Being both a poet and musician, I find many interesting similarities in the ways I create both. What Charles Olsen (Poetry New York No. 3, 1950) calls projective [breath-related] poetry writing vs. non-projective [closed verse], “line, syllable, image, sound, sense, taken up in the kinetic,” may be helpful in understanding how I create my music.
Consider: traditional verse vs. free verse. Closed forms vs. open forms. The organic vs. the purely metric. The set feet of the old poetry line vs. the newer freer forms. The poetic phrase against the meter is similar to the musical phrase against the metronome.
Someone has noted that my music often does not follow four or three bar measures of regular beats, metrical pulse, like 4/4 time or ¾ time. Although I improvise creating new lines like the jazz musician, I differ in where and if the bar comes. I don’t use the bar which creates problems for me trying to use traditional music computer editing. Also in traditional jazz, the underlying song has regular chord changes so the musicians can stay together (although even that is evolving to more free improv.) I, instead, spontaneously create a-rhythmically which has similarities to the poet’s free verse.
There is a similar emphasis on the breath vs. risking running out of breath. The reader/writer of the poem and/or the singer singing the song, both must pay attention to the breath. The listener too must have a chance to breathe, a chance to take in and absorb a section before moving on to the next part.
I notice some familiarity with the evolution of free verse vs. the older iambic pentameter. In music, the similarity would be most often iambic tetrameter. Free verse is an open form that does not use consistent metrical patterns, rhyme or other musical patterns, instead follows the rhythm of natural speech. In my case I try to respond to the musical sound and pattern of the previous phrase. It is careful listening, like having an intimate conversation, but is instead with your previous musical expression.
The music evolves from the first notes I play on the piano. Like a conversation with the piano, I listen and something new is suggested. Sometimes the piece is built on specific chord changes like a jazz musician improvising. But most of time I spontaneously compose the piece based on motifs I invent and chord sequences I spontaneously create. Each time I attempt to do something a little different from the last time. Like speaking with a friend, nothing is pre-planned but evolves through careful listening. Over time I have developed a specific music vocabulary and grammar that has become my piano signature.
The poet tends to be solitary whereas the jazz musician often plays in groups so that some structure is necessary to hold them together. Thus for the free verse poet with the lack of a predetermined form, as a solitary improvisor, I feel there is more license to express feelings. I can go louder or softer, faster or slower, simpler or more complex, as the feelings arise. Similarly the free improviser goes where the feelings lead in the playing and improvising. It is truly creating on the fly.
The poet focuses on intonational accent, alliteration and rhyme, linguistic stress, the placement of line breaks, the choice of words and their register, complex patterns of a coherent system. If form is an extension of content in poetry in free verse, what is the content of the free improv musician? It may be a musical idea, an emotional feeling, a pattern, the key, whether major or minor, or alternating with chromatic variations. The process is moving from point to point, in poetry moving from breath to breath. The obedience in poetry is to the syllables. Just as repetitions of consonant and vowel sounds give free verse enough of a pattern to help transform daily language into poetry, repetitions of notes and chords patterns transform sound into music.
Moreover, with dual keyboards I can play one hand against the other, and in turn one instrument sound against another. I go for regular alteration and internal patterns of sounds.
After I record the midi information on my computer, I can duplicate the two patterns and repeat and/or modify the sections and extend them to other instrument sounds.
My teacher, Harold Blanchard, jazz musician and composer tells me “improvisation is the beginning of composition.” I do the composition with computer editing. I call the process “dual keyboard edited free improv.”
In my art, music and poetry, I seek unity in variety and variety in unity. I seek simplicity and complexity; economy of expression in simplicity of phrase, and intensity in layers of meaning. A good poetic line is simple yet suggests so much. In poetry the poet seeks compression: more salient things together, more nouns and adjectives, key words repeated more often; I am gradually learning to compress my music rather than run on just because yet another creative idea comes into my head. Cutting off is as important as developing more and more. It is easy to cut off with the computer.
As in poetry with its emotional complexity that goes beyond with repetitions, rhythm, emotions, sound, metaphor, and imagery, my music attempts to develop emotional complexity beyond notes, pauses, rhythms, rhythmic patterns, repetitions and changes in sound. The poet uses assonance, consonance, alliteration, parallelism while I use chord scales and similar alliteration and parallelism in my music. I like internal rhyme, consonance, and repetition of sounds. I edit using repetition of phrases and sections.
The sound palette of the computer waves, sampled and synthesized, adds a new experience to more traditional acoustic orchestral instruments. I rearrange the music like I do with an abstract painting all the time listening to what works and what does not. To the software orchestra of various sound waves, I add filters, distortions, reverbs. Then I mix it all together, bounce the piece down and upload it to http://www.soundclick.com/jgyoungmd or use in a video I create using Final Cut Pro that I upload to http://www.youtube.com/jgyoungmd
Pingback: Clouds | jgyoungmd