How To Write A Song Without Playing A Single Note
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- čas přidán 27. 07. 2024
- There are lots of different ways to write music, but perhaps one of the strangest is Total Serialism. This technique eschews artistic license entirely, building an entire composition from a set of strict, unbending rules. What sort of music does it create, though? Well, it's certainly unique.
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"We just pick a set of durations and pretend those are the only ones there are." - Precisely the way we do with pitches, then!
well yes, but actually, yes
Weird non-musical question. Do you keep all the sheets of paper in these videos? Great vid as always!
I feel like some of these could be sold on eBay at this point.
"How to write a song without playing a single note"
- Have perfect pitch
- Know music notation
It worked for Beethoven. Hue.
^_^
Pretty much every rapper does it too though ;)
Beethoven didn't have perfect pitch, deaf people don't have pitch at all.
Yeah they do.
Pitch can be perceived by more than just the ears.
It's possible that Beethoven did it with great relative pitch perception. In that case, he'd just be hearing his own music in a different key.
I don't know about serialism, but I've occasionally used some random generation to get some musical ideas, sometimes deliberately, like when I used some dice to generate a melodic line, and sometimes accidentally, like when the batteries in my old drum machine went dead and created a strange but interesting pattern that I liked. But it's hard to do that and resist tweaking it in some way, or at least to integrate the randomness into a more conventional song structure.
But from the title of the video, I thought you were going to talk about writing music without actually playing it on an instrument. Like someone writing sheet music without a reference point, or as I've sometimes done, simply entering notes manually on a midi sequencer or mod tracker.
Cory: "I couldn't resist programming it up, so check it out!"
The internet:
Cory: "Let me add a few more rules, and... done!"
Your total serialism piece has the B-A-C-H motif at the very end. I couldn’t help but notice this
I often compose a whole song by sight on paper; I’m never sure how it will sound, exactly, but I’ve got a good idea. For me, it’s about following some basic rules to create puzzles and solve them.
Intellect is pure beauty.
The things the human mind is capable of are absolutely fascinating.
This video should be a few seconds longer. Hehe
^_^
Thanks for all your videos sir! They are informative and make analyze and reanalyze my music theory and composition learning from elementary, middle school and what I learned from an online and phone driven musical composition class from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Keep up the great work!
Just discovered your channel completely by accident. Damn, why hadn't I earlier? Tons of great stuff you sir have here.
Thanks!
Liking this video because it is so great, very very well done. Still don't like serialism though.
Awesome video and easy explanations! You helped me to understand it better. Thank you very much! :)
Just discovered and i see myself watching everything in one night. Love it ;)
Always watch while I'm taking a shit. Great content!
Fascinating! The completed piece gave me a bit of a headache, though. That was strange, but cool.
John Cage’s 4’33.
Zero-tone serialism!
"i only listen to real music"
^_^
12tone your videos are the reason i live, keep being awesome
they are the only reason i live too... ::stares at the floor in blackening existential dread....::
This is really great! It reminds me of Indeterminacy. I'm also especially fond of Minimalism which I think takes a similar kind of outlook on things (but with far less "rules"!) I like the kinds of music that lets melody take a backseat so that you can build harmony and tension to extreme levels (stuff like ragas? drone, anyone?) so this very much appeals (=
Yeah, it's definitely kinda similar to minimalism, which is strange 'cause as far as I understand it, minimalism was largely a cultural reaction to the overly strict rules of serialism. But they both have a "the music isn't really in my control" attitude which is a neat parallel!
swishyfeather I think this is nothing like indeterminacy. The whole point of indeterminacy is that the music sounds different each time it's played. That's the exact opposite of this kind of total control. In this kind of music, there is nothing open to chance or interpretation. What the music sounds like is already predetermined before a single note is played. In indeterminacy, though, almost everything is left to chance and/or interpretation.
Yeah, I understand that, but it's kind of like a horseshoe--though they are at opposite ends, as a result they share some similarities as far as stripping down music into something far removed from our notion of most music.
swishyfeather That makes sense. :)
I'm loving your videos man!
What did you use to program the piece from the video?
Thanks! Normally I just program with Reason, but because of the precision needed here I believe on this one I wrote it out in Sibelius first, then exported the MIDI data to Reason from there, so I could more easily see if I had done it all correctly.
@@12tone Did you cut the piece from the video? I wanted to hear it but it's not there when you say "check it out!" at 3:44 -_-
@@andresfernandezmtl it's in the description
I don't know, but while watching this video, only Ron Jarzombek comes to my mind.
Found you on Reddit. This is excellent, thank you.
Thanks!
