Michigan State University Music Composition

For a little over a year now I have been interested in music criticism from a popular music standpoint. Every time I listen to a new album I pour over the reviews and comments about the work. I’ve always favored the writings of Alex Ross and Robert Christgau because they take reviews beyond explaining what you have just listened to. Each review or article is never just about about how the album sounds, both writers connect the music to its creator, history, and the world around it.
Robert Christgau reviews encompass every genre of popular music. His roots are in Jazz and Rock, but he has successfully made every leap in the development of popular music, from gangtsa rap to modern pop without ever loosing his biting sense of humor and brilliant incites.
Alex Ross’ specialty is contemporary classical music, writing for the New Yorker since 1996. His articles have a rare mix of historical reflection and explosive story telling energy that makes any casual music listener excited to jump in. His two books, “The Rest Is Noise”, and “Listen to This” are essential reading to anyone in the music world today.

My goal is to also start writing reviews and articles about the music world today.  I believe that commenting and debating what we listen to is helpful with understanding, memory, and enjoyment.  Mainly though, it keeps new music relevant to our everyday lives, and as a composer, this last is most important.

So far I have been using a “letter rating” system of approach to new music.

“A+” ratings are reserved for timeless classics, the kind that may not be made every year, but that will be listened to past the generation gap and only gain reverence over years.

“A” ratings are kept to just a few a year.  Every track or section must fit together expertly and also be a stunning final product, worthy of numerous evaluations throughout a persons life.

“A-” rating are given for music that is especially relevant upon release; either hyped up or happen to be very powerful at the time of creation, but either has obvious faults to prevent an “A” rating or is destined to live radioactively, loosing significance every day after it’s been made.  This is the largest gap, a ton of great musicians will churn out nice products with faults.  Higher then an “A-” is where masterpieces live.

“B+”, either has obvious faults that will frustrate the listener because there are a few or numerous moments of greatness, or is a failed experiment that moved the artist in a different, possibly promising direction.

“B”, most music released on the planet requires a “B” rating, for numerous reasons.  Mainly, enjoyment decreases over time.  This may be because it is so stuck in a minor genre that it will be left there when the next fad comes around; its simplicity is marred by a lack of energy or variation; it’s complexity becomes clutter to prevent a vision from getting to a listener’s ears.

“B-”, must be a disappointment, but not a failure.  There must be an absence of a vision for the work as a whole, or so much filler that the highlights are haphazard and arbitrary.  The artists control over their own vision is minimal, or even lazy.  A first listen should put doubts in your mind as to why you have chosen to listen all the way through because you feel no real content.  It should feel like wasting time.

“C+”, albums that receive overwhelming sales attention, but are otherwise not influential or notable in any way.

“C”, below this, any promise for an artists career should collapse, or move them completely away from that term of endearment: “Artist”.  Many chart toppers will fall into this category because of a lack of depth, personality, or soul.

“C-”, figure heads of a project that has little or nothing to do with vision or effectiveness.  As Boulez would say, “mass shit”.

“D”, music that only critics and masochists should  subject themselves to.  No cohesion, no vision, and boring.

“E”, is so awful that it is possibly enjoying to listen to.  You wonder how something this dreadful could even exist.  Or is so boring that you will make bets with friends to see if anybody could sit through it.

To end this week’s blog, my review of Bob Dylan’s most recent studio album: “Tempest” (released September 10th, 2012)

Rating: “B+”

Bob Dylan has released 35 studio albums in his 71 years on the planet and is considered an American Icon (I’m betting partially against his will).  Whenever and wherever someone steps up onstage holding an acoustic guitar, they will always be compared to the master.  This, his recent track record of stunning comeback releases (“Love & Theft”, Modern Times), and the albums name,  put immense pressure and anticipation on his latest project, “Tempest”.  After rumors were quashed about its relation to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, the hint is still important.  How much it connects to Dylan’s personal life is (as he always has claimed) irrelevant, but we are still left with a sense of finality and grandeur.

As with the last few studio albums Dylan delves into the roots of American music: early rock n roll and blues.  Most songs do not have a chorus, and it’s this simplicity that many previous Dylan songs have flourished.  Early Dylan masterpieces, “Shelter From the Storm”, and “Tangled Up In Blue”, have no choruses.  But there is a difference between those and the songs from Tempest.  First of all Dylan’s voice has always been known for its faults, but now it is almost tonally useless.  “Soon After Midnight” is one of the only breaks from his difficult rasp.  Luckily, the lyrics of every track are characteristically interesting, quirky, and image laden.

One of the most interesting things about Tempest is the pervasive violence.  “Two timing Slim, who’s ever heard of him?  I’ll drag his corpse through the mud”  The same song ends with, “it’s soon after midnight, and I don’t want nobody but you”.  Dylan knows how to make a listener ask questions, the ones that nervous laughter only begins to describe.

