Tag: craftsmanship

A few thoughts on having a practice

Over the past few weeks, something that came up repeatedly in talking to artists and teachers is the idea of practice – something so obvious in instrumental music that it’s hardly ever talked about. But what about electronic music, what about composition? Clearly, motor skills can be removed from the equation to a high degree. But first, should they? And then, what about skills of perception, action, reaction? What about amassing experience? Having had an instrumental practice, and a systematic one at that, has been vital for me while studying more abstract arts. Doing this has allowed me to transfer knowledge to other aspects of being an artist, such as the perceptional skills mentioned above.

Whether you’re reading the Composition Exercises on this site, if you’re enjoying the programming screenshots I’m posting, reading an essay (perhaps this extensive one on deliberate practice?) or coming to a sound walk with me – these are snapshots of my practice.

If we’re going to make progress in our work, better have a regular, deliberate engagement with it.

PS: Another Touch Guitar Circle starts in Berlin today. For the time being I have disengaged with that particular practice, but I am there in spirit.

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On writing 100 Composition Exercises

I’ve now published way over a hundred Composition Exercises on this blog. Over a hundred quirky legs for your compositional brain to run away with, to dance on.

It started out with the notion that much amazing music remains uncomposed and unreleased because we procrastinate by fantasizing, discussing, reading about, buying and reselling gear, always on the lookout for the one machine that will finally get us ready to produce something of worth. So cutting back on that, like any abstinence from things that take up more space than they deserve, should have an effect on our actual work as artists: making art. Reflecting on the larger commercial and cultural context will shape the way we see our practice. Once I called that Composition Exercise #1, it felt natural after a few weeks to post a related thought as #2, and I soon found myself hitting double digits and then writing an open-ended series.

At first I thought I would go in the direction of actual traditional exercises and tutorials, provide tactics, solutions, software. I may still do that at some point, but it turned out that this series is about sharing ideas, making mental connections, pushing some notions ad absurdum, and seeing things in a new light. Changing the way you – and I – think. These are tools, heuristics, lenses, paradoxes, provocations for you, for myself, for later use in teaching and composition contexts.

As for me, writing Composition Exercises has become a compositional practice in itself: I think all day about what it means to make art in our current time anyway, how that relates to living a meaningful life, and how art offers us a playground for experimentation, play, training and reflection. And by now, whenever I notice something odd or intriguing about creativity, my mind goes „Wait – there’s a Composition Exercise in there!“ and I write the thought down.

In early 2016 I’d committed to posting on the blog at least once a week, and while I often didn’t have time for essays, Composition Exercises were a condensed way to share an idea instead of having it vanish in my notebooks and files, allowing me to write longer articles when they occurred to me. I write down many more ideas than I publish and the more I write, the more I think of new ones. Late last year I started posting twice, now I’m publishing at least three times a week. I often review and refine Exercises over time before I hit publish. That doesn’t mean that they’ll all be brilliant – some will per definition be above average, some below. Some have sparked insights in people or made them compose a piece of music. Many will go largely unnoticed, some deservedly so. That’s OK. It’s about the joy of the practice, the courage to own an idea, the habit of publishing something for others, thus training my brain, and maybe yours, to notice and to share.

Once or twice each month I share more thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog on my newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

I Give You A Tool

I give you a tool. We don’t know who made it. You use it.

I give you a tool that I made. You use it.

I give you a tool that someone made. You use it and study it, and come to know its strengths, its shortcomings, its unexpected or unintended benefits.

I give you a tool and show you different ways of using it. You try them out and use them.

I give you a tool and show you different ways of using it. You try them out and use them and improve on them. Ideally, you then teach me.

I show you how to make a tool. You build it and use it.

I show you the thinking behind the tools I and others make. You study their history, traditions, the conditions that led to their inventions, the needs they adressed when someone first thought of them. Now you come up with your own tool.

Then you invent your own way of making tools according to your ideas and needs. You build them, refine them, and use them.

You document why and how you made your tool, and how I can make one myself.

You give me a tool.

All different ways of relating to one another, different distributions of authorship, power and influence. This does not just apply to art, but the consequences can be particularly striking there. The things we work with can be the things we think with – if we see the opportunity.

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