Boxes
I remember when I was a child I enjoyed playing the piano despite having no formal music training at the time. I would spend hours, no doubt to my family’s despair, attempting to fashion crude progressions of chord-like things and melodies. Occasionally I would discover a few sonorities I really liked, and really liked how it sounded moving from one to another. When I finally got a little musical training I attempted to understand why these progressions worked, what made them sound “good”. Eventually I studied music at University and took years of theory, spending countless hours analyzing Bach chorales and all the rest. I now know exactly why my early experiments sounded good (or not), understanding cross-relations, third and tritone -based relationships etc. Yay for me, right?
The story is boring, I know. That’s not the point.
This is the point: When I was a child and had no formal knowledge of music, my mind was free to work with sounds on an instinctual and intuitive level. There’s a kind of freedom to be had that way, with nothing to guide me but some deep feeling of what notes were right for right then. But for anyone who actually wants to do something serious with music, which I do, intuition and instinct are not enough. I had to climb in the box with every other composer of the past hundred and some-odd years and learn what makes music tick from the inside out. Some of the most brilliant minds in music have been the ones most devoted to understanding the work of their predecessors. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Brahms, Beethoven. They climbed in the box. Eventually they climbed out and got their own boxes for their ideas.
Once you’ve been in that box and learned things formally then you can start trying to get out of that box again. Let those instincts and intuitions inform what you’re trying to do. Someday, if you’re really good and you really want to, you can get your own box for your ideas.
I’ll be talking about boxes again soon.
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