seriously though, really depends on what music you do, with elektrons it’s really easy to stretch a pattern into a track because you have a lot of control over micro and micro details of everything, muting trigs, tracks, shifting patterns, steps per page, trig conditions, you have a lot of options under your hands, if you don’t think about structure but just play the damn thing you can do a lot with very little.
techno, dub, it’s meant to be repetitive, the rules are not the same as classical music, composition, it’s a vibe, and if you are vibing then probably the listeners vibing too, you just need to figure out how to vibe with the thingy without overthinking it.
I think for many of us who came up in “western” traditions, it takes a bit of unlearning to transition to electronic music, especially dance music. I didn’t formally study music past secondary school (high school I guess), but came up playing orchestral instruments in bands, reading music and writing four part harmony, piano lessons, and from there to rock bands.
Even with that, there’s a lot of “rules” that I had drilled into me as if they were immutable laws of nature rather than just one quite specific musical tradition that don’t actually work very well in the context of electronic music - or pop or rock or really most of the music that people actually enjoy listening to.
I was reading a couple of books about Can recently and one story that really struck me was when they brought in a Ghanaian percussionist called Reebop and Irmin Schmidt (Stockhausen student) and Jaki Liebezeit (probably Germany’s leading jazz drummer of his generation) were completely perplexed by his approach and how it related to their expectations of beats and bars:
I asked Reebop, “Where the bloody hell is the ‘one’ here?” And he looked at me and said, “Ah, you poor Europeans. The ‘one’ is where[ver] you start.” And that was a revelation. All of a sudden, fuck the “one”! It doesn’t exist. Everybody has his cycle. It could have seven units, seventeen units, or four. And he starts and then repeats them, and all together they make a rhythm. And that’s actually how it works. And I knew that theoretically, but from that moment on I knew it practically. I could start, and that was my “one”.’
Most of the electronic music I enjoy has as much or more in common with participatory forms like drum ensembles than it does with what tends to be taught as the One True Theory of Music in Europe and the US. It comes out of a conversation primarily between African and Latin and European traditions, a lot of “classical training” only really acknowledges one voice in that.
Hot take or not, but from my experience, clasically trained musicians rarely truly “get” pattern-based electronic music and do it well. It doesn’t take much to realize it if one starts listing any number of major artists in the field. There’s probably some very hard drilled in programming (how ironic) regarding music theory and composition that gets in the way of pure intuition and appreciation for the inherently repetitive nature of this type of music.
Fun fact: I once somehow answered the wrong exam question in a musicology exam, and chose to analyse a piece by Schoenberg despite not having studied him at all and not knowing that serialism was a thing. I waffled on about how he was being very atonal and random, all the while not knowing about tone rows. I got zero for that section…
Yes this is exactly my situation too. It makes sense coming from a classical background - everything is deterministic and set-in-stone in classical music (although less so from the baroque period backwards, where improvisation was much more common), and so the different mindsets being discussed in this thread relating to electronic music are quite alien (but liberating and exciting).
100%. It’s definitely a gear shift to get out of that mode of thinking (harmony, melody, development) which often has no place in techno. In some of the most effective techno there’s often no melody, minimal harmony (beyond a basic harmonic root) and minimal development (at least of melody).
Very good point. This may explain why there’s very few dub concertos…
Yeah and this is the thing. As you say, you have these seemingly immutable laws drilled into you, which do make sense in the context of (most) classical music. There was almost zero variation on linear, deterministic composition for hundreds of years, until some of the whackier experimental forms of the 20th century. I suppose I’m trying to use a square peg in a round hole, to some degree, in trying to transplant that to electronic music.
I literally thought this was what producers were doing live until about a year ago. I could not get my head around how they were composing and playing at the same time. Then I learned about pre composition, live arrangement. I still find it amazing how people remember what’s on which track, which effects to tweak, revert to the saved pattern, all that stuff.
I am, I studied it, though I’d quite forgotten it was a thing until you just reminded me! Yes, through composition sounds like a fantastic classical analogy for electronic music. No hard joins, rigid sections, just evolution.
He wrote a ton of pieces that are not based on tone rows. Those aren’t random in the slightest either Which piece was it?
I’m writing this here merely for everyone else, because everytime the name “Schönberg” pops up, sadly, dodecaphony or “serial” is mentioned as response, as if that was everything he or 296824595 Composers since 1923 did. And, because nobody understands what dodecaphony is, but believe they do. To enlighten this a bit: A serial row is a motif, or a collection of motifs.
A motif is something like “dadadadaaaa” from Beethoven’s 5th.
… and while this piece still has a dramatic form (e.g. a turbulence in the middle), there were pieces to come that seemingly stand still:
from Morton Feldman, written in 1956.
An older form that fits well with e.g. Techno is the Ostinato Form, where a motif is repeated and never stops. A famous example is the “Bolero” by Maurice Ravel.
I think the thing with “electronic music” is that it can be anything you want it to be - it’s more so that the forms that we’re enculturated in tend to be the ones that derive from the conversation between African and latin traditions with European traditions in the US - so anything with roots in blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll … i.e. house, techno, pop, minimalist “classical” music, pretty much most of the stuff people actually listen to these days. You can make an argument that some ambient and drone stuff is an exception, but even there I think the influence is there in a lot of cases.
