Friday greetings, team. Here’s a bonus end-of-the-week Cut Through post for you, with a new Not A Podcast edition emerging on Sunday. A double-whammy week!
Over on Instagram, I’m running a nascent video series titled ‘Let’s Get Geeky’. As is the way with algorithmic social media platforms, we must contort ourselves and our ideas into a narrow 60 seconds + a snappy attention-grabbing title to try and encourage a temporary halt to the doom-scroll.
Whilst those platforms are great - and predominantly how I have met, connected with, and continue to engage with many of you - fundamentally, the approach above is not the path to true, meaningful, engaged connection around shared interests. Here, I’m hoping to cultivate a place to Cut Through the noise, and go deeper around a range of topics important to us. Which, I hope, is part of why you’re here too ❤️
Here’s the latest Let’s Get Geeky video for you, where the focus is on my latest release ‘Ballade No. 1’. I’ve included it here natively so you don’t have to wander over to IG and end up never coming back, lost forever in the interminable scroll!
I know delving deep into music is not for everyone. Some people like to listen to music for what it is in and of itself, without giving too much thought to either any underlying or inherent meaning. I absolutely understand and acknowledge that.
Additionally, musical analysis can be quite intimidating, and potentially quite inaccessible for people who haven’t studied music to a certain level - the vocabulary alone can often be or feel exclusionary, even to musicians, especially those working in and around a range of musical styles, and for whom a narrow stylistic focus was, in itself, exclusionary. I can be quite sure to say: many former music students do not have deep pangs of nostalgia for the analysis lectures of old!
Sadly, the over-use of musical vocabulary in certain contexts can often serve to enforce the elitist and hierarchical imbalances between people “who know” and people “who don’t know” - sometimes done so with the deliberate and cynical aim of doing just that. I am sure you can hear my audible, frustrated sigh! At the risk of getting a little meta - or, god forbid, bringing dear old Adorno into the mix (save us) - I think for most people, music is, rightly, fundamentally for something different than that.
I should probably press the pause button at this point, in danger as I am of entering rant territory (it is the weekend after all). However, my aim with this ongoing LGG series is that the hallowed grey space I am continually seeking - which is where the really good stuff often happens - is able to be actualised in this area of musical appreciation (a more helpful term than analysis, I think).
I am hoping to break down the clumsily-erected faux stand-off between people “who know” and people “who don’t know”; seeking to find a path towards the exploration of why and how our enjoyment and love of something - which is so meaningful to so many of us - can also be useful to discuss, investigate and explore, as a means of bringing us together towards shared musical experiences, enjoyment and appreciation.
‘Ballade No. 1’
So…there are 60 seconds of analysis of my own piece, my latest release ‘Ballade No. 1’, in the video above. Here is the piece in full, both the released version, and quite a differently played live version respectively.
Finding the right way to pitch it to achieve this middle-ground approach is hard, and I would greatly value your thoughts and feedback around this, whether you feel like more of a person “who knows” things, or “doesn’t know” things!
As a - and in this case the - composer, it would be very easy to explain about the varying techniques used in certain places to achieve certain effects. I am wary of reducing it all down to some kind of bland exercise.
Rather than me simply delivering a lecture in which you understandably slowly switch-off, if you have questions, thoughts, ideas, and yes, even critiques (I can take it!), I would love for this to develop into a conversational activity. If you tend not to describe yourself as a musician (leaving to one side the fascinating “who is a musician?” discussion), I promise you, you will have insights that are just as valuable and helpful as others who are able to bring a vocabulary/knowledge-heavy approach, from which we can all learn and develop our appreciation.
Pop your questions, comments and thoughts in the comments below so we can all see them and engage with them/each other.
A music download + sheet music is available on Bandcamp, or just the sheet music as a separate file is available here.