Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'd like to tell you about my eureka moment.
Now, I'm a composer, and I work a lot with visual scores,
but I didn't always.
For a long time, I struggled with my music.
I had a very specific idea in my mind
about what I wanted my music to sound like,
but I always felt like something was lost in translation.
I mean, I liked the music;
I just felt like it wasn't quite me.
Now, this particular problem
came to a head one day in rehearsal about ten years ago.
I'd written a piece of chamber music, a very complicated piece,
and I had a specific special effect in mind
for my horn player.
I wanted her to sing into her instrument.
My notation looked like this.
(Laughter)
Now, she was playing it perfectly, exactly how I had written it,
but it wasn't even close to what I had in my head.
So I changed some of the notes, some of the rhythms,
thinking that maybe if I tweaked the notation a little bit,
suddenly she would tune in to whatever it was I had in my head.
Didn't work.
"Can you try it this way?" and she did - didn't work.
"Can you try it that way?" - didn't work.
And eventually we were both a little bit flustered,
and she finally said,
"Well, Hunter, what the heck do you want it to sound like?"
I took a minute, I thought about it,
and I said, (Wolf howl).
(Laughter)
And something clicked.
All that time, I had wanted a wolf howl.
(Laughter)
But nobody could understand that,
not even me,
through this ridiculous notation.
So the next rehearsal, I changed my score to this.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, this is a magical thing.
That wolf solved a number of problems all at once.
It helped the performer to get inside my head a bit more,
to perform it exactly how I wanted it;
it added a little bit of visual intrigue
to the score;
(Laughter)
and maybe most importantly,
it finally let me zero in on what it was that I actually wanted to say.
And after that day, I started to realize
that the notes, the rests, the articulations, the dynamics,
the language that we use to talk about music
isn't nearly as important as the visual image
we get from our music.
I could write all the notes in the world,
but if that performer doesn't have that mental picture,
it's all for nothing.
And so I started straying more and more from this traditional notational model,
trying to show my music instead of tell my music.
Suddently, I could make my music scream.
Or overwhelm.
Or accuse.
Or pinch.
And people started to get it.
By giving them this visual metaphor, it was suddenly easier to communicate.
I felt like I had this superpower.
I could finally express my music's nerdiness.
(Laughter)
Or its repetitiveness.
Or its optimistic spirit, with hands pointed up to the sky.
Now, it may sound counterintuitive, but the more I hid the rests,
obscured the notes
and broke from that traditional notational structure,
the better everything worked.
Performers thought more deeply,
more artistically,
more creatively.
They brought their own personality and experience to the performance.
And I'm not saying that this is a perfect system
or that all music works this way,
but I am saying that thinking about music in these terms
gave me a very specific kind of scaffolding
upon which to build music that was more meaningful,
that I felt communicated more.
I had finally separated the code of the music
from the music of the music.
And once I did that, the results were exhilarating.
I had audience members come up to me after shows
with fully fleshed-out stories
that they had imagined during the performance.
I would have performers come during rehearsal with creative ideas,
thoughts for improvements on the piece
because they finally felt like they could do something about it,
they felt like they got it.
Suddenly, the music wasn't an instruction manual;
it was a shared vision.
Everybody felt like they had a stake in it, a sense of ownership even.
Now, I remember the first time that I really got to see this in action.
I had written this,
the dénouement of a loud, large, big piece for wind ensemble.
I was in the audience during the premiere, and I saw the most glorious thing happen.
From back in the percussion section,
a pair of drum sticks launched up into the air,
soared over the entire ensemble
and landed somewhere, with a clatter, in the low brass section.
(Laughter)
Now, I hadn't put that in the music, didn't know anybody was going to do that.
We hadn't talked about it.
It was a total surprise.
But as soon as I saw those sticks soaring majestically over the woodwinds,
I knew that was exactly the right thing at the right moment.
So I went up to the performer after the show,
and I asked him why he had thought to do that.
He said, "Well, it didn't look like you would mind."
(Laughter)
And he was right.
Perfection, finally.
A moment of true musical honesty.
Let's look at a piece that many of us will know.
This is "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,"
from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.
Now, I want us all to try a little experiment.
I want us all to conduct this music.
But I don't want to conduct the code of the music;
I want to conduct my vision of what I think the music looks like,
which is this.
So if y'all don't mind,
take your fingers, point them up at the screen
and follow along as we listen to the opening bars.
All right? Everybody ready?
(Music: Tchaikovsky, "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy")
(Laughter)
All right.
Very good.
(Applause and cheers)
So by visualizing this piece of music,
we're all of a sudden open to a number of things
that we might not notice when just hearing it.
We can see patterns and sequences more easily.
We can see which instruments are playing, and where and how.
And we can see when harmony becomes melody,
and we can see when there's one note versus when there's many notes.
Visualization helps us understand, it helps us get it.
And when you visualize your music -
I'm not saying that it has to look like this;
it could look like buzzing bees,
popping popcorn,
burial plots,
clocks, eggs, eyes,
squiggles -
is that you start to develop a sense of visual understanding,
a visual language to talk about and describe this music.
By adding this additional sense into our musical toolkit,
we suddenly feel more connected, closer.
The lines of communication are finally open
when we think about music this way.
And music at its core is all about communication,
of melody, of rhythm, of meter,
of metaphor, of story and of emotion.
But what happens when we don't think about music that way,
when the lines of communication get cut?
And this is a problem that each of us deals with today -
we live in a world of passive media consumption,
for better or worse,
and when we think about our media passively,
we don't use our imagination
and we run into problems.
The metaphor, the story,
the deep meaning of the music starts to get lost.
Music has the power to exalt the human spirit.
And when we think about our music in visual terms,
we start to reopen those lines of communication.
This is something that each and every one of us can do today.
Go home, get your favorite track on your iPod, your favorite CD,
your favorite record - put it on the hi-fi -
and try to paint a mental picture of what it is that you're seeing.
Does you music look weird and squiggly like spaghetti?
Or is it sharp and angular?
Is the music round or is the music straight?
Is the music dense or is it thin?
Is it big or is it small?
Is your music pointilistic
or does it move and glide freely, organically over time?
Does your music glide across the floor like a ghost
or does it tumble end-over-end?
Lose yourself in fantastical worlds:
giant explosions,
towering mountains,
scary animals,
flowers,
ripples in the ocean.
Listen to your music.
What does it sound like?
What does it look like?
What does it feel like?
Talk about your music
and listen to what other people have to say about their music
and talk about the visions that you get when you're listening to music.
Imagine anything and everything,
and know that there's no wrong way
to listen to, to experience, to interpret music.
Think about music in pictures, in story, in narrative,
not in quarter notes and eighth notes.
Because at the end of the day, music is a visual art,
and all we need to do to love it,
to truly form a meaningful, deep emotional attachment with that music,
is to get the picture.
Thank you.
(Applause)