Or: What I Learned About Composing from Singing Alap. _In which we explore music as a quanta and a qualia, drawing lessons from Raga, and practice our first metaphor: "Music as a Slow Reveal."_ ### Activity: sing a long alap in *Raag Yaman*. Alap: a form from Indian Classical Music, in which a musician explores a tonal structure, a raga, in an improvised yet methodical way, slowly, with no meter. ## Quanta vs. Qualia Compare the experience we just had to the symbol: Bbmaj7#11. A distinction from the middle ages: *quanta* vs. *qualia*. The symbol is the quantification, but the experience has a quality that can't be quantified. The asymmetry is enormous – big experience, tiny symbol. This is the power of composing. We have leverage: a small dot on a page can lift a world. But it's also the danger. We can get lost in the *quanta* and forget the *qualia*. I start with alap because it can be a life practice that keeps us connected to the heart of music, and because it is an archetype that can teach us a lot about compositional development and drama. Here are some things I've learned from alap: ## 1. Slow down to go deep. Practice the experience of music that you want. Getting "better" as a musician can feel one-dimensional – we go "forward" on a single axis: playing faster notes over faster changes, or increasing in complexity and detail in our scores. But there's another axis, which is to go deep. To slow down, to feel more. To sensitize us, to magnify our perceptions. This practice is not just about making lines, it's about feeling them fully. Drinking and savoring their juice, their flavor, their qualia. It's a practice in attention. What do you want from music? Joy, freedom, delicious absorbtion? Practice the experience of music that you want. Can we focus on the sounds, can we become absorbed in them, can we have a deep experience through them, can we be emotionally available to them? Can we get in tune with them (and can we get them in tune?) ## 2. Go beyond thinking of a scale as simply a flat row of pitches. This is the flat, one-dimensional version of the scale we sang, in C: C D E F# G A B But when we listen, what we experience is macroharmony[^1] - the aggregate impression of all the pitches we have recently heard (as our memory fades). It is a two-dimensional scale. First dimension is pitches, the second dimension is relative weight/prominence (does it happen more often than other notes? Louder? Emphasized by meter, leaping, beginningness, or endingness?) **C** d **E** f# **G** a b is very different experience from: c d e **F#** **G** a **B** So using only one scale you can bring out many different colors and shades of colors by shifting which notes are most prominent. Anxious composers may worry that when we stay in one scale for very long we can 'use it up.' But we really only 'use it up' when we present all the notes quickly and equally. Then the 7 notes can feel very few. But a scale is not just 7 notes, because no note is experienced in isolation. Its immediate neighborhood powerfully influences its effect -- the note that it comes from colors it, and the note it leaves to colors it retroactively in our memory. A note on a page is not just a note, but a multi-dimensional, context-dependent experience. In a raga, each degree of the scale has a unique character, with characteristic approaches/departures, ornaments, dynamics, probabilities of where to move next, degree of pitch stability, and more. Raga therefore provides us a greatly expanded concept of a scale, from a flat collection to a multidimensional space. From it we learn questions we can ask of our scale that will bring our music greater specificity, consistency, and richness. - What notes can you begin and end on? - What notes can stand on and which are just to move through? - What notes can you only ascend from, or descend from? - Consider transitions - how are certain notes approached? Quit? - What notes are played with vibrato and which are still? - How are different notes ornamented differently? - Can any note follow any note, or do some notes usually resolve or pass in a particular way? (You can map this in a probability network, also known as a Markov chain.) - What are the cadence figures? You can invent these arbitrarily and then explore how your choices feel, or explore the experience of the notes and feel your way into choices. The goal is to have a relationship with each note in your collection as an individual, unique experience, and bring that out for a listener. I visualize this space with a metaphor borrowed from epigenetics (how biological forms develop from genes). The right image is like the notes (stakes) and their complex interactions of interval and dissonance and resonance (cords) pulling tight a landscape of possibility (left image) which then you, the ball, can explore as you compose or improvise. The landscape of possibility has a shape. Not everything is possible. Some paths are more likely than other paths. Treating all the notes the same way gives flatness. Exploring their differences leads us to specificity, integrity, richness. ![[Epigenetic Landscape.png]] **PRACTICE:** **Design a 'Deep Scale' with these ideas. Write a series of phrases that explore the properties of your scale.