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Why I want to learn about music
A couple days ago I started a thread in Music Discussion that probably should have gone in here. In spite of the "general" tone I took in that thread, this is kind of a personal topic for me, but I'm posting about it in here because I think that some of you might be able to relate. I'll start things off with an excerpt from a BT interview that I read not too long ago:
| quote: | "OK, look, the laptop is the folk instrument of the 21st century. It is, right? The thing that gets lost in that leap is a knowledge of the past. If you’re 14 now and rocking some crazy in Reaktor, you think you’re doing something new that actually was happening 30 years ago. So in having these incredibly sophisticated tools, I think we’re losing perspective historically on what’s already happened. Secondly, so many systems are in place now for instantaneous satisfaction of generation of musical ideas--and not like cool aleatoric things where it’s randomization, but just like, ‘Hey, here’s a cool breakbeat track.’ That is taking the tools and having them impose their will on your creative works. That’s why I prefer to create a lot of my own tools. I’ve been prototyping a lot of my own instruments, and I have four guys that are building stuff in C++ for me because I can’t work out the syntax of that . And I don’t have the time to mess with it. But the third and most important thing is that nobody can play an instrument anymore. Until you have had the feeling of your hand on a string of a guitar or on the keys of a piano or the bow of a cello or on two drumsticks, and you’ve dug in and locked into this frictive space, and there’s a connection between your neurology and your physiology, to me, it’s not music. Ironically enough for someone who works so much with synthesis and computers and programming, I’m a musician, man. I like to play with musicians. I just like using weird to shape those sounds that I create.
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I could sit my mom or a 14-year-old kid down with a garage band, and they can do something that’s not only dope but encourages them to go, ‘Hey, I like this a lot.’ From that point, you start experimenting and discovering other tools. I actually think the level of proficiency to create interesting music is zero, seriously. If you can send email, you can make music with a computer now. There’s this incredible supersaturation of people making electronic music. That’s good because what’s really interesting and engaging and bleeding edge and important rises to the top. But the thing that I like to encourage people to do is, if you think this is something you actually like, go study music, not computers. The way you’re going to make really meaningful music and be an actualized musician is to play something. Music is about interfacing with an instrument and musicians, and the computer as a tool for sound design and manipulation. But you need that joy of sitting down with your instrument and another musician and pulling something out of the air. You’re not getting what music is until you have that experience. |
I used to take the attitude that only the "end result" matters, and I still think that is true in a sense. But concentrating on that sentiment obscures the fact that the "end result" will be affected quite a bit by the process, and the process includes the route(s) by which one comes to learn musical principles. And it is my impression that while guesswork and instinct may allow some "untutored" people to come up with brilliant stuff, the whole thing can be made more precise and perhaps more enjoyable by a more "systematic" education in music (which can include a lot of self-education, if one has the discipline). So here are a few things I want to educate myself on:
I want to learn to play an instrument and play it fairly well. I want that tactile experience available. And I would like to learn how to read and write music using "traditional" notation so that I don't have to feel like a whole world of music waiting to be played, understood, and analyzed is not essentially "closed off" to me.
I admit, these are partly ego things for me. I don't want to feel like I come up short in a significant way compared to "real" musicians who play instruments, and I don't want to be scoffed at by people who have taken the time to learn how to perform and write music in the "traditional" way. I guess it's stupid, caring that much about how other people are going to react to what I do, but it is how I feel on a "gut" level and I don't see any easy way to change that. But I also think that knowing this stuff will prove useful in the long run.
I want to learn music theory -- much more than the little I know right now -- because I want to know why some melodic and harmonic things "work" the way they do and how to utilize this knowledge in coming up with progressions in a track, and I want to be able to recognize how other producers are using these principles in their tracks.
I want to learn a good bit about the history of music in general and electronic music in particular. I want to learn when and why all the abovementioned principles developed in the way they did, who the pioneers of musical principles were, and why the principles are how they are today.
I want to learn more about synthesis and sound processing. This is probably the area where I have so far been best about seeking knowledge, probably because it provides very immediate and tangible results ("Oh, so that's why the synth sounds like that when I turn that knob to the right!"), but I could stand to learn quite a bit more.
Another thing to consider is that if I ever (the horror!) stop wanting to make electronic music but still really want to make some other kind of music, I'll have a very good base to draw from. I doubt that I'll ever abandon this entirely, but still, it's good to keep things like that in mind.
The bottom line is that I hate feeling ignorant, especially about things I love as much as music in general and electronic music in particular, and I think that remedying this ignorance by educating myself will be pleasurable and will add to my production skills, too. Maybe some of you feel the same way.
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I play guitar, piano and I sing, as well as trying to produce (which is my weakest skill) and I love to make music with just my hands and my vocal chords and nothing else, it just feels more pure somehow, I enjoy it more I think.
