The Shepherd
Sep. 25th, 2005 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI was listening last night to a BBC Radio 4 series called Creative Genius, three half-hour programmes presented by Ian Peacock. The third, on how to make yourself more creative, struck me as the most interesting. Nine minutes into the RealAudio file you can hear Paul Howard Jones of the University of Exeter conducting an experiment on Peacock inspired by Kurt Schwitters, who used to set himself the challenge of, for instance, making a collage based only on materials he found rummaging through his wife's wastepaper basket. Jones' experiment asked Peacock to tell stories using random and unrelated words while lying in a brain scanner. His hypothesis (later proven by the brain scans and subjective judgements of the stories) was that Peacock would produce more creative stories, and use his brain more actively, when given more random, less related words to work with.
The experiment got me thinking about the importance of limitation, of making self-imposed rules which restrict that awful "anything is possible" feeling we get confronted by a blank sheet of paper (or a blank CD). Without limitation, it's easy to sink into what Brian Eno calls "the mire of options", or to fall into other people's styles, or the dominant formulas of the day.
When I'm planning an album (and I'm sort of "pregnant" with one now, but still in the very early stages) I tend to do something I call "signature specification", which could also be seen as a voluntary restriction of my own freedom. Style, after all, is limitation. It's the sum of all the things you don't allow yourself to do. You stop yourself doing those things by inventing restrictions for yourself early in the game. They're just guidelines, and of course you end up rebelling against them and breaking them, but they construct a sort of plank walkway across the "mire of options". They focus your thoughts. And if they're weird and random enough, I believe they make your work more creative.
Actually, maybe weird and random is not the best way to describe the self-imposed restrictions I use. I let appetite be my guide, choosing restrictions based on the kind of music I'm enjoying, and the formal properties, textures, genres, gestures and emotions I want to investigate in my record. It shouldn't be painful to submit to stuff you love; appetite makes you do that happily. You are, after all, only submitting to your own taste. And if style is the elimination of all the things you don't do, taste is the elimination of all the things you don't like.
So what might the limitations and eliminations on my next record be? What's the style specification? I want to scribble some notes towards it. First of all, the title. Titles are important, the first big shaping restriction. My working title so far has been "The Friendly Album". Now I'm thinking more in terms of a record called "The Shepherd". Here are some of the appetite-based restrictions I imagine bringing into play to shape the record.
First of all, the remaining idea from the "Friendly Album" concept is a record that's flat and static, like renaissance lute music, full of beauty and positivity. Positivity doesn't want to go somewhere, it wants to stay where it is; in a garden, perhaps, basking in the sun and listening to birdsong. A celebration of social connectedness is also, naturally, part of the "Friendly" idea; I want to make a record which celebrates friendship and interdependence rather than solitude and independence. A collectivist record! A political gesture! A moral position!
So we've got something friendly, positive, static, connected, collectivist. But although that's a lovely idea—I've already started collecting recordings of cooing turtle doves—it's also kind of boring, like a vision of heaven, a place where nothing ever happens. I need some contrast. Even Virgil's pastoral Eclogues have conflict.
It happens that I'm also interested, at the moment, in the idea of Torch. Not so much Marc Almond, Anthony and the Johnsons-style Torch, but Enka, the Japanese variety, and specifically this song from a 70s Shiseido ad for Simonpure beauty lotion. It's called Yume Hitoyo ("One Night's Dream"). Something about the relaxed sensuality of singer Kosetsu Minami's voice, combined with an undertone of aching hunger, appeals to me. (The beautiful proud woman lying semi-naked in the surf probably has something to do with it too.)
Torch and Enka aren't static, but dynamic. They want something, they want to go somewhere, they twist through chords and key changes, searching for an elusive happiness. Minami's song, though, is Pentatonic Torch. Well, the scale may not be a strict pentatonic, but, like a lot of Enka, it tends towards pentatonic shapes and turns pentatonic corners. And that's what fascinates me. The unfamiliarity of those corners, to the Western ear, makes this Torch seem formalist rather than corny. Torch tends to derive its emotional power from retreating always to familiar tricks, treading well-worn paths. But when we hear Torch in a foreign language using unfamiliar scales and chord sequences (and I'm also interested in Thai Torch, and Arabic Torch), it has this odd and interesting combination of weirdness and aggressive normality going on. How could you reproduce that fragile combination, give the listener the impression of padding along a well-worn path through an unfamiliar landscape?
