Hearing and Writing Music: Professional Training for Today's Musician
By Ron Gorow
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Reviews for Hearing and Writing Music
18 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very detailed book that guides a beginner all the way into professional work. It discusses so much about the principles of music that may have taken self-taught musicians centuries to discover.
The review sections are a nice bonus, and reflects how well the author understood about music not being something that is acquired through passive reading, but active engagement.
Book preview
Hearing and Writing Music - Ron Gorow
Gorow
1
YOU AND MUSIC
PERSONAL TRAINING
THE COMPLETE MUSICIAN
CREATIVITY AND PRODUCTIVITY
WORKING IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS
MUSIC TERMINOLOGY
1
This book is about you, about music, about your personal relationship with music. It is designed to help you develop your perception, perfect your musical skills, and to communicate your musical thoughts.
This book will prepare you for a life in music, whether you wish to create your own music or participate in the working world of music— the professions of composing, arranging, orchestrating, music preparation and performance. Our goal is to provide the tools, to save your precious time and to point you in the right direction.
The emphasis is on hearing. Music is, after all, sound. All things visual and intellectual (notation, theory, etc.) merely serve or support the making of musical sounds. Contrary to most music theory books, we emphasize learning (or re-learning) music according to what it sounds like, rather than what it looks like. In fact, the first half of the book avoids notes, note names and music notation as much as possible so that we may learn to perceive music in the air before committing it to notation or producing sound from an instrument.
We will augment, rather than duplicate, information that is already widely available, and show you how to combine the principles of music theory, composition, orchestration and transcription into one coordinated system of integrated techniques.
Your job, like any artist or craftsperson, is to know your materials intimately and to be aware of all the possibilities inherent in them. The following text and exercises will provide you with the essential tools for hearing and writing music. With these tools, you will have the means to:
Perceive and notate any style of music.
Remove obstacles to composition or improvisation.
Communicate accurately through music notation.
Develop a fast sketch technique.
Be able to jot down an idea anywhere, without using an instrument.
Document and preserve your work.
Consolidate your skills into an integrated, subconscious process.
The path of text and exercises will lead to the development of a series of techniques which will ultimately be combined to produce your craft.
The understanding and mastery of the fundamentals of music making will prepare you for the unknown, the uncharted, the unexpected.
Music has no boundaries. It is yours to discover, to enjoy, to draw from and to pass on to others.
PERSONAL TRAINING
A life in music is a continuing process of discovery and development. Inspiration happens in an instant; the craft is developed over one’s lifetime.
Mozart, when asked how one would learn to compose: Here, here and here (pointing to his ear, his head and his heart) is your school.
Every musician knows that music classes in theory, performance, history, etc., cannot provide all that is necessary for you to become a complete musician. Music, like all art, is ultimately self-taught. The fundamental connection you form with music is intimate and requires motivation, dedication, discipline and action. The energy required can only be generated by your passion, curiosity and love for music.
We have in common the desire to make music but we have different personalities. Some of us are more organized than others, more or less disciplined, intuitive, emotional, expressive. We encourage you to adapt this work to your own personality and needs.
If you are self-studying, you may adapt this work to your personal goals and develop your techniques, your craft, from this point in your musical life. You may quickly read through some areas and spend many hours on one page or exercise. There are suggestions, directions and resources for years of study. Please do not skip any exercise. In order to learn to hear music, you must actively engage your ears.
This training will allow you to improve your ability to hear music and express yourself, starting at your present skill level. Proceed at your own pace, propelled by your sense of discovery, pleasure and accomplishment. You are in control of the pace and extent of your training.
If you are teaching, you can adjust the flow of material according to the level of your students and the time allowed. See pages 382 and 383 for structured study plans.
We"ll focus on the fundamental skills of creating music: hearing and writing. Developing these skills is essential to understanding each link in the music making process: composer to orchestrator to copyist to proofreader to conductor to performer to listener. This work will consolidate your hearing and writing techniques into a seamless, intuitive flow, as natural as breathing.