** ## 3. Form and feeling is union – separation – union We sing with a drone because the real 'juice' we experience is not note but interval between two notes. Our concept of the musical interval is a quanta – a measurement. But it has a qualia, a flavor, a relationship, a pull. I think of the word *sehnen*: Often translated as "longing," the German word Sehnen "enshrines the feeling of being connected to something but removed from it. The connection remains despite the distance, and the separation despite the sense of union... it is from the same root as die Sehne, a tendon. The object of longing is that towards which we 'tend,' and 'tendon' is similarly related to the words 'tend' and 'tendency.'"[^2] We sometimes talk of tendency tones in music – the leading tone 'wants' to resolve to the tonic, the perfect fourth 'wants' to resolve to a 'stable' third, a modulating section 'wants' to return 'home.' All tones are 'tendency' tones. All intervals are separations of different degrees from unison, each with its own particular flavor; the flavor is the sehnen, the yearning for reunion. This is why so much music closes on the root note of the scale or key center; union with the implicit 'home' is our most satisfying closure. The drone simply makes the implicit 'home' note explicit and omnipresent. The rhythm of separation and union creates the syntax of the alap: - union (a long Sa, a unison with the drone) - separation (a phrase using the notes just above and below Sa) - union (return to Sa to close) - separation (a phrase that reveals one higher or lower note) - union (return to Sa to close) - etc. until the separation stretches as far as it can before... - separation/union miraculously merge! (Sa an octave above: both far, and home!) When we observe that 'to hear something we have heard before' is also (re)union, we see that cycle of union / separation is so foundational to musical experience that it may be the first axiom of musical form. We go away, we come back. We hear new things until we hear something familiar. For example:  | - | Home | Away | Home | Away | Home | | -------------- | ---------- | ----------- | -------------- | --------- | --------- | | Song form | - | Verse | Refrain | Verse | Refrain | | Jazz standard | Head | Solos | Head | Solos | Head | | Sonata Allegro | Exposition | Development | Recapitulation | - | - | | 2 bars of funk | The One | Fill | The One | Fill | - | | Khayal | Asthayi | Vistaar | Mukhra | Vistaar | Mukhra | | Bach invention | Statement | Mod. Seq. | Statement | Mod. Seq. | Statement | This is also the basic structure of narrative (see Joseph Campbell's Hero Cycle and Dan Harmon's sitcom adaptation, the Story Circle). Home – the peace of home is disturbed, and we must go on an adventure, something new is fought for and won – and brought home to renew it. One more angle on this. In information theory, a communication has two components, uncertainty and redundancy. Uncertainty is information; information is what cannot be predicted. Redundancy strengthens, confirms, provides certainty about the information. Music is a rich mix of both. Uncertainty is the journey, redundancy is the coming-home. Notice the connection between our fundamental shapes here. A circle is an arch, is our melodic journey, is a waveform, is sound itself: A point on a rotating circle draws a sine wave over time. ![[Sine Circle.png]] ## 4. The Slow Reveal Reveal your materials slowly. Compositional approaches often stem from a metaphor about what music is and how it comes to be. We're going to explore many of them together. Here's the first one: music as a process of gradual revelation. Call it "The Slow Reveal." You, the composer, know something, but you don’t tell it to us right away. Instead, you show it to us bit by bit. Call what you know the 'background.' It can be a simple shape. What you reveal to the audience can be complicated, because you reveal it in creative and nonlinear ways. You don't just reveal it, you travel it, you explore it, you hold some back for later, to make it special, you squeeze as much juice out of it as you can. The simple background shape ensures an underlying coherence to the surface. Here is the background structure of Yaman: an ascent and a descent. [Rule: you can step to Sa or Pa, but you cannot step up from Sa or Pa.] ![[Yaman Aroh Avroh.png]] This Sargam Bandish beautifully Slow Reveals the raga by taking it as a path and walking in loops that gradually expand, and finally revealing the full picture. Here is an example: ![[Yaman Sargam Bandish PPN.png]] Notice how the peak note of each phrase goes a step higher than the phrase before. That gives the whole piece a clear trajectory, an architecture. Notice also how each phrase is closed with a clear cadence on Sa. Cycles of separation/union are the form. **In quarter and half notes only, write a series of phrases that slowly reveal Yaman.