This will be an ongoing blogscussion. I have recently been granted the opportunity to study a subject of intense interest and riveting, even scary, possibilities. I have dual careers: Musician and Software Engineer. Some might say that the former is a hobby but I take it too seriously to be a hobby (though recently have learned to take myself much less seriously). You might call it a dream but this subject consumes me, defines me, drives me and makes me who I am. I am husband and father, musician, man and programmer/geek, in that order. I identify more with my artistic expressive character than I do with just about anything. In fact, I entered the professional computer world with the intention of using it as a stepping-stone to a career in music. I will not elaborate on this topic here, other than to say, “Keep your sites set on your ultimate destination no matter how far you get blown off course. Eventually, all paths lead to the same place.”
For my birthday, my wife searched and found “The Shillinger System of Musical Composition” by Joseph Shillinger. Two volumes weighing in at 900 pages each is an ominous avocation. It will be a labor of love.
What is it? The two volumes encompass a theory of music from a mathematical perspective and describe the general mechanics of music removed from traditional notation and rules of western music. It creates a visual, geometric approach to music that provides a model from which we can more easily architect a musical score. As opposed to rules from which we are restricted, this system is founded on opportunities and choices, distinguishable paths, which are revealed as we begin a musical voyage in the form of a song. It begins with rhythm on a macro and micro scale. The sounding of a note and the harmony or dissonance of chords is defined as the zooming out of a rhythm or polyrhythm. This concept has always intrigued me and I have been dancing around this theory on my own without grasping what it could mean. I was drug into the biology of the inner ear and physics of it and failed to grasp any useful meaning because music was encrypted within the complicated bounds of traditional music theory. What I know of Joseph Shillinger is only what I've found online. Here are some resources:
Harry Lyden on Shillinger
the Muse's Muse Messageboard - Yukon's topic on Shillinger << particulary good discussion with the usual banter
Some infor from Berklee
a sizeable PhD in music thesis by Jeremy Arden (pdf)
Music is not a mystical sorcery that stems from some ancient undiscovered, magical organ. It is a concrete part of human psychology and sociology that all humans share. It came from somewhere. Perhaps its evolutionary path split from speech out of early language as some theorize. It is certainly the most powerful way to express emotion between people. Sometimes you can decipher a complicated system by working back to its source. We can’t do that with music because we have no source, there are no early recordings. There is no record of what music sounded like 6000 years ago. We have to start with today, and today is very evolved, very powerful and very deep. 1800 pages may be a good start.
Some complain that using a system will remove the creative element from an artist. Using software is even worse. What if I can write these systems into a software product? My goodness gracious, holy f~@%ing s#!t! Could computers write music? What would happen to the world? First of all, computers tell them what you instruct them to do. If you program a system into some software, this instructs the computer to do something specific with an expected input. A human will still drive the racecar! Consider animation. Fifty years ago we were enthralled with moving pictures! No longer were artists confined to still images but now they could create scenes that changed in time. On one hand we had the ability to record reality as we constructed it (Hollywood) and on the other we had the ability to draw fantasy and make it move as if it were real (animation). Then came computers. Now we could not only create more realistic pictures faster, we could let the animation software do much of the drawing for us. An animator creates shapes in three dimensions and tells the software where to move it. She tells the software where the light is coming from and what the texture of the surfaces are and then executes the render command and lets the computer take over. When it is finished, a very realistic fantasy has become visually realistic. She can tweak and finesse the details and even combine it with real filmed events and suddenly we arrive at today. Would anyone argue that movies have destroyed the visual artist or that computers have killed the painter? No artistic freedom has been damaged by the introduction of software that draws for us! It has been enhanced, expanded and liberated! If I had known where animation was going when I was in high school, I’d be an animator today! Instead, I program computers for a living. …but recently I discovered a mathematic-based system for composing music and what do you think is spinning in the back of my head. Other than a thousand unfinished songs, a spark of an idea is flickering to life.
It will take a long time to finish these books. I will be taking my time and enjoying the trip. I will try to share regularly what I discover and learn. This is truly a liberating possibility. Sometimes a stepping-stone constitutes a very long journey.