THREE STAGES OF MAKING MUSIC
You inhale music, whether listening externally (live performance, recorded media), internally (memory, imagination) or reading music notation. You process music, whether memorizing, analyzing or just enjoying it. You exhale music, whether performing (improvising, reading or playing from memory) or notating (composing, orchestrating, transcribing, copying).
These three stages are the principle components of your craft.
• Stage one is active listening, learning to focus your ear.
• Stage two is analyzing and organizing sounds into units that you can recognize and work with.
• Stage three, expressing music, is your musical output, whether it be pencil on a staff or sequencing or performing.
When all three stages are working together, music will flow in and out of you. Whether you are creating your own music or working on someone else’s music, you’ll be working at your most efficient level—fast and accurate.
In this training, we will move from the simple to the complex, from the center outward, from melodic to harmonic to polyphonic, from diatonic to chromatic to microtonal, from the traditional to the future.
The world’s music, however diverse, shares common elements. The unique attributes of each culture/genre/style are merely variations of intervals, rhythms, temperament and timbre. We will concentrate on those elements with the goal of preparing you to work with any type of music and to master every step of the process of communication among musicians.
Learning music is a very personal experience.
Once you have it, you own it for life.
THE COMPLETE MUSICIAN
In the past, a musician was a performer or a composer or an arranger— seldom known for more than one ability. Today, we do many things, if not everything—compose, orchestrate, perform, sequence, record and distribute our own music. With advancing technologies, self-producing your own music has become feasible since the last decade of the 20th century.
If we are to compete and survive in the music business, we must be both creative and productive at a very sophisticated level. Even in a non-competitive environment—say, composing for your own enjoyment— if you want to hear your music, you must find musicians to perform it, prepare score and parts, or you must be able to sequence and mix a satisfying recording. Whatever you do in music, and at whatever level, the result will be a product of your craft.
Today’s working musician must be familiar with many styles, comfortable with both acoustic and electronic instruments, and prepared for any situation. Everything in music is related and the more you know about each job, the better equipped you are to handle anything that comes your way.
As you work with music, your decisions are guided by your instincts and experience, rather than by concrete rules. Always keep in mind the function of the music and your particular role. When composing, be the listener; when orchestrating, be the composer; when copying or conducting, be the performer.
Your success as a musician will ultimately depend on your ability to hear music, to know what you are hearing, to remember what you have heard, and then to communicate through music notation or performance. Whether you are working at one particular job in the music business or entirely self-producing your own music, the set of tools presented here will help you prepare for the unknown and carry you through a lifetime of work and play in the sound environment.
BIG EARS
When we talk about ears and ear training, we are actually talking about perception. The ears are merely filters which funnel the complex pattern of sounds entering your consciousness. As a human, you hear music; as a musician, you perceive music.
You can reach a level of perception that will enable you to recognize and notate any musical sound, which in turn will allow you to develop unlimited compositional or improvisational abilities.
Beethoven’s musical perception enabled him to write after losing his hearing. Your perception will allow you to transcribe or compose music without an instrument.
The perception/notation process ties together all the disciplines in the music making process, from the inner world of feeling and thought to the outer world of performance and production.
CREATIVITY AND PRODUCTIVITY
You are both creative and productive , whether to use a soft or hard reed. You are productive whenever you take action; you are moving forward on some level. Put simply, creativity is choice and productivity is action.
The purpose of this book is to help you develop your skills so that you may maximize your creativity and productivity, to reach a level where you write or play music intuitively and spontaneously. To accomplish this, you need experience, motivation and craft.
Experience is repetition—constantly evolving, building on the past. The only way you can gain experience is to be actively involved in music. If you are an instrumentalist, you must find other musicians to make music with—anywhere music is being played. If music groups do not exist in your area, organize one with the musicians available. Any conceivable combination of instruments will make music. This also creates an opportunity to write music. If nothing is happening locally, you will have to travel to find musical situations. The first step is to place yourself where the music is. Biographies of great musicians reveal that many had to create their own luck.
