Process of Writing 7: A Little Music History

While still organizing texts into a central notebook, I see I had more fragments, even more almost-finished lyrics, than I realized. I've been able to sit down do a lot of thinking the piece over, but mostly still on the textual rather than musical level. There are some songs where I have the basic melody already written, and fit to the words, even though there's no accompaniment as yet. I sat down and played at the piano last night for awhile, playing with ideas for accompaniments and chord patterns for songs.

A basic limitation for this choral music commission is that the vocal parts can't be too hard to sing. I'm not writing an avant-garde proto-masterpiece here, I'm writing something that amateur singers can perform with a bit of rehearsal. One of the basic principles in play, during this writing, is to keep it simple. In the most positive sense, keeping it simple means keeping it naturally singable. The music will stretch the singers somewhat, don't worry, and they'll be asked to step outside their comfort zones from time to time—emotionally, at the very least—and I don't feel the need to "show off" as a composer. Quite the opposite. I am writing music in service to a chorus that wants an original piece to sing, and I am quite willingly and cheerfully tailoring my songs within this piece to be comfortably singable for most amateur choruses—with a bit of a push just outside the zone of familiar comfort and safety.

Still, I don't really write tonal music. I don't write straightforward ballad-form songs, and only one or two of the songs in the new piece will be identifiable as such. It's not that I don't understand tonal music; with all those years of music theory training under my belt, followed by years of jazz and rock and blues bands experience, I understand it only too well.

It's that I want to avoid obvious clichés—both in the text and in the music.

Nothing demonstrates the clichéd chord patterns of tonal music more clearly than standard rock 'n roll. After all, rock 'n roll evolved from two sources: one of them was African-American musical roots, the blues, rhythm-and-blues, and jazz; and the other source was the Northern European ballad form as preserved in the folk music from the southern Appalachian mountains, brought over and preserved by the Scotch-Irish-English immigrants who settled there. From Pennsylvania to Alabama, the hill music was dominated by the ballad form over all other lyrical forms. The vast majority of folk music is still performed in story-telling ballad forms, as is virtually all blue-collar roots-rock music.

Set beside jazz music theory, rock 'n roll music theory still seems simplistic, predictable, and often clichéd. That's not a criticism, to be clear: the chord patterns of standard pop music are always clichéd, and always will be: because that is what's ingrained in the public memory, and that's what is easiest to remember. Anyone can sing along because you already know where the music's going to go.

And rock 'n roll is nothing if not sing-along music: participatory, Dionysian, crowd-unifying, celebratory, mass-ritual music. There's nothing like a live rock concert to get a crowd of disparate people to all be thinking and feeling the same things at the same moments. It's the closest public ritual of Unity that we have, nowadays, to compare to the gospel revival-tent Pentecostal services of unity-in-worship. And of course, that's another one of rock 'n roll's musical roots: those gospel services. It was an old joke, and a true one, that in the old days, musicians played the blues all Saturday night at the speakeasy, then, without going to bed, took a shower and played gospel and hymns all Sunday morning in church. Celebration, worship, mass ecstasy: these are the rituals of the rock concert.

Knowing where the music's going to go, even to the untrained ear, is part of the ritual, part of the sacrament. It's one reason any teenager can pick up a guitar, learn three or four chords, and start a garage band. As a composer, my ears are always excited to hear a rock band do something a little different, a little unusual, break out of the three-chord rock-ballad mode. Lately I've been getting into the Foo Fighters, led by Dave Grohl. One thing I've always loved about Joni Mitchell is that her musical forms and chord choices are completely unpredictable, completely non-standard. In my mind, as I write lyrics and songs for the new commission, I do carry open-form models influenced by the possibilities evident in songs by these more out-of-the-rock-box writers. I've set myself a couple of goals and standards that I try to meet, for these new songs—and one of those goals is to push the ballad-form clichés into something that surprises a little, surprises both the singers and the audience. I don't want to make it too easy, and lose everyone's interest—starting with my own.

