FOR THE SAKE OF HARMONY
:An Enchiridion for Composing Music
by
Thomas Calandra
PART ONE
“Music is a dreadful thing. What is it? I don't understand it. What does it do?
It exalts? Utter nonsense! If you hear a marching band, is your soul exalted? No, you march. If you hear a waltz, you dance. If you hear a mass, you take communion. It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. The listener has no choice. It is like hypnotism.”
- Ludwig van Beethoven from Immortal Beloved
Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. "The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame." - From Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath her feet
The Silent Teacher
“The silent teacher is the empty page. You got to look at that empty page and say, “man, somebody’s trying to tell me something, I gotta start to listen.” Because the process to me, and I think the process to most artists, doesn’t feel like creation so much as it feels like discovery.”
- David Mamet
A band I use to be in did an interview for an online magazine once, and the interviewer asked us, “why we write music?” I answered, “In reality, writing music is more than an output. People will say music for them is like an output to let off steam, as the example goes, but in reality it's like an addiction. It’s physically impossible for us not to do this. I can’t not write music.”
A third person observer whom was paying close attention, or perhaps you dear reader, might have noticed that I didn’t actually answer the interviewer’s question. I myself probably would agree, but not because I didn’t have an answer for her, but because I hedged my bets. For if I would have elaborated further and explained that when it comes to why I myself write music, my answer would have been that “I have no choice in the matter,” with all of the cognitive gymnastics I could muster in order not to sound like a pretentious douche bag, or a religious schizophrenic.
The above quote by Mamet is spot on when it comes to music, and that it is less like you are composing something and more like you are locating something. Anyone who has picked up and instrument and has attempted to write something knows that there is a point where you realize that you aren’t choosing the next note, but that you are finding the next note, like unearthing a treasure that has been there all along.
“I think I need the demons to write, but the demons have gone. It bothers me a lot. I have tried and tried, but I just can’t find a melody.”
- Brian Wilson
Has a thought, even as simplistic as “I should exercise more,” suddenly emerge in your head out of nowhere? Perhaps right now you are reading this sentence, but my words have competition with a never ending succession of thoughts that unfold and usurp your attention. Anyone who has ever had to study for a test understands this phenomenon perfectly, yet, unfortunately this is the only time we notice this cognitive punishment happening. However, all the other moments of your life it is happening as well; you are just conscious of it as much as you are conscious of oxygen.
This banal mundanity is the Buddhist concept of suffering called Sankhara Dukkha, which in the context of music, melodies and rhythms that arises in our minds is not due from the Mozartian notion that the composer is the instrument God uses to bring praise to Himself, but because our minds are not singular, nor are they permanent in any way. And we suffer because of this. Our minds are the product of an infinite causality with each cause having origins that have a firewall of darkness. Yogis and contemplates spend years or even decades in meditation to simply try to somewhat mitigate the best they can the onslaught of thoughts that arise in consciousness. A serious breakthrough in meditation is not when one is able to have moment of thoughtless serenity, but simply when one is able realize just how difficult it is to have a moment of thoughtless serenity.
So to answer the interviewer’s question, it should not be shocking to us that melodies and riffs and rhythms just emerge in one’s mind; patterns or structures of orchestration appear in your head sometimes almost prearranged, pre-composed, and pre-performed, and all you have to do is look and listen as if it were a private recital of faceless automaton playing what “you” “wrote.” When it comes to the melodies or patterns of rhythms that emanate in your own brain, the best way to exorcise them from your mind is to arrange them to be played in some spacial-temporal place in the external world. Do not try to beat back hordes of harmony pillaging your thoughts. You will lose. No matter how much you adore music, incessant emerging thoughts of music, like incessant thoughts in general is a form of suffering. Many say composing and playing music is their escape, their drug of choice, or their mistress, but has an immense potential to become a burden, where the only semblance of mental liberation comes in the form of the few hours between the composition of one song is done, and the next begins to emerge. Here, composing music is less like an opiate flooding one’s brain with dopamine, and more like setting down a bag of bricks. It is less like a licentious mistress with both the willingness and aptness too surrender to whatever Hedonistic fleshthirst one’s godless mind can author, and more like dealing with your Ex, whom you have to hand over your children to every other weekend and holiday. The purpose of this warning against musical nihilism is not to frighten you, but to hopefully vindicate those fellow composers who may experience the same phenomena, but not know if they are the only ones. Perhaps too it is to reveal that one doesn’t don’t have to love music to write it. And just like any occupation anyone does, one doesn’t have to love it to be good at it.
The Speaking Teacher
“The speaking teacher is the audience. You can not learn anything about writing...without writing, putting it out in front of an audience, and getting humiliated, because nothing makes sense until you do that, until you used your consciousness and said, “this will kill em! This is the best thing anyone has ever wrote. It’s going to grab them by the throat, and they wont be able to look up.” And then you watch the audience go to sleep. And you are humiliated. You found you were in error. You have to try again. And if you’re easily shamed, then you’re not going to learn.”
