Got to hear a seminar presented by Armando Bayolo last month at the Charlotte New Music Festival. Armando is one of those composers who travel in circles I travel in (as I wryly told him, “circling the same drains”), but somehow we had never met before. I really appreciate what he has accomplished in his music, which is vivid, precise and engaging.
One of the students asked if he composed on the computer, and he had an interesting answer. He said he sometimes does, but he dislikes it because the temptation to hit playback is so hard to resist. Enter a note, listen to the result. Enter a new note, listen again. It slows down and distorts the creative process. Instead of responding to our imaginations, we respond to a fabricated simulacrum of a sound, leading our ears astray.
I can certainly empathize. Can’t we all, whether we are composers or not? It’s difficult to avoid tapping, typing, clicking for answers when we really should be scanning our minds, our memories. For experienced composers, no midi playback is as true to life as the synthesizers in our skulls, where we have stored enormous scads of samples over the course of a lifetime.
In case my intent doesn’t come through from my words, this is not a screed against technological advances, which I value tremendously. Just a word of caution: understand your tools, both their values and their drawbacks.
Here is one of my quirks: I like using midi playback with the sound turned off. There is a little green line that scrolls across the screen in time with the music. As that vertical bar inches its way through my thicket of notes, I conduct the beat and silently imagine every detail on the page. No fake violins or misfired percussion influence my experience, but the relentless green bar keeps me honest, lets me know when I’m speeding up or slowing down, stops my mind from wandering off the path of musical time.
But are you ever surprised enough by midi playback to take a passage in a different direction? I don’t mean that you made an interesting mistake in entering notes or rhythms, but that the peculiarities of a midi “performance” hit your ear in a certain way and fired your imagination. This happens to me a lot, and is one of the reasons I’m not nervous about hitting the play button and listening. Actually, I’m sure this is an age-old technique. I’d be seriously astounded if Leonin didn’t hear a surprising harmony emerging from the resonant overlap in the huge acoustics of Notre Dame, or if Chopin didn’t notice a particularly powerful voicing in an otherwise unimportant piano chord, and if these unexpected occurrences didn’t inspire some later music. of course developing students should always be trying to improve their “mind’s ear” and to not rely solely on midi playback. But playback can also be one more chance to expand our finite imaginations. As always, I love your blog posts. Keep them coming!
Yes, I’ve had that happen many times. Unfortunately, almost always I am disappointed by the results when live players try to recreate what I pursued because of something I heard in the midi. There are exceptions to that rule, so I keep an open mind, but the results have been horrid frequently enough that I have to remain vigilant.