One improbable touchstone for finding this balance is Johann Sebastian Bach, who it must be remembered was a gifted musical entertainer simultaneously with being a composer of complex and even esoteric music. Bach knew well how to write pleasing chamber music for the background of social events, while behind the pleasant surface of the music lay his formidable genius for mathematical and numerological relationships and connections.

The lyrics I am writing, I use some of what I've learned from writing poetry for years, but pared down, lean, and shortened. Compressed to the essentials: keep it simple. The challenge is to tell a complex story within simple lyrics. Years of haiku-writing actually come in handy here: finding the way to evoke a layered emotion in as few syllables as possible.

I found I've written a couple of songs, too, that might not end up in the final version of the commission. Call them "illuminations": they are of a thematic whole with the overall commission, but they don't advance the "plot." (That all sounds more intentional than it really is.) One of these, for example, is a song about the climate and mood and weather in the Upper Midwest. In a Broadway musical, it would be called a scene-setting piece: it sets the mood of the locale of the action, but doesn't directly reflect on or advance the action. If these illuminations don't make it into the final score, I am fond enough of them to rework them into stand-alone pieces.

Sometimes it helps gets the creative juices flowing to write an illumination before getting serious about writing a piece more centrally important to the work. It's like finishing a sketched portrait before taking on the big painting. You do a couple of small pieces to limber up, then dive into the major work. In no way are they distractions, from the viewpoint of the artist (although patrons have sometimes misunderstood them, and the purpose of doing them), they're warm-ups and kick-starters. (Patrons, it must be said, care about the results, the finished product, and frequently misunderstand an artist working on parallel tracks to be merely distracted. It's true that many artists are scatterbrains, compared to business types: but that scatterbrained quality is exactly what allows the art to happen. The business mentality is linear, forward-moving, and object-oriented—and unlikely to make the sideways connections that artists make, which leads them to explore ideas far outside anything the typical businessman would consider, or even imagine.)

I have more I want to say about conceptual sources, about thematic guides, about examples of what I want to do. But i'll save that for another time.

Lux Aeterna

Tonight I'm writing a short a capella choral piece, for male voices (TTBB), as a sort of warm-up exercise for larger-scale composing I will be doing later this year. An unlimbering of the creative muscles, musically, if you will. Nothing too fancy or complicated, just a simple, lush setting of a favorite text. I'm about half way through the piece right now, taking a short break to step back and journal about the process; the writing is going smoothly tonight, and I may actually finish the piece in the next day or two.

I'm setting the Latin text Lux aeterna, from the Requiem Mass. Here's the Latin text, followed by an English translation. (My rendition from the Latin, based on a blend of other translations.) A text that begins and ends with eternal light:

Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,
cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,
quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Eternal light shine on them, Lord,
with your saints in eternity,
for you are merciful.
Grant them eternal rest, Lord,
and perpetual light shine on them.

Why would I, a non-Catholic, a post-Christian, be setting this text? Because the Latin texts remain beautiful, after all these centuries. My knowledge of Latin is mostly Medieval Latin, or church Latin; not ancient Roman Latin, but the Latin used by the church in Rome in later centuries. And I like what this text says, from the Requiem: eternal light, eternal rest. My own spirituality is all about the Light, its presence in my life, its recurrence and return. I can imagine no more potent an image for the Divine than eternal Light.

I'm writing a short homophonic setting of this text, not more than a few minutes long. I find myself, as I compose, repeating each phrase a total of two times before going on to the next phrase. I find myself writing it at the piano, sounding out each chord sequence before writing it down.

I find that I can only sit and compose for an hour or so at a time, at most. I may be full of ideas, but my ears get tired. I pause for awhile, then come back to the piano, with new music in my inner ears. Also, and this is very interesting, I experience an almost electric overload after an hour or so—as though I am brimful with current running through me, and I must step back, get grounded, relaxed, and recentered, before I may continue. So I step back form the writing, then come back to it later; write for awhile, then must pause, and come back again later.