- David Mamet
“That’s the Frailty of genius, John, it needs an audience.”
- Sherlock Holmes
“When asked what I think are the most erotic words in the language, I sometimes think slowly, “Captive audience.”
- Christopher Hitchens
Musicians and songwriters today as well as Baroque, Classical and Romantic period composers have been always seen as Gods, for what I think to be three reasons: first, composing music, especially arrangements for large bands, choirs and orchestras, appears to the us mere listeners as tantamount to the creation of a soul that was previously nonexistent: a meta-soul, a somewhat spiritual superstructure, where the voices and labors of many beings are decluttered from the chaos of the mundane, and remade into a single entity that is to the hearer both as tangible as any flesh, and as incorporeal as any apparition.
The second must be the timelessness of certain music, which means that the designers of these songs share with God the trait of eternity. Composers and songwriters whom have long past on are immortal in the music they mercifully leave us, and who have melodies that are still echoing through the halls of the collective conscious of not just our civilization or present day culture, but the residual future of he human condition it impacted.
The third and final reason is the only one out the three that I myself submit to, because it is the only one that doesn’t sound like an edict of Divine Right, and it is the only one that is useful or helpful in the task of composing music, and that is that the composer has the power to manipulate one’s emotions merely by organizing sounds in a particular manner. A sort of Emotional hypnotism: the power to dictate the passions of others.
Hierarchies within species seem to be spurred by one member’s ability and means to control resources, and there is no more valuable resource than the will of others. God gave man free will, which is the faithful’s timeless answer to the question of why an omnipotent deity does not stop the suffering inflicted by evil men. The composer, however, like the Sirens of Greek Mythology, has the capacity to usurp man’s free will, and make him be the earthwork and fodder in the most useless battle, or make her dance onto her knees, begging, not to be loved, but to be the mere surrogate for a love that if came to be would assuredly be a disappointment. By beckoning the listener’s will to their submission, the composer momentarily gives truth to solipsism, with the composer’s consciousness monopolizing that of the collective, like a virus, a tsunami, or a cancer. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective Sherlock Holmes said that “The frailty of genius is that it requires an audience,” which is a paradoxical tragedy being that such power invokes, as does godliness itself, the ultimate loneliness. If you got into music to meet people, don’t. Not because you couldn’t hack it, but because the better music you encounter, the more you will be met with emptiness.
A moment by moment, second by second manipulation of the listener’s emotions, anxiety, stress, and capacity for love and violence is exactly how one should go about writing a song.
The Enemy of Democracy
“You don't decide to be a writer; you are one or you are not one. This drives people crazy, because everybody thinks it’s easy to just sit down and scribble, and that’s it. Well, it isn’t, and you have to have a certain gift, which is not art. It’s not a democracy. In fact, art is the enemy of democracy.”
- Gore Vidal
“All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?”
- Antonio Salieri
Though the great author of Lincoln, and self-proclaimed biographer of America, Gore Vidal, was speaking as a writer of language in the form of novels and essays, his closing remarks, “art is the enemy of democracy,” applies to all the forms of aesthetics from writing, to painting, to film-making, to acting, and to most importantly, to the composition of music, where, as Frank Zappa said, “The air of the performance is sculpted into something,” and as Edgard Varese famously proclaimed that “Music is organized sound.”
The art of composing music is the clearest enemy of democracy, because a system where the authority to govern over the people is derived from the people themselves, is predicated upon the idea of equality of each individual within the democracy. Thus when voting on whether or not laws should be enforced, or voting for representatives in a legislature, (whom best take your needs and values into consideration when producing laws or rejecting laws) each individual's vote is equal to everyone else’s vote, and no one person’s vote is valued more or less than another. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Though it took well more than a dozen years after this maxim was written for the United States to officially include all men, and a few more years after that to include the other half of humanity with these unalienable rights, this Creator either forgot or didn't think too much about endowing all people with the ability to write a bloody song.
"Antonio Salieri: Leave me alone.
Father Vogler: I cannot leave alone a soul in pain.
Antonio Salieri: Do you know who I am?
Father Vogler: It makes no difference. All men are equal in God's eyes.
Antonio Salieri: [leans in mockingly] *Are* they?”
-from Amadeus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9NG_NPLktA
Music is the great enemy of democracy, precisely because music is the proof that everyone is not created equal.