** ### You Can Slow Reveal Anything *“My music is like a garden… Listening to my music can be compared to walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.” Toru Takemitsu* The garden is the background, the walk reveals it. You can do a Slow Reveal with any musical material. Here are the first three bars of Webern’s Six Bagatelles for String Quartet: ![[Webern.png]] And here is one possible Slow Reveal of that material: ![[Webern2.png]] Here’s an example from the great string quartet Ainsi la Nuit by Henri Dutilleux. This, from the introduction, is a phrase in its simplest form: ![[Dutilleux 1.mp3]] ![[Dutilleux 1.png]] The third movement develops this in a (fast) Slow Reveal. He moves forward a bit, then back. Starts over, goes further the next time, goes back… Like in an alap, he moves gradually further in each repetition:  ![[Dutilleux 2.mp3]] ![[Dutilleux 2.png]] Then he uses the same process to descend: ![[Dutilleux 3.png]] **Choose two bars you have written so far and, in a longer series of phrases, slowly reveal them.** ### The Rule of Threes / Ready, Aim, Fire This fixed formula is a species of Slow Reveal. This rhetorical structure appears everywhere in music, storytelling, and comedy. I have also heard it called "ready, aim, fire." “With the first item, you are establishing that pattern, and then with the second one, you are reinforcing and maintaining that pattern. When you reach the third item, this is the critical moment. This is where you deliver the unexpected twist or punchline.” (BeMoreFunny.com) You can do it a lot of different ways, but a 4 bar phrase like this is common. Think of the second half as the thing-to-be-revealed, which you partly reveal twice before revealing the whole thing. ![[Ready Aim Fire.png]] **Write a phrase, and then turn it into a 'Ready, Aim, Fire.'** ## 5. Expectations and meaning. How do you make something 'mean something' in music? What is musical 'meaning' at all? Let's separate two types of meaning: Designative meaning: apple means this -> (real apple) Embodied meaning: thunder means rain. (Antecedent -> Consequent) Music can have both kinds of meaning, but it mostly has the second kind. A bit of music means something (rain) because something in the past has set it up to have meaning (thunder) — and the thing in the past becomes meaningful because of what it set led to (rain). They are meaningful as a pair — expectation, fulfillment. But when our expectations are perfectly fulfilled, our reaction becomes habitual, unthinking. Leonard Mayer describes the situation: *"For example, as we drive along a highway countless stimuli (on-coming cars, pedestrians, buildings, billboards, etc.) are ‘seen’ but as long as our habit responses ‘take care’ of these stimuli we do not really observe them. They are not **meaningful. Only when our habits are disturbed do these stimuli become meaningful**–e.g., if an on-coming car swerves into the middle of the road…”[^3] Consider this phrase. ![[Expectation.png]] 1. New note, no expectations. 2. New note, no expectations.[^4] 3. New note, no expectations. 4. Same as 1 - "we are starting over where we began." 5. Same as 2 - "two things the same as before! I know what to expect — next is E next." 6. SURPRISE - "not what I expected, but new and beautiful! Wow! But what happened to the E I expected? Now I really expect it." 7. "Ahhhh, there it is, I feel complete. I am ready for a new story." # Practice Practice a Slow Reveal. 1. Write a background. Write a short bit of music. This can be a raga shape -- an ascent and descent -- or it can be a phrase of melody, a series of chords, whatever you want. But it should contain a variety of resources, or else you won\'t have much to explore. This will be your **background.** 2. Write a foreground. Explore, walk, circle, slowly reveal your background, in at least 32 bars of music. Be simple or complex as you want with this. What\'s important is that you practice extracting music from music. Show it to us slowly. Take a journey through it. Squeeze all the juice out. Think about the rhythms of union/separation/union; create and surprising expectations; build in structure and add detail. Turn in both background and foreground. Next: [[Music as Line]]  # Footnotes [^1]: Described by Dmitri Tymoczko in _A Geometry of Music_. [^2]: McGilchrist, Iain. _Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World._ 202-203 [^3]: Meyer, Leonard. Meaning in Music and Information Theory (1957). [^4]: I am keeping it simple here, but there are many layers of meaning here, because music has many dimensions of quality. For example, you could say that two points suggest a line; that, once we are going up, we expect to keep going up. You could also analyze the rhythm — two quarter create an expectation for more quarter notes. [^5]: I learned this from Philip Lasser, at his summer course EAMA, where this idea is religion.