You are motivated or you wouldn’t be a musician; you wouldn’t be reading this book. Your motivation may stem from your desire to create, a personal vision, inspiration, making money—your own definition of success. When things get tough, when things look hopeless, that’s when we need to stay motivated. The successful musicians are the ones who kept going, kept playing, kept writing even when there was no work. You may have to put aside your ideals for awhile. Be willing to play or write any style of music—you can learn from any situation. Don’t hold yourself back by judging others. Embrace the spirit of the jam session—playing music for the sake of playing music; writing music for the sake of writing music. Some musicians expect to be paid before they have something to offer that is worth being paid for. Remind yourself that music is one of the joys of life and to create it or perform it is wonderful. To be paid for it is a wonderful bonus.
Your craft comprises all your skills and experience—it is the essence of you, the musician. To be creative and productive in music, you must be technically adept in many areas. Each technique is developed independently, then combined with other techniques to produce a network of interactive skills—your craft. It is an evolving process; an active musician never stops growing.
A composer’s craft consists of several fundamental techniques, such as counterpoint, a harmonic language, music notation, orchestration. As each technique is developed, it evolves from a general theory to a personal style. The seasoned composer is not concerned with each technique; rather, the focus is on the music itself and the specific requirements of the piece.
An instrumentalist’s craft encompasses all the techniques required to play the instrument, integrated into a personal manner of performing. The development of one’s craft, from a general system of instructions to a style shaped by personal choices, is also true for an orchestrator, an athlete, a graphics designer.
Examples of craft are all around us: a chef whose every motion is choreographed for efficiency; an artist sketching, every stroke of the pencil meaningful; a ballerina dancing with precision; a percussionist delicately moving from one instrument to another while counting rests before each entrance.
As you observe other musicians, especially those you admire, you may simply conclude, he’s a genius
or she’s a natural.
The instrumentalist who never misses; the jazz improvisor pouring out chorus after chorus of real-time composition, every solo worthy of recording, to be listened to many times; the orchestrator who always knows the next move, filling score pages with notes at a steady pace. Talent aside—let’s just say some of us have to work a little harder than others—what’s really going on here? How do they do it? If you look closely, you will see their craft at work— techniques being combined.
You can observe craft at work in yourself, as well as in others. Think of something you do really well, a skill that you’ve developed over the years. As you observe yourself, slow the process way down and examine each step. What is each hand doing? You’ve mastered each little move and learned to combine them in a smooth flow, like the frames of a motion picture.
HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR CRAFT
Imagine how you would learn to play the piano. In the beginning, you concentrate on which finger to push down on what key. After a period of time, you don’t have to look at your fingers. After more time, you don’t think about your fingers. When you have mastered a technique, you no longer think about it; the technique resides in your subconscious.
That is how we learn music, by isolating techniques, practicing until they are functioning at the subconscious level, then combining them with more techniques. Ultimately, the music flows directly from the staff lines through the hands, or from memory through the hands, or from the creative imagination through the hands, without conscious thought. A performer who has mastered techniques is more aware of the music in the moment; more attention is devoted to listening.
The same is true of writing music. To compose, orchestrate or arrange in an efficient manner, to express your musical thoughts spontaneously, you must have mastered the necessary techniques—counterpoint, orchestration, chordal harmony, the ranges and transpositions of common instruments, and music notation. Every time an orchestration or notation reference book is consulted, the flow is interrupted.
The ultimate craft is one in which all your techniques function on a subconscious level. As you perform or write music, each technique rises to the level of consciousness when needed. Occasionally during the creative process, you may have to call on a specific technique if you encounter a problem or unfamiliar territory. The more your techniques are developed, the less you have to think in terms of words, names of notes, names of intervals, etc. As you develop your craft, words and thoughts will fade into the background, freeing your conscious mind to focus on the immediacy of the music. Music will flow out of you—less consciously, more intuitively.
Whether you are performing or writing music, all your techniques working together seamlessly and subconsciously will allow you to function at your best, at your highest level of creativity and productivity. This book will help you develop your network of techniques—your craft.
