KLUGMO posted this Wonder Girls video in another thread. It reminded me of a Frank Zappa quote, "Music comes from composers—Not Musicians,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ioFu81MBYw
I would have to admit I’m more of a composer than a musician.
What role does a composer play in music anymore? Mainstream pop singers usually have someone else write and perform half of everything for them, which USED to be the norm until a few decades ago. A composer would write the music and either sell it to musicians or “conduct” a band of their own.
Here’s an excerpt from Zappa’s autobiography:
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. What I do is composition. Composition is a process of organization, in any medium you want. The most important thing in art is The Frame. Anything can be music, but it doesn’t become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music. The bassoon is one of my favourite instruments. It’s a great noise—nothing else makes that noise. Whether it’s a rhythm that can be heard or a rhythm that is perceived, i.e. a colour change over time—or a season), it can consumed as music. When someone writes a piece of music, what he or she puts on the paper is a recipe—in a sense that the recipe is not the food, only instructions for the preparation of the food. Music, in performance, is sculpted into something. SOUND is ‘ear-decoded data.’ If you purposefully generate atmospheric perturbations, you are composing. A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules. Lets ALL be composers: 1) Declare your intention to create a ‘composition.’ 2) Start a piece at some time 3) Cause something to happen over a period of time 4) End the piece at some time (or keep it going, telling the audience it is a ‘work in progress’ 5) Get a part time job so you can continue to do stuff like this. I employ a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and releases. A large mass on any material will ‘balance’ a smaller, denser mass of any material, according to the length of the gizmo it’s dangling on, and the ‘balance point’ chosen to facilitate the danglement. Anything, Any Time, Anywhere—for NO reason at all. If a musical point can be made in a more entertaining way by saying a word than by singing a word, the spoken word will win out in the arrangement—unless a non-word or a mouth noise gets the point across faster. “PUTTING THE EYEBROWS ON IT”. After “the eyebrows”, The Attitude. Perform the material with The Attitude AND The Eyebrows, consistently, otherwise, to me, the piece sounds ‘wrong’. “Timbre Rules”. It rules ‘the humour domain’. Put sounds together that tell more than the story in lyrics. TheSynclavier allows me to create and record a type of music that is impossible for human beings to play. The ‘little guy inside the machine’ play them with one-millisecond accuracy—every time. There are things you can do with live musicians that you can’t do with the Synclavier, and vice versa. Music comes from composers—not musicians. The orchestra is the ultimate instrument, and conducting one is an unbelievable sensation. “Conducting” is when you draw ‘designs’ in the nowhere—with a stick, or with your hands—which are interpreted as ‘instructional messages’ by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing. At home, a normal day for me is spent working by myself and not talking to anybody, so I really have to change my life around to go onstage. Stylistically, my approach on the guitar is closest to Guitar Slim, a mid-fifties blues player. His style seemed to be ‘beyond the notes’—it had more to do with the ‘attitude’. I’m not a virtuoso guitar player. A virtuoso can play anything, and I can’t. I can play only what I know. A soloist can go only as far into the ‘experimental zones’ as his rhythm section will allow him to go. The problem lies in the polyrhythms. Either a drummer will play steady time, in which case my line will wonder all over his time, or he will hear the polyrhythms and play inside them. Polyrhythms are interesting only in reference to a steady, metronomic beat—otherwise you’re wallonging in rubato. Just as in diatonic harmony, when upper partials are added to a chord, it becomes tenser, and more demanding of a resolution—the more the rhythm of a line rubs against the implied basic time, the more ‘statistical tension’ is generated. The creation and destruction of harmonic and statistical tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. I couldn’t even pass an audition to get in my own band. I can’t play guitar and sing at the same time. If a piece intends to actually tell a story, I don’t build an elaborate accompaniment because it gets in the way of the words. Apart from the snide political stuff, which I enjoy writing, the rest of the lyrics wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the fact that we live in a society where instrumental music is irrelevant. Without deviation (from the norm), ‘progress’ is not possible. People who think that classical music is somehow more elevated than ‘radio music’ should take a look at the forms involved—and at who’s paying the bills. To me, II-V-I is the essence of bad ‘white-person-music’. In radio music, timbre rules. It’s amazing that schools still offer courses in musical composition. What a useless thing to spend money on—to learn how to be a modern composer! No matter how good he course is, when you get out, what the f**k will you do for a living? I don’t like schools. I don’t like teachers. A composer’s job involves the decoration of fragments of time
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