Tempest has three great songs.  “Pay In Blood”, which gives us the tempo and energy needed to picture the heated atrocities described.  “Tempest”, the 14 minute sea song about the sinking of the Titanic.  It reads like a doomsday prophesy but sounds more like a late night drinking song (complete with fiddle).  It is by far the most disturbing track on the album, hinting at some great and terrible event in the near future, or an autobiographical Dylan acting as the watchman to his own 71-year old body headed to its end (however long away that will be).  Or, much more likely I believe, examining an event in which hope simply doesn’t matter.  There is no class difference, or conventions for an entire group of people’s unavoidable death.  The album ends fittingly with a tribute to John Lennon, “Roll On John”.  The song starts with an important account of the murder, “They shot him in the back and down he went”.  It is not a single assassin who kills John Lennon, it is much more then that.  The questions resulting from the one word change are key to understanding Bob Dylan’s artistic sense of himself in today’s world: a walking relic.  He is one of the last ones left, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, and so many other original rockers and songwriters from his hey day are dead.  Now, how does that feel??

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Here’s a sentiment you don’t hear often: the average classical music lover listens no more intelligently to music than does the pop-music lover.  Why?  Because listening intelligently to music is REALLY HARD.  Each masterwork is a piece of genius, of sweat and of deep thought on the composer’s part, and to try to understand that in one hearing at a concert is impossible.  If I were to ask a music lover who loves Beethoven why they love him, they would probably answer me in very general terms, dealing with emotions and themes that they held dear.  I would be surprised if they began by discussing how they loved the way he played with the common forms of the time, often emphasizing a point by making it stick out of the form, or by condensing a form to its very basic and integral parts.

Now, let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with this.  Music is by nature very emotional and should be enjoyed that way. I love some rock bands as much as I love Beethoven, even though the latter is clearly more complex in its harmonic and motivic structure.  I love rock music mainly on an emotional level. I love listening to great lyrics that I can emotionally or experientially connect to, and I love being “lost” in the wall of sound they often create.  Sometimes I just love rocking out to a good tune.  But I think if we only listen to music on this level, we miss out on a great deal of what makes great music great.  When we stop thinking about the concrete musical ideas that are creating the emotions within us, we lose the ability to apply this music to our own lives.  If we read every great novel and said at the end, “well that was a good story, even though it had nothing to do with my life or any real event,” we would fail to take any lesson from it that could apply to our lives. Great music, like great literature, speaks to its time, to its audience, as well as to future generations. Unfortunately, it is much more abstract than literature and therefore much harder to comprehend.

So how do we listen to music more intelligently? I do not claim to have all the answers here, but I will share what has helped me.

1.) Figure out what’s there. I learned this from a literature class, surprisingly enough.  We cannot begin to describe the central theme of a great novel without first making note of the characters, their actions, the setting, the plot, and other important details.  If you’re having trouble comprehending a piece of music, begin by identifying some basic features: the form, the harmonic progression, the motives, the tempo, the dynamics, and the general “feel” or first impression. I have found you can do this even if you have no background in music theory.  Many listeners can remember tunes, and make note of their presence throughout a piece. You can also do a simplified harmonic analysis, deciding which parts of a piece sound more pleasing and which sound more harsh (consonant and dissonant, in musicians’ terminology). Simply identifying what’s going on in a piece increases your understanding tremendously.

2.) Find Patterns. Is there a theme that comes back multiple times, perhaps in a different key or with different instrumentation?  Are there abrupt shifts in tempo or mood? Is the piece homogenous or heterogenous? Find the elements of a piece that make it come together as a whole. Try to understand why the pieces fit together.

3.) Ask questions.  A few good ones to ask: why does that part stand out to me? Why might the composer have included that? What is he trying to say? How does that relate to the piece as a whole? What seems to be the sentiment of the piece? How did the beginning and the ending relate to one another?

If you can answer these questions, congratulations, you now have a much greater understanding of the piece than you did before. The answers, by the way, do not have to be “right.” They only have to be right to you. Music is art after all, and, as Artur Rubinstein said, “Nothing in art can be the best. It is only different.”

Important things to consider:

1.) If you can, listen to multiple performances by different musicians. If a performer doesn’t understand a piece, how can the listener be expected to? I have experienced this multiple times. Sometimes all it takes is a great performer to get you to love a piece you never did before, or hear something in it you never noticed.

2.) If you’re having trouble figuring out “what’s there,” try isolating a single aspect of the music, such as melody or rhythm. I love going to rock concerts and focusing my attention on the drummer. I’m always amazed at the small things they do to give a song rhythmic interest, or to subtly change the sound to indicate an important structural moment (e.g. switching from one cymbal to another to separate the chorus from the verses). Isolating certain aspects of the music makes interpreting it a much less daunting task.

