Fraser Sherman on Music

[cathschaffstump]

Here's Fraser Sherman's post on music. You can find me at Isabelle Santiago's Twisted Fairytale.

And while I'm at it, please visit the Drollerie Chat Room on September 27th at 4 pm EST, 1 pm PST. New books will be given away. You know you want some.

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Music baffles me.

I can’t begin to imagine how composers create music.

I can understand how they write lyrics, even though I’ve never tried. Lyrics are writing, they’re words, putting them together makes sense to me. But music?
While I enjoy music, I don’t have any technical understanding of what makes it work: Why one note sounds better than another, why certain notes belong together. I’m not even sure notes do belong together: For all I know, a nice but of music from the Beatles or Mozart would have worked just as well if they’d put a whole different set of notes in.

I imagine my more musically educated friends can see the structure of a symphony or a jazz trio the same way I can see the nuts and bolts of a story if I want to analyze it. to me, it’s just a lot of pretty notes, followed by a bunch more pretty notes.

As a result, I can’t for the life of me imagine the creative process of someone writing music. They say Mozard could conceive the structure of an entire symphony in an instant; I can’t even imagine what a musical structure is.

I have the same problem with some of those incredibly busy paintings that were popular a couple of centuries ago: How do they artists decide where everything will go, what everyone will be doing, how it all makes sense. But I come closer than I do with music: I can imagine someone sketching out a painting, crossing out a few figures, adding stuff, finally getting the draft. But how does that work with music?

I suppose this makes me the musical equivalent of those people who ask writers “where did you get all your ideas?” It’s oddly fascinating to me; there are many, many skills I don’t have but most of them I can still comprehend how they work and how people make them work. Music? Not so much.

If nothing else, i guess it will help to keep me humble.

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.