Brady Cassidyffc.
I don't think it's entirely accurate to say that serialism takes control away from the composer. If anything, it helps control everything more meticulously. And there's a million ways to parse the row, for instance using some of the notes as harmonies. When you do that, you can end up with entirely new melodies while still having the notes appear in the right order.
If you want a composition technique that takes control from the composer, turn to chance music.
This gets sort of philosophical, but for some people it comes down to questioning what we mean by "composer", "listener", and "self." In some respects, all composition can be considered remixing of found sound. So the act of composition CAN BE thought of, as Xenakis speculated, pure aesthetic choice. That composers are ultimately trying things, and simply rubber-stamping what they choose to keep, and then curating this interesting experience they've found. As Cage said, dwelling upon an arbitrary distinction between nature and artifice would be missing the point of what we hear.
"Welcome to total cerealism. What?" Me, as a German.
Why does it say "bang" when the piano plays in the captions?
even though its coincidental, the melody sounds like Giant Steps to me at times. i think it has to do with the rhythmic displacement & melodic leaps
What did you use to program it?
I do almost all of my instrument sounds in Reason 8 Essentials.
Can you harmonize this piece of music? Like...if I write a melody totally serial, can I put chords normally or this will "break the rules" ?
Well, as with any question about serialism, the short answer is "depends whose rules you're following and how strictly you're following them." In theory that's not how this music is supposed to be done, but the way you're supposed to do it is incredibly limited, so adding variations like that might help give you a more artistic structure. If you want to try it out, I'd say go for it!
That would be a nice challenge (to create a serial melody and try to harmonize it in a funcional way). Thanks for the fb.
@Gustavo Milani This might be interesting for you: czcams.com/video/k82ds_xIZN0/video.html
I'm currently writing a piece called "Echos" with the help of total serialism, but i think i'll rather use it as a wallpaper... the score looks really beautiful so far, but the Sound of it... hmm...
Pls make a series where u try to make a song from scratch pls like so he sees
I'm actually been considering that for a while! I'm a little wary about committing to a multi-video series 'cause I don't really know how it'll be received, but I may try it at some point, just to see what happens.
To me, this seems to be really missing the point of what music is.
I can see it as an interesting exercise in learning to make things work, but IMO rules are the opposite of what music is all about.
It's like if you were to make a meal by selecting ingredients based on ten random barcode numbers, and their quantities based of dice rolls.
Sure - every now and then you'll get a little mouthful that's ok - but most of the time you'll just have a bunch of grapes floating in soy sauce with a side of raw chicken covered in baking soda..
"wouldn't that be fun?" - no
Structure helps a composer to create a feeling of development, purpose and closure; but when a piece is all structure, there is an element lacking - the tension between form and fancy. Composers such as Josquin and Bach were able to create staggeringly beautiful music by exploiting this tension - the restraints created by rigid canonic or fugal structures stimulated their imaginations to the heights. But where is the value in Total Serialism? It seems to me to be a method of generating ordered sound - music if you will - without actually engaging the creative musical imagination. Can this method really create anything beautiful? And if it does ever create beauty, can this be any more than a fragmentary, accidental sort of beauty frozen against a background of quasi-chaos? Give me back tonality and give me back control! Let me compose the old-fashioned way, and if I choose to write in a systematic way, give me enough control to be able to play and not follow like a slave!
i wish that chromatic line you played was a real song...
your intro metronome is Bb, Bb, Bb, Bb, Eb up a 4th
great video, the composition sounds like shit though
Thanks! Yeah, sounding good isn't really the point of things like integral serialism...
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Nobody writes music to sound bad. It isn't "nice" in the traditional, visceral sense, but it can be interesting, impressive, significant, meaningful, etc.
I would hesitate to call it a composition.
That word implies some thought went into creating something meaningful.
This is just paint by numbers.
Except the numbers are randomised.
nuberiffic - Except that paint-by-numbers connotes using rule constraints to copy somebody else's work or style. When one is dealing with their own work, paint-by-numbers becomes a reductionist way to explain away technique. Meaning is subjective, and being expressive is only one possible motivation for art. Obviously, more formalist/structural work is different. Serialism I think has a valid aesthetic, it is based upon symmetry, after all.
Au lieu de gloser pendant 4'29" on aurait bien aimé entendre un exemple musical.
Who else feels guilty when you use an instrument too much when you compose?
I wouldn't say guilty, but I feel myself getting stale and reusing old ideas if I try to compose on guitar too much
I like the content. Can't stand the hand writing. It's sooo hard to look at, like a child's.
He holds his pen like a toddler and it really annoys me haha