3.) Listen without expectations. I love randomly seeing a movie on tv or on a plane ride that I have never heard of, because I go in without biases or expectations.  I can judge for myself whether I liked it, and I’m often surprised later to find that the critics held a sharply different opinion from mine. This is a great learning experience with music as well. One way to do this is to hear premieres of new music (*wink wink*). If no one has heard the piece before, no one can tell you what you “should” think about it.

Hopefully these tips have helped you, whatever your level of experience listening to music. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought, “wow I thought I knew how to listen critically, but I really have no idea.” It’s never an easy process, and, unlike reading critically, we haven’t worked on this skill all through school. But with enough dedicated practice, we can all learn to be better listeners, and discover what truly makes great pieces of art worth listening to time and time again.

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Music, just like any other art form, has inspired people philosophically.  Philosophy, especially those of religions or social movements, has influenced the art of music.

For example, religious music (such as hymns) has a certain harmonic structure, and almost never fails to follow it.  This is because it was (and probably still is) believed to be the correct sounding harmony to represent God or gods (aka “Sounds Good!”).  Other kinds of sound are supposedly not good or represent evil beings (aka “Sounds Bad!”). Moreover, religious music needs to be in a format that is relatively suitable for singing since singing is the core activity of much religious music. Difficult for singing = not sounding good = not serving the purpose. So composers of religious music followed a similar formulas to each other, governed by this philosphy, in order to write these pieces.

Another example is that some jazz musicians almost strictly stick “inside” the given harmony/chord progressions while improvising because that is what they are supposed/trained to do;  most of all, it sounds good and right. On the other hand, some jazzers like to “go out” and enjoy the journey through the “extended” harmony because playing “inside” is just flat out boring.

These are just a few examples, but the point is that there is a philosophical activity concerning making music that “sounds good.” The definition of “good sounding music” depends on the person.  In the field of jazz alone, there are several stylistic differences such as swing, bebop, cool, smooth jazz, and so on. Players in the different styles pursue the particular sounds that they believe to sound like “good music.” The musicians may have many differences and disagreements, yet they all have one thing in common, which is to make good music.

Being a composer and performer, I go through the exact same process. As a composer, my main concern and goal is to write a piece that sounds good to many, if not all, people including myself.  My motto is, “If it sounds good, it is good.” Whether the piece is tonal, atonal, rock, jazz, contemporary, classical, vocal, instrumental, etc., making it sound good within a context is my primary objective.

Then I think about the inspiration (events, mood, music of others, etc.) of writing the piece, and try to represent it through my music. Or, if I am not sure where my ideas are coming from, I let the music “tell a story” (i.e. just listen to what I have written to see what kind of mood it creates in me, or what images pop up in my head). This activity is very supplementary to me.   The process of simply naming a piece and writing the program notes is like adding extra spice to a recipe to make it my own.

As a performer, my approach is even simpler.  I single-mindedly follow the motto, “If it sounds good, it is good,” by any means necessary. I would downplay, overplay, dropout, or just play along to make the music sound good to the audience, fellow musicians on stage, directors, people in the recording booth, and myself. It is nearly impossible to win everyone’s heart at the same time, but that is what I keep trying to do as long as I am a musician.

Philosophy is my device or motivation for a composition and performance, yet music is my main concern and always will be.

On the other hand, there are many musicians and composers that take the opposite approach, which is that music is the device to present their philosophy. Unlike myself, their approach is to “present their philosophy of the form of music by any means necessary.”   This could be an extreme manipulation of sound, burning instruments down, and so on. Unfortunately, this type of music happens to be my turn-off. Once I sense there is more philosophy than music in the composition, I quickly lose my interest in it. I do not think it is wrong to approach music this way. It is just not my thing. Sometimes I want to call that type of musician a philosopher rather than a composer or musician, but that is very ignorant of me. There is a chance that they see me as a mindless music making machine, but that is wrong; I just choose to keep my philosophy to myself. As long as they respect my way, I respect their ways.   I write and play music the way I want and they can, too.

Meanwhile, I believe that composers of the other philosophy think their compositions “sound good” or they would not share them with us. What’s important is to remember the difference in the meaning of “what sounds good.” It seems to me that their version of “what sounds good” is how accurately the composition captures/represents the subject in sound. For example, if the piece is titled The War or something similar, using a lot of loud noise would be a good idea.

In a sense, a lot of pop, folk, and rock music are devices of philosophy because those songs often sing about feelings and opinions of some sort. The musicians and composers of those styles, however, are still working to make music that sounds good–a majority of their concern is still music.

You may see me as an “absolute music” composer/musician, because I may appare to diss the philosophical/programatic aspect in music.  I respectfully disagree. As I mentioned earlier, I believe in certain things and tend to think about music in certain ways. I compose and perform based on my musical beliefs and that is my philosophy towards music. I use my philosophy to reinforce my music, just not other way around.

That is how I balance my music and philosophy.

How do you do it?

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