On Venus, days last longer than years.
And, unlike other planets, Venus rotates backwards (“retrograde rotation”).
Compose music for Venus.
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.
Listen to a piece of music on repeat for half an hour every day for a week.
Each time, write down everything you notice – instruments, sounds, structures, techniques, proportions, associations, etc – adding new detail each time.
Number your notes, starting with Day 1 – 1 for the first listen, Day 1 – 2 for the second etc.
As you may find yourself thinking about the piece during the day, write down interesting thoughts, associations, and everything that may be interesting.
Note how your thoughts about the piece evolve, and how they and your perception of the piece develop over time.
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.
Next time you open a piece of music software, note at least three things that it does well and as many that it doesn’t do well. How do these properties influence the music you’re working on, and, ultimately, how do they influence your artistic practice?
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.
Compose a melody that makes use of every interval from prime to octave at least once and no more than three times.
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.
Compose a one bar drum beat.
Copy it into the second bar and change just one note.
Copy that bar into the next and again, change just one note.
Iterate the process and continue for as long as you can keep it interesting.
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.
Compose the way a child sings – joyfully inaccurate, taking erratic turns, and like no one is listening.
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.
Create a pulse-based piece that continually slows down until it ends 5 BPM slower than it begins.
How – if at all – does this affect the feel of the music? Does it work well in a thirty second piece? In a one, two, five minute piece?
What changes will improve the piece?
Do you need to follow conventions in the other aspects of the piece to compensate for the unusual tempo aspect? Or do you better twist conventions in pitch, rhythm, harmony, melody as well?
Do you feel like making the piece shorter? Longer? Make the difference between start and end tempo bigger? Smaller?
What if you make the piece end 5 BPM faster than it began?
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.
Change your mind about an aspect of music about which you long held fixed beliefs.
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.
I recently read an interview with philosopher Timothy Morton where he said something about language that resonated with how I think about musical composition as well:
Rail: It’s interesting how your writing style is very far-reaching, fluid, and lyrical, and I wonder how your background in Romantic literature and Shelley scholarship affects the way that you think about writing.
Morton: There’s a form question and a content question. Form is first. I love sentences. I’m an English literature scholar by training, and when you are an English literature scholar, you train to study sentences. I’m saying sentences rather than words because—I think I’ve said a few times—the atom of meaning is not the word. It’s like a subatomic level. The atom of meaning is the phrase, right? The art of writing and speaking is to put phrases together into sentences. There are really crummy sentences out there, and I think I would like to make some nice new sentences that don’t suck.
I do think that words are triggers – a title, a sampled voice or sound can evoke whole fields of associations – but the real compositional interest lies in how these „atoms“ are arranged in relation to each other – how they interact on sonic and conceptual levels to form bigger entities. As I wrote in a 2012 post called Expanding my grammar:
It seems to me, then, that at this point I am not that interested in ‘expanding my vocabulary as a musician’ – if pushed to stick with the analogy of language I’m much more interested in questioning, testing, manipulating and yes, expanding my grammars – the internal workings of music on all levels of form, structure and events.
Sign up for the a100ql newsletter where I share news, thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog once or twice per month.