NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/bit/listserv/emusicl/1700

Text File | 1992-12-23 | 2.7 KB | 49 lines

Comments: Gated by [e-mail]
Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!darwin.sura.net!paladin.american.edu!auvm!CASSIEL.DEMON.CO.UK!CASSIEL
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.emusic-l
Date:         Thu, 24 Dec 1992 01:20:09 +0000
Sender:       Electronic Music Discussion List <[e-mail]>
From:         Nick Rothwell <[e-mail]>
Subject:      Re: Composing philosophies from a "gearhead"
Comments: To: Electronic Music Discussion List <[e-mail]>
Lines: 37

Composition philosophy: I paint moving pictures. The pieces are visual;
each one has a specific set of colours and textures, and a specific depth
and mood to it. I tend to spend a lot of time working on transitions
(rhythmic, tonal, whatever), so that the pictures change; I consider this
at least as important as the pictures themselves. The colours are very
important, since they help a great deal when doing an arrangement; some
colours go together well, some don't. For example, I wouldn't use the
Waldorf at the same time as a vocoder; the Waldorf is often a deep
red/purple, and vocoders are usually muddy brown. Yuck. And the textures
would look messy. My favourite arrangements currently are blue and white.

The other point is that I always compose in bars. (Sometimes both kinds.)
Even if something has no specific tempo or pulse, I still need to attach a
nominal tempo and bar structure to it, otherwise I can't fit any structure
to it. Without structure, a piece is potentially infinite and never gets
written. Bar counts are also useful when splicing ideas together into some
kind of crossover, and in nuts-and-bolts terms you need bar lines for
splicing in order to get the MIDI control to work properly...

Notation: I don't use conventional notation much unless I want to harmonise
something in a classical sense, and even then I can generally do that by
ear. However, I compose visually, and in three dimensions: vertical is
frequency, horizontal is time, and depth is depth (reverb depth, volume
level, EQ rolloff, whatever). The pictures here are related to the pictures
of the pieces themselves, with the same colours and so on, except that the
time sense is different. As it happens, my main compositional tool
(Performer) lets me lay things out graphically in a similar way to how I
visualise things; I suppose this makes it, by definition, a reasonably good
tool.

Creativity: No, one doesn't learn it. One has it at birth. The trick is
discovering a medium in which to exercise it. Some people find such, some
don't. Whether we're all born equally creative is a topic for the
anthropologists.

                      Nick Rothwell  |  [e-mail]
   CASSIEL Contemporary Music/Dance  |  [e-mail]