Inspirational Music Thoughts

Sometimes the wrong notes can be the right notes. I find that very often you can, in fact, turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. I’m talking about musical composition here, but this interesting possibility probably cross-pollinates into all of life.

As an inspirational music composer I’ve found that I often can come up with a new and original melody through my instrumental bumbling. The greatest improvisatory musicians probably would back me up here when I say that in improvisation, mistakes are more likely to be viewed as opportunities rather than wrong notes.

The best improvisatory musicians make mistakes all the time. We, the listeners, just don’t know it because the second they do, they turn inadvertent mistake into intention and go on from there. Therein lies their greatness, their ability to think, create and improvise on their feet, so to speak.

Their ability to go with the flow, even when the flow begins with a mistake, and take advantage of the mistake rather than curse themselves for making it the way most of us do, is the secret formula to success. This requires confidence, nimbleness and a joy at the experience of running along the edge of the creative cliff. If you’re running along in doubt, you will probably not be capable of turning a wrong into a right, but those experienced with the practice, can make the magic happen.

Sometimes I like to write and purposely not know what key I’m in. That way I’ll be sure to make some mistakes. Here’s why.

When asked to explain how a good melody comes to be written, I’ve always replied thusly. I think a good melody has to have a sense of recognition to the listener, a sense of remembrance, a sense that we might have heard this before or that we know where it’s going. That’s what catches our ear in the first place and there’s something inside each of us that says, “Oh yeah I know where this is going, I remember this and I like it.”

The listener wants to know that he’s in good hands – that you’re not going to throw him into turmoil or confusion suddenly with some bizarre avant-garde conglomeration of notes. They want to feel safe.

Just about the time they are thinking. “Ah, everything’s OK”, then you take some sort of a left turn into places unknown. You throw them a surprise to keep them involved or interested.  If you don’t do this in time, you end up with a cliché melody – one so familiar that the listener absolutely knows where you’re going with this and gets bored with the trip – bored because they’ve already heard it and so it is no longer original.

Often this left turn comes when you are working a time-worn chord progression and actually do hit a wrong note – wrong to your intention. But suddenly you hear the whole progression anew. It sounds different, it sounds fresh. Sometimes it can capture your imagination and often then you can turn the wrongness into something original.

There’s an original song on my Ode To Joy CD that you can find on WatchfireMusic.com that is the perfect example of this. One day I walked by my Clavinova piano in my studio and noticed that it had been left on from a previous session. I was curious as to what sound they were using in the session, so I just let my fingers run an arpeggio across the keys simply to hear the sound.

I gave the arpeggio no thought before I played it. In other words I did not decide to play an arpeggio in the key of Bb, I just wanted to hear the sound so I just let my fingers land where they might.

What came out of the instrument was an arpeggio that I would not have planned to play in a million years, and because I only played the white keys, the randomness of the notes stayed in the key of C.

What I heard come out of the instrument was not just a sound, but the beginning of an entire 7 minute piece called “Anadori” which I wrote for the album. As soon as I heard what I had played, I quickly grabbed my little digital recorder and played it again to remember it. It was full of “wrong” notes, random “wrong” notes, and so it came out sounding somewhat Asian in its tonality. But it was fresh, unexpected. It was instantly evocative to me of the sea. It took me flying above the ocean in a graceful arc of tranquility.

I sat then at the piano and noodled around the tonalities, recording each improvisation for about 10 minutes and then realized that I was late for a meeting, got up and ran out the door to the meeting. Some weeks later, I came back to that recorder and was captivated once more by the “wrong” tonalities of that little melody and used what I had mistakenly played that day as the main theme to the piece.

Whenever I worked on the song, it always took me to the same place – high above the sea. So one day I decided it needed a name. It was becoming a reality so I needed to call it something better than “that Asian mistake song”.

I Googled “Japanese sea birds”. Up came a bunch of names that I could not pronounce, but one of them jumped out at me – Anadori. I had my name. I then went to my sound effects library and loaded various sea bird squawks and calls into the song, spent about two hours organizing their flight across the sky and filtered them in and out of the composition at various points.

The mood with its multifarious images was set. Out of my mindless non-intention came first, randomness, followed by improvisation on the mood set by the randomness and finally composition.

When I listen to the piece today, it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever written before. Oh, some of it is recognizable, but its essence is foreign to me.  It did not come from my experience originally; it came from randomness. It did not come from my soul, but it did finally enter my soul and so has the earmarks of my soul, but not the origination.

All that said, you might find it an interesting listen. Check it out: To listen to Anadori, Click Here.

Enjoy!

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please visit Watchfire Music.