What we all have in common is music itself—the language. Like any language, it has evolved over time, formed by generations of musicians, through cultural styles and personal choices. When you study a particular part of music in a class, or learn to play an instrument from someone else, you are learning the common language of theory or technique. But when you apply that theory or technique, you are expressing your individuality, your personality. Eventually, you will develop your own unique style of performing or writing music.
Craft is the underlying working of all art; the foundation of the artist’s soaring fantasies; the funnel through which emotions pour.
What others have said about technique and craft:
Technique must be learned as a child learns to move his limbs; what was difficult at first must become easy; it must be at one’s instantaneous disposal; it must function so perfectly that its action is no longer noticed; it must sink to the level of subconscious activity . . . the goal must always be such mastery that technique does not obtrude itself, and a free path is prepared for thought and feeling.
Paul Hindemith: The Craft of Musical Composition
To have your fingers respond to the music in your head is a worthy goal.
Bobby Shew
Whether composing, improvising, or assimilating, the intuitive faculty must be allowed free rein, provided the technical problems have been met.
Anthony Jackson
The technique became second nature to him.
Marina Ma: My Son, Yo-Yo
We can only improvise to the level of mastery we have acquired on our instruments . . . This is a life-long task in which one will forever strive to become more fluent, develop a broader vocabulary, and find one’s own voice and individuality in the music. This is the road one must travel to become a jazz improvisor.
Marvin Stamm in Jazz Educators Journal
Bill Evans said, Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument... to transfer any emotion.
THE PROCESS
Here you are in a state of creativity and productivity. That large cloud filling your head represents your perception. When you are listening to music or writing music or thinking about music or performing music, your awareness of music occupies nearly all of your focus.
THE RESULT is your musical output. It may be a performance, composition, improvisation, sequence, orchestration or arrangement of your music or your work on someone else’s music.
The line between you and the result is not always a straight line. What stands between you and your result is the big T—technique. If you have mastered all the necessary techniques, you will flow through the maze, even enjoy the process. But if you stumble on technique, it will slow you down, discourage you, even stop you in your tracks.
YOUR MOTIVATION
We’ll look at what’s in your head. But first, what’s in your heart? What drives you to get to that result? What is your motivation? Your intention? Your desire? Your dream? Your goal? You may be driven by a passion for music, inspired by your musical heroes, gratified by being paid for your skills, enticed by the love of sound, or because music is the coolest thing on earth. You have your our own reasons, directions, dreams. It is good to think about what drives you. Write a list of your motivations, or at least take time once in a while to reflect on the direction you have chosen and why, and your progress.
That’s what music is all about. Giving back. Tradition. Life. Love— conscientiously staying involved in the perpetuation of our craft.
Clark Terry in Q: the Autobiography of Quincy Jones
What about art? Where does it fit into this equation? First, let’s define art. Some musicians would say, If you’re not getting paid, it’s art.
Our definition is slighdy different. When you are working on someone else’s music, you’re a craftsperson. When you are working on your own music, you’re an artist.
DEVELOP YOUR TECHNIQUES
Because we wear so many hats today, we need to master a lot of techniques. The quickest way to creativity and productivity is to start working on your techniques today.
Take action. Create a place (a notebook or database) to keep track of your development. Think about what you want to accomplish and when and how much time and energy you are willing to commit. This is not an academic exercise; this is your life!
Get organized. Make a list of techniques that lead to your goals. Include everything that comes to mind; you can refine it later. Your techniques might be organized in broad areas, such as music theory, instrumental, digital, and general techniques.
List of techniques. Your list will be tailored to your particular goals. As you proceed through the book, your techniques will become more specific and your list will change accordingly.
Arrange your technique list in order of importance to your goals, then rate them: which ones have you mastered and which ones need your time and dedication; which ones are hanging you up, preventing you from accomplishing your immediate or future goals? Now you know where you are today and where you want to be eventually.
