Songs without Words

I am a composer, and sometimes people ask: “Why does this note happen here? Why is this chord voiced this way?” People who study music are trained to think this way: that musical events happen for a reason. There is a magic to discovering that an absurd note is really the resolution of a suspension held two bars ago in a different instrument or that one tetrachord dominates the chordal progression over the entire phrase.

But post-facto rationalization is of little use to any composer. Even the king of orderly counterpoint, Bach, once said that playing music is not hard, because instruments play themselves. This is the same for composing: songs compose themselves.

In music, there are conventions in any style, but the reason why a computer has never created convincing music on its own is not because it cannot replicate good harmony, but because there is nothing in music that tells you what to do next. Given a first theme, there is no indication of what the second theme should be, or how the first them ought to be developed, and so forth. Every new note is a decision. I suppose that is why people ask “why” the next note occurs – because I seem to have made a decision about that note.

The truth is the opposite: I am no better at making decisions when composing music than a computer is.

A composer is a mediator between this world and the world above, where music truly exists. Imagine standing in a dark room all alone where the only light comes from the twinkle of celestial bodies. The celestial bodies are within your mind but you know that they have a much greater source and that they fill the entire world and space and life. You want to show them to others who have never looked up to see the stars that you now gaze upon, but you cannot pull the stars down because they are so far away. You can only record them in a notebook, hoping to capture their arrangement and luminosity faithfully. On those days when the sky is cloudy, you are out of luck and your notebook stays empty.

This is the act of composition. The stars are the sound-world; the songs are already composed in the heavens, and a composer exists as the vessel by which the actual experience of the stars becomes a memory for others who have not witnessed the song’s original form.

A composition is a translation of a perfect sound, an ideal star-scape. The composition is merely a reflection of the scene that the composer can hear playing within his or her mind.

So why does this note happen here or there? Because that is where it occurs when I close my eyes and listen to the starry sky. The stars are already there and have always been there, and I have only been training all my life to understand how to best convey the beauty of the stars so that others may also share in the experience.  I am yet still fallible and will be my entire life, but the mistakes are in my sketches and not the songs themselves, whose essences are perfect.