Even for playing in guitar bands I found the little “classical” training I’d had an active disadvantage - so much of it doesn’t make sense when you try look at it through that lens. Because it has its own logic, just like blues does. This still kills me now because I have a horrible tendency to play/write closed phrases that just don’t work in riff/loop-based music.
I have a huge objection in general to the use of “classical” to describe all of western art music - I can just about live with it as a shorthand for compositions from the classical era. Who gets to say that these are the “classics”? Aren’t there also classics in various folk musics and other traditions? Pretty obvious point that’s been done to death, but from a practical point of view imho the most harmful aspects are the notion, whether overtly or by implication, that other forms of music and traditions are less “serious” and worthy of study - where in fact western art music has traditionally been rhythmically totally unsophisticated vs. other traditions, but especially African and latin - and also that the “classical” tradition is a gold standard that other (apparently lesser) musics must be contextualised against.
I’m definitely not immune to this, was listening to this track from Nu Genea’s new record during the week - melting pot of traditions from around the Mediterranean - and found myself thinking how nice the microtonal vocal line is … but who says 12TET is normal and therefore anything that works differently is a “microtonal” aberration of some sort - see also the “blues scale”.
Anyway, I’m just up on my soapbox here and like I say it’s hardly original or 100% on topic. Going back to Reebop, he’s also coming at it from from a particular Ghanaian tradition where if you ask James Brown or George Clinton there very much is a one and everything is on it. And this follows through a lot of hip-hop as a funk derivative and from there through to the likes of Autechre and Boards of Canada as drawing on hip-hop, at least in parts of their careers.
On that - Ann Danielsen’s stuff on grooves vs. songs is worth a look. I’m linking Ethan Hein’s blog here a lot - he really nails down a lot of the things that have instinctively bugged me over the years - also put me on to Philip Tagg and the groove harmony idea.
Also I’ve always found “Bolero” a fascinating example of orchestration being used like a synthesizer: thinking about layering and sound compositing. The primary theme starts with a piccolo, celeste, and horn, but the best part is the composite doesn’t sound really like any one of those instruments. It sounds like a totally new sound. Not that Ravel was the first to try these kind of doublings (also can’t forget Rimsky-Korsakov), but he was a master at creating new sounds through layering – and I often think the way he treated timbres and form, he was basically a synthesist and sound designer before that was a thing haha.
Also love Feldman… + Xenakis, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Reich, Riley, Adams, etc. all of whom used traditional and orchestral instruments but to great effect with textures, pattern repetition, aleatoric passages etc. Some of them used electronics but whatever the tool, they were thinking of form and timbre in a similar way that evokes a lot of modern techno.
Yeah, I thought it was well worth it. I made some music I really enjoyed as a result of the prompts. I did really enjoy the saturday listening groups, where you’d gather with 2 or 3 strangers and listen to each other’s work. It pushed me to finish things i might have let stall without the accountability. In that way, I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed it as much asynchronously. I’d definitely take another SoS workshop though.
I don’t consider the word “classic” to mean better. I think of it more along the lines of, that is a classic joke … something that has been around for a long time, something repeated, something amenable to variation, adaptation, up-scaling, remix. Archetypal.
Why, exactly is western art music rhythmically unsophisticated? It is certainly not because other forms of music are rhythmically sophisticated. That would be silly, zero-sum thinking. And just to break down rhythmic sophistication, most of the stuff I hear on these forums has a metric qualities that repeat, quite predictably every 2, 4, 8, 16 etc. beats. That is not rhythmically sophisticated. Most classical music lacks percussion. Does percussion add rhythmic sophistication?
Thank you for including references. I peeked at the article on groove harmony, and according to the notion, in certain types of music, the metrical location of a chord matters more than its harmonic function. I have a problem with this notion, however. Many electronic musicians have, demonstrably, little interest in harmonic progressions, and also many of them have little or no basis in study of classical harmony. So, that, by default, makes the “rhythmic” element of chord placement more significant, according to the zero-sum logic.
I personally do not see why electronic music should be so limited that it cannot simultaneously manifest both rhythmic interest and harmonic progression through the use of chords. It is worth noting that classical music has an historical long arc of players and composers playing and studying the works of those who preceded them. And by contrast, electronic music is still historically pretty new.
I don’t disagree with the general notion that classical theory and techniques may not help us create certain genres of electronic music. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is because electronic musicians have rejected so much of classical music theory and practice.
It’s interesting how we tend to conceptualize and try hard to decipher the musical masterpieces some guys with no musical knowledge, skills or training, produced with minimal, extremely cheap equipment, on the fly, in one take, effortlessly, while high.
This is probably the biggest roadblock on elektron instruments for me. Especially when I try to implement guitar or bass guitar playing with sampling. It takes a lot of planning when to start sampling, where to put the trig, how to maybe loop it, how to structure the patterns and their arrangement, and so on.
This is where the simplicity of the tape-based workflow of the OP-1f shows it’s real value. Here, I can simply start recording a bar earlier. That’s it.
For linear composition, that’s unbeatable. But there’s also something to be said for more repetitive music. There’s something special in playing and recording e.g. the same bassline for 6 minutes straight as opposed to playing it once and just looping it.
Which piece was it?