Describing this process makes it sound problematic, but it's nothing of the sort; if anything, it feels like I am filling up to the brim with electricity, with joy, with passion. It's a very good feeling. Yet to keep the music focused, and not run off in all directions or become unbalanced, I must stop, rest, recenter, regroup, and begin again. It's like taking a break from making love. You come back to it with love. I am balancing abandon and focus, inspiration and contemplation; I've said before that art-making needs to be a balance and blend of Dionysus and Apollo, and this process seems to bear me out.

My musical language herein is typically modal, rather than tonal. Looking at what is emerging, I'm seeing all that counterpoint training back in music school, with internal voice-leading and contrary motion, coming into play. All of what I learned about 18th C. harmony, although this piece sounds very 20th C. There are a lot of chords that just hang there, lush and resonant, without typical, clichéd resolutions. Sometimes the resolution comes several bars later. You can't really say what key it's in till the very end, and even then it's a harmonically open cluster, not a triad. I find the usual tropes of tonal music—virtually all pop songs are based on the tonal ballad form, no matter what they do to veer away from that template—to be heavy-handed, unsubtle, more like the marching of an army than the sighing of a willow branch. I want to write music that's outside that box, and for most of my career, I have. Not that I haven't written a pop song or two, or jazz chart, but rarely anything you'd recognize as a Nashville or Tin Pan Alley song. I've often been invited to join songwriting composers' groups—the pop song equivalent of writers' critique groups—but nothing I write really fits into that paradigm.

Just as in writing a poem, or when elements converge into a visual artwork, I hear phrases and lines of musical setting in my mind. I sit down to play them out at the piano, and then write them down. In playing what I'm hearing in my head—I'm one of those musicians who always has a permanent soundtrack in his head, which when I'm composing is supplanted by what I'm composing—I sometimes find other chord choices, or surprise myself at the piano. Sometimes a phrase wants to go off in an unpredicted direction, and I let it—following the brush, just like when writing a poem. I don't try to force the music, I just listen to it. It's not a process of deliberate, conscious control, everything martialed and mastered by the intellectual part of the mind; it can feel more like listening to an inner voice, singing, and notating what you're hearing. I know what I would like to do, mostly, but I don't feel in charge of where the music is going. I listen, and I follow.

I've always been able to dip into that inner permanent soundtrack, and pull out a melody, a phrase, a line of song. Since it's always there, it's always available. But when I'm writing music, I usually need silence, no other musical or sonic distractions going on. I'm listening, so you need to create an environment in which you are able to hear clearly what you're trying to listen to.

People often seem surprised that I don't have the TV or stereo blaring sounds out into the house all the time. As though there was something wrong or abnormal about that. Well, it seems to me that many people are afraid of silence—afraid of what might rise up in them should they not be constantly stuffing it down with input, with distractions, with pop songs or TV dramas. It seems many are afraid of those voices that rise up within, given a chance, given some silence; they do their best to suppress them, or outright deny them. Many famous songwriters I could name write almost entirely from their left brains, avoiding anything mysterious or unpredictable—and it shows: their music is often depthless.

Since this choral piece is a warm-up piece, stretching my creative muscles for a much larger composition I will be undertaking throughout this next year, I am writing quickly. I plan to gift this piece as soon as it is done, perhaps even this week, to Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, if they want it, for their next Christmas concert. If they choose not to do it, I'll pass it on to other venues.

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Update, one day later:

I finished composing the piece late tonight. The second to last segment was the hardest to bring into focus. I actually got the ending first. I knew exactly the way I wanted to end the piece, and I wrote that down first. Then I had to go back to get to the ending from the middle, and that was the segment that made me work harder. It's also the part that uses more linear counterpoint, with different lines weaving together, rather than the homophonic nature of the rest of the piece.

The finished score is short, only three and a half pages, and I estimate the piece's duration in performance to be around four minutes. So, not a big piece. But just perfect for what I wanted to do with this. Something short, simple, elegant, and meaningful.

Tomorrow I'll make a cleaned-up fair copy, as the finished score, then make a couple of photocopies of that, and start passing it around.