Plan a routine for yourself. Include only the techniques that are of immediate importance. Designate how much time you are committing each day or on specific days. If you have only one hour each day and you’ve chosen six techniques, plan to spend 10 minutes on each technique every day. You will be surprised how much progress you can make in 10 minutes of concentrated application. Of course, you must be organized so you don’t spend your valuable time searching for your materials. If you seem to hit a wall with any technique, get help. Read, research, contact someone who can help. Periodically adjust your schedule as you develop your techniques and add new ones. Soon, you will be a master of many.
Techniques become craft. Discover your most underdeveloped techniques, isolate them and practice in a simple manner until each is automatic. Remember how you learned to read and write words? First, you learned each letter, then each word; now you read and write groups of words. When you have mastered each element, you’ll perceive music as flowing in time. That’s how you build your craft. When you have mastered the techniques, your newly developed craft will allow your inspiration to flourish, your vision to materialize, your spirit to soar.
[Coltrane] worked extremely hard at cultivating his talent. He set up schedules for studying, practicing and listening.
Peter Watrous: John Coltrane: A Life Supreme
No [student] could possibly feel enthusiastic over the drudgery that was the foundation of accomplishment. Only later, when the student became aware of an ability to create ... only then would he gain more interest in the work required of him.
Isaac Stern: My First 79 Years
On one of the rare occasions when J.S. Bach appraised his own life’s work he remarked simply, I worked hard.
Milton Cross’ Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and their Music
Wisdom that works. If you talk about your goals and what you are going to do, you are expelling energy that could be directed toward the accomplishment. Try to keep silent about your work and see how much more you accomplish. The motivation comes from within.
WORKING IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS
Every working musician has a different story, a unique path to the present. Life is shaped by twists and turns, perhaps some calculated, some guided, some accidental or pure chance. So many success stories have to do with being in the right place at the right time.
RIGHT TIME
When is the right time? Anytime may be the right time. The key is to be prepared for anything to come your way—right now. If a job is offered, say Yes!
Hopefully, your basic techniques—ear training, notation, and knowledge of basic theory—are in place. Don’t wait until you feel you are ready; that day may never come!
Those just starting out have to take anything and everything they are offered just to get a toehold in the industry’s work. Peers often provide that opening shot.
Robert Faulkner: Music On Demand
RIGHT PLACE
Where is the right place? First, exploit all the possibilities in your area. Wherever there is music, there may be opportunities to write or play. Make yourself visible. Be willing to give your talents if that may lead to a paying job. Most local theater companies cannot even pay the actors, but there is usually an opportunity do something creative and meet people who may hire you as their careers develop.
A lot of would-be film composers come to Los Angeles (Hollywood) because that is where the big budget films are made. There are places in L.A. to meet other composers, as well as people in the industry. (See resources in section 12) However, there are a only a limited number of films being made that have a budget for a composer and an orchestra. Some composers have left Los Angeles and returned to their hometown (or country) and discovered they could find work there. With new technologies, more films are being produced without the necessity of a major studio, providing opportunities to score films anywhere. The art and techniques of putting music to film are essentially the same, whether a low budget film or a Hollywood blockbuster.
BEING PREPARED FOR THE UNKNOWN
How can you be prepared for your big break? In the music business, every job is a little different than the last one, so you are never totally prepared. Here are some guidelines to help you meet the challenge of the unknown: You must: know the fundamentals of music—how to put notes on a staff; be comfortable working in every key; have a good ear—know what you are hearing and how to notate it; have a basic knowledge of orchestration— all common instruments, their ranges and transpositions. The experience of having played music in any type of orchestra or band is invaluable for writing music.
GETTING A BREAK
There is that first big break that you will always remember fondly. However, there is usually a series of little breaks that you may not remember. Be alert for them and open to the possibilities, then react positively. I missed a few opportunities because I dismissed the person or situation as not interesting or important at the time or I lacked the confidence or self esteem to accept the offer. Later, I realized that a more positive reaction could have changed the path of my career. Keep an open, positive attitude. Be curious about what is going on around you, rather than what is going on with yourself. What are you learning that can help you later? Observe people who have made it,
who are working the kind