We tend to find comfort in believing that beauty, and therefore art, is in the eye of the beholder, for a couple of reasons: the first, is that we think that the music that a person loves says something about who that person is, and therefore a qualitative difference in music taste means a qualitative difference in individual people, and this is amplified in magnitude when it comes the music people write, compare to just that which people enjoy listening to. The second, is because music is like religion, even the minds of unbelievers; “He who sings, prays twice,” says, Saint Augustine. Therefore, to many, it can’t be quantified. The evolutionary biologist, and American Paleontologist, Stephan Jay Gould said that religion and science were “non-overlapping magisteria,” and for many, music and science are equally mutually exclusive. If music has values, and those values are quantifiable, then science can determine what is music of higher value compared to music that is objectively, and scientifically verified to be inferior. And the corollary to being able to prove that certain music is superior to other music, is that certain musicmakers and their means of making music, are superior to others.
This may, at first glance, seem appalling to egalitarians, cultural relativists or relativists in general, but hopefully I can convince you that it is not. In fact, it is obvious. If all were equal, then you could walk into a record store blindfolded, pick however many albums you wanted and leave, and you would be just as happy as when you scan through the store, with all your senses unabated, and carefully select records you desire. If all were equal then Neurosis would be just as good as Nickelback, Cardi B would be just as good as Lady Gaga, Cannibal Corpse would be just as good as Six Feet Under, Queen just as good as Grandfunk Railroad, Minor Threat would be just as good as Simple Plan, Frank Sinatra just as good as Joey Bishop, Jermaine Jackson just as good as Michael Jackson, Snow just as good as Tupac, Tom Waits would be just as good as Billy Joel, or John Coltrane would be just as good as that band Train. If all were equal in music you could throw a tennis ball at a high school marching band, and no matter who it hit, that person would be just as good at writing a song as Miles Davis.
Notice that I didn't show preference above, though one might be able to infer that I had certain bands or songwriters whom I thought to be superior in each of my comparisons, but it doesn't matter. If you think Nickelback is superior to Queen, or Joey Bishop superior than Frank Sinatra (Bishop didn't even think so) then you still acknowledge the inequality of talent, artistry, and/or musicianship between competing artists. In fact this discrepancy goes further than just artist by artist juxtapositions, it even is seen when one just looks at the work of a single artist or band. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." A musician, a composer, songwriter what have you, has some music better than other music. We talk of bands having records not as good as previous ones, “the best stuff is the earlier albums,” or maybe the opposite where we would say something in the nature of, “the band didn’t hit its stride until album X.” And even when we delve further, we talk of certain songs on otherwise immaculate albums being better than others, or sections in orchestral work being superior than others within the same composition, such as the outro to Layla, by Derek and the Dominos, being better than the beginning, or the “Ode to Joy” section of the fourth movement in the Beethoven’s 9th Symphony being that which is the soundtrack to human spirit, while everything else (to the Philistine) seems lackluster. Not only is talent not endowed equally among humanity, it isn’t even endowed equally over time within those who have it in the first place; otherwise Meet the Beatles would be comparable in quality as Sgt. Pepper, Cannibal Corpse with Chris Barnes would be just as good as Cannibal Corpse with Corpsegrinder, and everything before the Black album would be equivalent in excellence as everything after The Black Album. The economist and political thinker Thomas Sowell once said, “Nobody is equal to anybody. Not even the same man is equall to himself on different days.”
Do not fret though, dear reader, nor become melancholy or feel defeated. The amazing artists, bands, and singers who wrote the songs that have soundtracked your life through the heights of your joy and the pits of your sorrow, are not responsible for their gifted talent, no more as they are responsible for their height, or the color of their grandparent’s eyes. Neither you or anyone else is responsible for the melodies, harmonies, or rhythms that somehow emerge in your consciousness, just as you are not responsible for the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that never came. Which, no doubt, in their void, consists of riffs heavier than Iron Man, sonatas sadder than Moonlight, and melodies more memorable than anything Tchaikovsky ever wrote. Yet, what you are responsible for and are in control of is what you do with those melodies, harmonies and rhythms in a song once they are revealed to you. And that is songwriting, which can be inferred, taught, practiced and/or understood through experience.
Black Sabbath guitarist, Tony Iommi once said, “However great you are, you’re only as good as your song is.” We should not feel awful about the inequity of music composition, because the results, (the song, the sonata, the symphony) means more to humanity than the songwriter, just as a moral imperative is more valuable to the well-being of humanity than the individual who first issued it. This isn’t to say that there is one good kind of music, and therefore one good way of writing music, which can be determined by science. Instead, we can think of objectivity within musical composition the same way Sam Harris writes about moral values in his book, The Moral Landscape, where there isn’t one good moral system, but a landscape of moral peaks and valleys, with greater or lesser heights and depths:
“Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. The fact that there are many right answers to the question, "What is food?" does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition.”
What you should do with melodies in order to create a great song that is better than 95% of all other music, varies, and has qualitative peaks and Nickelbackian depths. Yet, there is no question that some of those variations and tactics in songwriting is musically equivalent to the rock band Poison.