Pentatonic bucolic torch! That's already plenty of restriction, plenty of contradiction to be getting on with. But if I need more, I just need to rummage in my bag of appetites, which is also a bag of restrictions, for some more "drawing restraints". As a matter of fact, there's another well-represented by a Shiseido ad. Check out this commercial for Benefique. A puppet woman soaks and soaps in a spilly cedar bath while a wooden bird twitters and peeps from a branch in the garden beyond. The music is a traditional Japanese folk song (snow melting in the daytime, a flower) accompanied by a shamisen. What I really love here is the sparsity of arrangement: it's perfect (but not Western) counterpoint, with usually only two notes sounding at any given time, two melodic lines snaking around each other, instrument and voice.
I really dislike the "thickness" of the sound of Western rock, where the whole tonal range from bass to hi-hats has to be filled by decree of some unwritten law of genre, based, no doubt, on some kind of adolescent need to avoid giving the impression of frailty and weakness. (I saw Motorhead doing "Killers" on TV last night, and it was utter fascism, right down to Lemmy's iron cross medallion... but also sonic fascism in the way it filled the whole sound spectrum the whole time with its idiotic "dominance".)
So I'd like to impose another rule-restriction: only two voices can sound at the same time, but there should be a constant turnover of voices. I'd like to do a pop version of Webern's radically non-repetitive "Five Pieces for Orchestra". But can tone that thin and frail, in phrases that never repeat, carry torch sentiment? The question brings "productive anxiety" or "generative tension" and joins other anxious questions: Can bucolic emotions work with torch, which tends to rely on tragedy? Shiseido and shepherds, how does that pan out? Selfish pleasure and social connectedness? A contradiction?
There's another purely formal idea I'm playing with the idea of playing with, this time from John Cage. Cage structured pieces according to the duration of sections. That may sound like a very simple idea, but it's radically different from the way I (or most pop writers) approach composition. Especially when you determine the duration of sections by chance operations. (I believe Bowie and Eno worked this way on "Low", at least on Side 2.)
So, random thin bucolic selfish sociable pentatonic torch it is, then. With the restrictions out of the way, it's just a question of choosing the notes.
The experiment got me thinking about the importance of limitation, of making self-imposed rules which restrict that awful "anything is possible" feeling we get confronted by a blank sheet of paper (or a blank CD). Without limitation, it's easy to sink into what Brian Eno calls "the mire of options", or to fall into other people's styles, or the dominant formulas of the day.
When I'm planning an album (and I'm sort of "pregnant" with one now, but still in the very early stages) I tend to do something I call "signature specification", which could also be seen as a voluntary restriction of my own freedom. Style, after all, is limitation. It's the sum of all the things you don't allow yourself to do. You stop yourself doing those things by inventing restrictions for yourself early in the game. They're just guidelines, and of course you end up rebelling against them and breaking them, but they construct a sort of plank walkway across the "mire of options". They focus your thoughts. And if they're weird and random enough, I believe they make your work more creative.
Actually, maybe weird and random is not the best way to describe the self-imposed restrictions I use. I let appetite be my guide, choosing restrictions based on the kind of music I'm enjoying, and the formal properties, textures, genres, gestures and emotions I want to investigate in my record. It shouldn't be painful to submit to stuff you love; appetite makes you do that happily. You are, after all, only submitting to your own taste. And if style is the elimination of all the things you don't do, taste is the elimination of all the things you don't like.
So what might the limitations and eliminations on my next record be? What's the style specification? I want to scribble some notes towards it. First of all, the title. Titles are important, the first big shaping restriction. My working title so far has been "The Friendly Album". Now I'm thinking more in terms of a record called "The Shepherd". Here are some of the appetite-based restrictions I imagine bringing into play to shape the record.
