Richard Russell
THE ESSENTIALS OF THE COMPOSITION PROCESS- A FEW NOTES FROM THE ROCK-FACE
#1 Introduction: Socio-political Context
They tell you music is a universal language. Yet its syntax, its grammar, even the very basics of its alphabet are an impenetrable riddle to almost everyone. The niceties of Western notation, its fractional sentences and Italian gloss only mean anything if you've played piano or an orchestral instrument to a certain level, or sang in a truly proficient choir. Many highly paid musicians know little of theory, giving rise to the periodically trendy notion that theory is dead in the age of Logic Audio and the iniquitous auto-tuner. Well, it's dead if you want it to be. It's dead if you only want orchestras to plough through Tchaikovsky for the 78th season running. It's dead if the horn section on your album is just carefully doctored midi. It's dead if all you want to do is drown in the sound of two separate record-players playing James Brown too fast. If you want another Stravinsky or another Dizzy Gillespie then the language of music must be preserved to teach the next generation, dazzling little black boxes or no. The better Djs know something of musical key: this helps them work out which records can go together. The better singers work out on scales and arpeggios on a regular basis, much as a rugby player works out on weights. Learning guitar or keyboards completely by ear, without recourse to the theory of harmony and chord structure can be done, but it's like learning brain surgery before you can handle a knife and fork. Even drummers have to learn the rules of rhythm, backbeat, accent, syncopation patterns, and plenty of the better ones tune their drums just as you'd tune a guitar. The age of close-harmony Morris dancers and bands put together by telephone poll puts little value on actual musical ability, but unless a critical mass of people learn the basics, if only to teach their kids, then there won't even be any Tchaikovsky. In order to perform, say, Tchaikovsky's Fourth you need around 80 people, all of whom have been to music college. Several of them must have studied the violin, one of the most difficult instruments ever invented. Imagine a guitar with no frets, a range of four octaves, all produced from a finger-board the size of a mobile 'phone; now imagine you've got to play it with a knitting needle. To be good on the violin you've done ten years sounding like a cat strangling its mother, and a further ten sounding like you are taking the piss out of JS Bach. Then you need virtuosos of the viola, the 'cello and the double bass. A double bass is just a violin that's eight feet tall, and it's a real pain to fit under your chin. You need flautists, oboists, some people prepared to play the bassoon; and you need tons of brass, for Tchaikovsky's Fourth, at least a big band's worth, plus they all have to be sober at least for the first few bars. Then they read this stuff, this music that to most is like Sanskrit or Morse code, adding all the nuance dictated by this week's conductor, and the result more often than not makes your hair stand on end. Now in Tchaikovsky's time (1840-93) writing music for a living was a pretty strange thing to do, indeed in Russia it was only a few weirdos catering to bourgeois Europhile sensibilities who could get away with it. Even so he lived in an era when every home that could afford it had a piano from the lower middle-class up, and households who could read music were almost as common as those who could read the newspaper. Today with have adult literacy at pretty much record high levels, but those who read music are a tiny minority even amongst musicians themselves.
