Finding Balance When Writing Music
One of my bad habits is that I get obsessive about things. It could be food or it could be video games, it doesn’t really matter but it has definitely impacted how I write music. For all of the positives this mindset can bring, unfortunately I often find it difficult to realize when I’ve gone too far, which has led to some sticky situations. Recently, while putting together resources for my arranging course, I stumbled on an old recording which reminded me of one such event.
At the end of 2019 I made the decision to write a suite featuring a local heavyweight trumpeter named Mat Jodrell. I’m not too sure what led to the initial idea but I soon found myself having booked the band for a date in January 2020. In the traditional fashion of my pre-covid self, I had bitten off more than I could chew and did most of the writing in the week leading up to the performance. Instead of having the weeks of free time to lose myself in creativity that I had envisioned, I found myself clocking in an excessive amount of hours over a few days. As such, I had no time to think about what I was writing and leaned heavily on the core components of arranging that I liked.
Somehow, even though I had a stupid self imposed time crunch, the charts were written just in time for the gig. I was lucky to have an amazing group of musicians that could sight read most of the music at the soundcheck and nail it for the show. A crucial element that led to the success of the whole evening. By the time we got to the final note, I was on cloud nine. The band had rallied when I needed them the most and the audience seemed to have enjoyed their evening.
While the band was packing up I went over to Mat and asked how he felt about it all. To my surprise, he gave me a slightly more critical response than expected. As it was the first time the suite had been performed, none of us really knew how the music would stack up. During the performance I had been so caught up with avoiding potential trainwrecks that I hadn’t been able to listen to the piece the same way as him and had interpreted my euphoric feeling afterward as a sign that the chart was a success. Mat raised the point that the 45 or so minutes of music was imbalanced and had a lot of loud, high moments, but not that many low or moderate sections. Although I was feeling optimistic at the time, I could see the truth in his comments.
The next day I revisited the score and realized that a large majority was built around various shout sections. Even though they brought a lot of excitement, because of the high saturation they didn’t have the same effect that they usually do when they stand alone in a chart. I quickly realized I had fallen into a pitfall my arranging professor Rich DeRosa had warned me about years earlier. Something he had taught in relation to voicings, but a principle that applies to many avenues of music and life in general.
Back in one of the introductory arranging classes I took with Rich, he introduced the concept of saturation points. Like many of the topics he discussed, he would often have a food related analogy to go with it. This time he used cheeseburgers in place of voicings to make his point. Rich explained that when you take a bite of a cheeseburger you initially enjoy it, so much so that you want to take another bite. However, if you were to keep taking bites eventually you get to a point where you can’t stomach any more cheeseburgers and have to eat something different. This is what is called a saturation point, a limit where the initial positive feeling of doing something shifts to a negative. Translating the story to music, Rich said that if you were to repeat a technique enough, eventually it would become stale and lose its appeal.
Even though I had listened in the class, I had never taken the concept and thought about it on a macro-scale with arranging. Due to my obsession with shout sections, I had written too many into my suite and had gone well past the saturation point. I had eaten too many cheeseburgers. Fortunately, the realization led to a new approach to planning an arrangement.
Although I had crossed the line with dynamics, I realized that I could’ve done it with any number of other musical elements too. In order to avoid the same situation again, I started to graph out the density of each element against the overall duration of an arrangement. That way I would have a better picture of the arrangement and clearly see the contour of whichever element I was mapping, making it a lot easier to locate any kind of imbalance.
The entire process is quite simple and something which can be done alongside the creation of an event list. I personally draw the arc I want a particular element to follow by hand and then incorporate it into my event list. For example, if I want the dynamics to grow over the entirety of a piece, then in each section of my event list I’ll mark an associated dynamic level that represents that. You can get really creative with the approach with there being an almost unlimited amount of shapes to map. It also can get very interesting when you try to focus on two elements at once, such as the dynamics getting louder while the rhythms get simpler.
Similar to other planning techniques, we can use this method as an analysis tool to try and capture what other composers have done. Used alongside an event list, it can give a pretty good insight into the inner workings of an arrangement and help you capture that same feeling in your own writing.
Even though my obsessive personality has got me into hot water many times in life, in this case it has led to a positive outcome. It’s funny how life works like that sometimes. Hopefully you’ll find the technique useful and can potentially avoid the pitfall I found myself in.
Looking to the future, I’m going to spend one more week on the topic of developing arrangements and look into one of my favorite areas: thematic development. From there I haven’t decided on which direction to go and thought it might be best to get some input from you as the reader. I want the newsletter to help provide solutions to the arranging and composition problems you are facing as well as discuss topics you find interesting. If you have a moment, I’ve setup a quick Google Form where you can anonymously enter any arranging issues you’d like me to discuss. If I don’t get any replies, I’ll just keep going in the same direction with techniques I find interesting and check-in again at a later date.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read this newsletter. I got a wonderful response from many of you last week and it is always great to hear that you find the information useful.
Thanks,
Toshi