First of all, the remaining idea from the "Friendly Album" concept is a record that's flat and static, like renaissance lute music, full of beauty and positivity. Positivity doesn't want to go somewhere, it wants to stay where it is; in a garden, perhaps, basking in the sun and listening to birdsong. A celebration of social connectedness is also, naturally, part of the "Friendly" idea; I want to make a record which celebrates friendship and interdependence rather than solitude and independence. A collectivist record! A political gesture! A moral position!
So we've got something friendly, positive, static, connected, collectivist. But although that's a lovely idea—I've already started collecting recordings of cooing turtle doves—it's also kind of boring, like a vision of heaven, a place where nothing ever happens. I need some contrast. Even Virgil's pastoral Eclogues have conflict.
It happens that I'm also interested, at the moment, in the idea of Torch. Not so much Marc Almond, Anthony and the Johnsons-style Torch, but Enka, the Japanese variety, and specifically this song from a 70s Shiseido ad for Simonpure beauty lotion. It's called Yume Hitoyo ("One Night's Dream"). Something about the relaxed sensuality of singer Kosetsu Minami's voice, combined with an undertone of aching hunger, appeals to me. (The beautiful proud woman lying semi-naked in the surf probably has something to do with it too.)
Torch and Enka aren't static, but dynamic. They want something, they want to go somewhere, they twist through chords and key changes, searching for an elusive happiness. Minami's song, though, is Pentatonic Torch. Well, the scale may not be a strict pentatonic, but, like a lot of Enka, it tends towards pentatonic shapes and turns pentatonic corners. And that's what fascinates me. The unfamiliarity of those corners, to the Western ear, makes this Torch seem formalist rather than corny. Torch tends to derive its emotional power from retreating always to familiar tricks, treading well-worn paths. But when we hear Torch in a foreign language using unfamiliar scales and chord sequences (and I'm also interested in Thai Torch, and Arabic Torch), it has this odd and interesting combination of weirdness and aggressive normality going on. How could you reproduce that fragile combination, give the listener the impression of padding along a well-worn path through an unfamiliar landscape?
Pentatonic bucolic torch! That's already plenty of restriction, plenty of contradiction to be getting on with. But if I need more, I just need to rummage in my bag of appetites, which is also a bag of restrictions, for some more "drawing restraints". As a matter of fact, there's another well-represented by a Shiseido ad. Check out this commercial for Benefique. A puppet woman soaks and soaps in a spilly cedar bath while a wooden bird twitters and peeps from a branch in the garden beyond. The music is a traditional Japanese folk song (snow melting in the daytime, a flower) accompanied by a shamisen. What I really love here is the sparsity of arrangement: it's perfect (but not Western) counterpoint, with usually only two notes sounding at any given time, two melodic lines snaking around each other, instrument and voice.
I really dislike the "thickness" of the sound of Western rock, where the whole tonal range from bass to hi-hats has to be filled by decree of some unwritten law of genre, based, no doubt, on some kind of adolescent need to avoid giving the impression of frailty and weakness. (I saw Motorhead doing "Killers" on TV last night, and it was utter fascism, right down to Lemmy's iron cross medallion... but also sonic fascism in the way it filled the whole sound spectrum the whole time with its idiotic "dominance".)
So I'd like to impose another rule-restriction: only two voices can sound at the same time, but there should be a constant turnover of voices. I'd like to do a pop version of Webern's radically non-repetitive "Five Pieces for Orchestra". But can tone that thin and frail, in phrases that never repeat, carry torch sentiment? The question brings "productive anxiety" or "generative tension" and joins other anxious questions: Can bucolic emotions work with torch, which tends to rely on tragedy? Shiseido and shepherds, how does that pan out? Selfish pleasure and social connectedness? A contradiction?
There's another purely formal idea I'm playing with the idea of playing with, this time from John Cage. Cage structured pieces according to the duration of sections. That may sound like a very simple idea, but it's radically different from the way I (or most pop writers) approach composition. Especially when you determine the duration of sections by chance operations. (I believe Bowie and Eno worked this way on "Low", at least on Side 2.)