It isn't that Western music notation has been superseded, not by any means. Experiments with graphic scores and other alternatives have been going on for years from Berio to the Cubase window, but nothing has matched the ancient Italian simplicity of plotting pitch against time in linear punctuation. The truth is we are in an advanced capitalist society, one in which the price of everything implicitly infers the value of nothing. Music is everywhere, hypnotic jingles, cheap midi telephones, the daily dusk mantra of 'Eastenders' theme wafting like a biological weapon across sedated populations. Music is cheap. As cheap as it has ever been. The BBC provides it on three stations, 24 hours simultaneously, all for about week with the tv thrown in, some half of one per cent of average earnings. Of course I still moan about it, it's several per cent of my income, but i'd never get by without Channel Four News if the suicide bombers hit John Prescott or something. A grenade pie, or a cluster pie, showering his innards across Westminster Bridge like a flock of scarlet seagulls all diving at once in perfect grace. Sorry. Where was I? Cheap music. Downloading is even cheaper than that T-Rex you got from the supermarket because it was past its sell-buy date. Shops throw in ten minutes of meaningless sonic clutter along with the free disdainful look at the till and the free carrier-bag, designed to promulgate global capitalism as much as any carrier-bag possibly could. A shame they all end up covered in seagull shit on some cancerous land-fill. Advanced capitalism is troubled, bloated, lost in the decadence of its own fictionalised nostalgia, creaking like some over-plundering wreck of Francis Drake's, the great nautical mugger; sick from over-weaned gluttony, content to do anything that doesn't require moving from the sofa. We have convinced ourselves that endeavour of any sort is meaningless when everything's already been done much better than you. Why write a book when you can buy one? Why play music when you can listen to it and play computer games at the same time? Why even have sex when you can watch it on tv without any of the risks, rejection, infection, obligation? The trouble with a culture based on pushing preset buttons is that anything that might require effort, especially cerebral effort, is generally given up after the first attempt in favour of watching your latest snack turn round in the microwave. And all the arts, by definition, require years of dedicated passion before you get any appreciable results. We still have enough real musicians to get by, but only just. Our leading young violinist is still Nigel Kennedy: he is 48. He's the only British violinist to get a recording contract worthy of the name in the last 25 years. British culture says if we've got one half-decent fiddle and a couple of so-so opera singers, then we can wheel them out at Christmas and tell ourselves what a great musical talent we've got living on our islands. Well we have ! And they're all, or nearly all skint ! Either living on that grudging remnant of the social cake called Job Seekers' Allowance, or in some netherworld of post-Thatcher self-employment, selling their hard-won talents in pounds and ounces, a service like a hair-cut or a ready-made burger in the big wide world of the neo-liberalist economic trance. Maybe reproduction has played a part? Does the Mona Lisa look any less for being on postcards? Not really. Is Beethoven a lesser composer now broadband allows you to hear him for free? Of course not. But in an environment where no-one cares how Beethoven did it, what it was about his way of writing music that transcended even deafness; in an environment where the artifice of a boy band deliberately belies all the skills required to make them even tolerable to listen to. The sound engineer who put them all back in tune. The totally ignored little hireling who wrote the song. The invisible keyboard player who plays most of the notes. In an environment where music lessons cost extra, and instruments extra still. In an environment where market forces (ie. those born with the mostest gets the mostest) dictate who goes to college, who promotes themselves, who gets published, where even repertoire is chosen on some MOR most bums formula, with the 1812 on the last night. In an environment indifferent to the realities of music-making and music education, the remaining practitioners lead isolated lives, besieged by day-jobs and badly blagged promises of better times to come. Until the day when there are no more musicians, no more pianists, no more orchestras but those left on our pretty little discs.
The majority of popular music is boring and repetitive, which is why it is boring. Much of it is produced as it were, as a secondary source; either using music that already existed or factory presets on some popular software. Tempo is chosen according to what's been selling that week: typically 110-140 bpm. Harmony is limited by the harmonic sense of the band's keyboard player, to whom the black keys are just some unknown scary place. The drummer is invariably a machine, no matter what boy-next-door drummer sits there on Top of the Pops. Machines are good at doing exactly the same thing lots of times, but they couldn't do a solo if the future of machine-kind depended on it, and there's never been one that bought me a pint. The central issue though for a popular hit is the production, usually done by someone several years older than the lads on the packet with years of experience handling reverb, equalisation, and the gentle subtleties of mastering to give the record the requisite plastic sheen everyone's stuck to since Nirvana. Ever more bombastic production values is the only thing keeping bedroom-made music out of the charts, and thus is instrumental in preventing genuine musicians getting anywhere near the trough. The rich kids dance from model agency to model agency, send in c.v.s to join carefully manufactured bands and they may have 2 gold discs behind them before anyone's had the nerve to explain they can't actually sing, that it's all done afterwards with the auto-tune. While the guys who can sing, who've spent years perfecting their singing, are running the ever decreasing circles of pubs and clubs and the occasional properly paid party. And with the new Licensing Act likely to lead to fewer and fewer venues, the immediate future is bleak for music as a performance art. We are mere pilgrims in a dark age filled with smoke and mirrors and an unshakable sense that hell on earth is just one smarmy Blair remark around the corner. Few people can even face up to considering the future, let alone pledging half their heart to an art they know will take decades to perfect.
But while preserving an art form for the immediate future has to be at least one of the considerations for serious musicians, we have to think about the day after the day after that: to the renaissance that will follow the darkness as surely as dawn follows day. Whether the great music of tomorrow is played by fiddles and oboes depends on us, now. Whether the orchestral palette is deemed fit for the sound-painters of tomorrow depends on whether orchestral music can be made to communicate with today's culture, and not some merchant bankers' two glasses of Chablis in the interval culture, bereft of style or any relevance. Tchaikovsky highlights really shouldn't have a place in the art of a vibrant city. The Tchaikovsky fans would prefer an entire work, and preferably one they haven't already got 13 times on CD. While the concert-going public, for the most part open to a little mind-stretching novelty, merely get the classical all-time top 30 rattled out at them by old pros who'd rather have a crack at something new, if it was all the same to the sponsors.
Advanced capitalism stagnates all it touches, preferring any status quo to anything new that might affect sales. The Hollywood movie has disappeared up the arse of 70s tv, already looking forward to the days when no-one goes out and they're forced to rake it in on the dvd. Tv has disappeared in favour of reality tv, in which we stare at unprofessional actors, who expose their faults in an engulfing tedium with all the evil fascination of a road crash. Here's the deal: two hours of that and getting up to put the kettle on somehow becomes exciting and fulfilling. A golden rule of capitalism is not to change a winning formula, and the winning formula is always some cheap gimmick involving sex and the cult of youth. The equivalent in serious music would be a violinist doing Bruch in a see-through frock, so I guess it's on the way. Maybe the brass should stand at the front, in those pants the male ballet dancers wear, and do a dinky little formation dance to a Mozart minuet. Or maybe they could run a 'phone poll to decide which of the second trombones gets the sack next week.
Orchestral and chamber music are in a dire state to be true. Nothing new gets played because nothing new has a guaranteed affluent audience, unless its a new work from Paul McCartney, with Mull of Kintyre halfway through. Amateur music making, which as i've said elsewhere is just professional musicmaking but no-one gets paid, is never going to thrive when the government will only permit fully licensed 'regulated entertainment', to quote the Licensing Act. The battles for freedom in the 60s and 70s have given way to a dull, bland and forever pecuniary reale artistique. If you tried to organise a 'happening' today under a bridge in W1, you'd get carted off and charged under the anti-terrorist laws. Play your flute for a few coppers by the shopping centre and a few more coppers, this time with big sticks, will throw in a wagon and subject you to compulsory drug therapy for the next year of your life. In the days of the Viennese masters (for the unclued up I mean chaps like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, who between them worked from about 1760ish to 1820-odd), orchestral and chamber music were almost exclusively maintained by the aristocracy. Haydn was lucky and got a job that allowed creative freedom at the court of Esterhaze. Mozart always resented using the servants' entrance and ended up with no work at all except a clarinet concerto for a mate to pay a debt and a Requiem commissioned by a bloke who wouldn't leave his name. Beethoven achieved as much as any artist the respect and social mobility any true artist should command; he did it mostly by being a bluff, arrogant git. Still he combined the moody irascible cool with frequent begging letters to every rich person he ever met. Nowadays we are back to the servants' entrance. For a while the state became responsible for culture: the South Bank shows what is possible; but dear old Margaret Brunnhilde and her disciples rolled back the state until it consisted of nothing except the MOD and a call-centre in Mumbai. Current funding for the arts is a laughable paper-chain in which grand a year penny-pushers hand out a measly 500 quid to anyone who's managed to turn themselves into a bureaucracy. Composers are a mere add-on to tv and film makers in the cut-throat world of who's got the next gimmick. While musicians in general are left to suffer on the basis that they're in it for the love, not the money.

© Richard Russell 2004

Next
#2 Mechanics of the Soul; Apparatus of the Sonic Landscape

Front Page