So, random thin bucolic selfish sociable pentatonic torch it is, then. With the restrictions out of the way, it's just a question of choosing the notes.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 08:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 08:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 11:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 08:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 08:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 08:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 09:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 09:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 10:12 am (UTC)A "Digisen/Laptosen" perhaps?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 09:32 am (UTC)I admit that when you first came out with the idea of the "friendly" record, I was looking forward to some nice bossa nova 5-note chords. However, I quite like the idea of the two melodic lines. If one of them is always going to be your voice, there's the opportunity to vary the timber and frequency range of the other line widely, producing different dramatic effects; even within the same song. Baritone shamisen, anyone?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 05:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 02:00 pm (UTC)I wonder if The Shepherd will sound anything like this lovely little piece (http://www.sabadabada.com/Music/Cronica%20Da%20Cidade%20Amada/O%20Pombo%20Enigmatico.mp3).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 06:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 03:07 pm (UTC)As you begin to discuss your restrictions, I immediately thought Pastoral, and there, a few sentences later, you note the very man I was thinking about, dear Virgil.
I was then thinking, what about a Dionysian sort of context...it has the friendliness, the collectivity, sort of positive, but utterly lacking in the static. In fact, as I read on, I began to pair up Dionysis and his Bacchanalians with your "thickness of Western rock" commentary. This left a horrible image of Lemmy playing God of the Wine. The aftertaste is still sour.
Suddenly, it hit me. "Can bucolic emotions work with torch, which tends to rely on tragedy? Shiseido and shepherds, how does that pan out?" Pan! Mischevious shepherd, player of the lute, static in the sense of always being a boyish creature...pastoral to be sure...a single voice that can play at being others...I don't know...this seems like an interesting character to keep in the back of one's head when setting out on a project with restrictions such as yours. Of course, you've probably already thought of all this.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 05:35 pm (UTC)Now you've got me and everyone else excited to hear your new album.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 04:28 pm (UTC)Make iron clad rules for yourself if for no other reason than to make them difficult to break.
One of my favorite Bresson rules is - No music unless it is comming from a visible source. I love film and I love music but more often than not I hate film scores. I would rather hear the natural sounds arranged and ordered to make up the soundtrack.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 04:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 05:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 06:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 07:12 pm (UTC)I did something similar when I was the resident lighting designer at NYU. I would impose a variety of limitations on my work, only three lights at a time. Only one color but vaying hues. That kind of limitation ends up provong how many options are avalable to you. If you can only turn on one light, you quickly start paying attention to the varying gradations of intesity from off to full.
Are you familiar with the music of Zoe Keating? She's a cellist from San Francisco and does layered multi track cello pieces all played by her. Quite interesting stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-25 07:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-26 02:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-26 07:35 am (UTC)Actually, for me anyways, "not using instruments" sends me straight into the mire of options. I remember a particularly cluttered practice space where it would be hard to get anything done...you'd always find some cool object hidden behind something else, and my immediate response was always to find a way to get music out of it. And of course half the time this strategy turns out sounding like crap, but then you'd find something else hidden behind the previous object and you just have to know what cool noises you can get it to make, and it goes on and on...
More math
Date: 2005-09-26 11:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-28 05:14 pm (UTC)John Cage wanted sounds to exist on their own terms. He wanted all sounds to be acceptable in music. But in practice he carved out one significant exception: Loud sounds were permissible only when they are very brief, and usually surrounded by silence. In that case, he had only liberated some sounds.
It strikes me as similarly restrictive to insist either that the audible spectrum must or must not be filled. Can you not find room for both, in proportion? That variety, for me, is essential. You find that in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, for example. Mahler embraced all these things. Yet it is not necessary to include high density and low density, loudness and softness, in a single work. Motorhead and Webern can sit side-by-side, and through their contrasts they each comment on the other. That is the only way to contain the whole world.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-29 08:41 pm (UTC)this is probably why live versions of musical pieces are so exciting. you know exactly what the restriction is - the studio recording - and can see how the musician handles this, plays around with it.
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure
Date: 2005-10-04 03:04 pm (UTC)Have you ever listened to Virginia Astley's 1982 album "From Gardens Where We Feel Secure"? I always felt this album basked in positivity - it perfectly captures the sentiment you've described.