I hear from time to time that music is the universal language. In many cases I agree with this statement, but I also don’t agree with this statement at all. I know this seems very oxymoronic, but bear with me and I’ll try to explain why I think this way. 
                Music for the most part is pitch and rhythm played in time, basically just organized sound. The individual sounds themselves have no particular meaning no real ‘universal’ lexicon that guides us to particular thoughts when we hear them. They are just soundwaves that hit our ears. Since humans are pattern seeking creatures, we try to organize those sounds into something meaningful, but as individuals we are going to do this in different ways.
Before we get into the more abstract ideas behind sound let’s look at sound from a scientific angle. Sound, as we know, is the effect that happens when objects vibrate and disturb the air molecules around it, which creates sounds waves. These waves are measured in frequency of the number of revolutions the object makes as it vibrates and these are labeled as Hertz (Hz), named after Heinrich Hertz. The speed at which something vibrates we hear as pitch. So something that is vibrating at 1000Hz we hear as a high pitch, while something vibrating at 400Hz sounds lower to our ears.
 So, now that we have some science behind our sounds, do we find any “universal” organization there? In the United States and in most of Europe we have a standard frequency for A, which equals 440Hz. There are parts of Europe where A has a range between 440Hz and 444Hz. Which isn’t a huge difference in frequency but changes a lot of things for musicians, especially string players. If we start throwing in music traditions and pitch standards from other countries outside of the US and Europe it starts to get really confusing. An example of this would be a Javanese Gamelan, since they don’t use exact pitch but relative pitches to a single instrument. A=440Hz has only been the standard for 48 years. The International Organization of Standardization didn’t adopt A=440Hz until 1975, before then the standard was 435Hz, which was the standard in Paris and Austria, which was mostly used in the Romantic Period (1830 – 1900). During the Baroque Period A=415Hz. (That’s a 25Hz difference, a huge difference from standard pitch today!) As we see pitch has changed drastically over time and with an increased interest in having historically accurate performances, the older tuning practices have been adopted by some modern ensembles.
                So, great pitch isn’t really standardized, but music expression is something that we can all understand, right? Well … yes and no. Yes, we can listen to music and make an interpretation about the music, but is your interpretation and my interpretation going to be the same. Probably not. When we interpret things our history, experience, belief systems, culture, etc. all play a part in how we make our judgements and interpretations. Most of the time we do this subconsciously and without realizing it.
                For example, a few months ago, me, my partner, and a friend went to listen to the Oklahoma City Philharmonic play Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. After the performance the three of us got into a discussion about the piece and what each of us thought about the performance and the music. My partner notice that the music at the being of the second act or Rite of Spring sounded very familiar to him. I point out the John Williams stole it for the theme for the planet Tatooine in the Star Wars (for you non Star Wars nerds it the desert planet that Luke and Anakin Skywalker lived on). This was the first time that our friend had heard this piece and loved the overall sound of the piece and the primal pictures that it invoked for him. As for me, it brought back memories of studying this piece in school and remembering the history of the piece and the many, many discussions I had about this piece with friends. Each of us in this situation walked away with different interpretations of this piece and thinking about different things.
                In the Baroque period a group of music theorist came up with this idea that certain music keys and intervals express different moods and feelings. This was called the Doctrine of the Affections.  Some of the ideas from this suggest that smaller intervals express sadness while larger intervals express joy.  Key signatures such as C Major was considered joyous, A minor was honorable and calm. Music from India also has a similar system for their Raga (scales/tonal centers). Indian music also takes it to a different level by restricting certain Raga to certain times of the year or for specific occasions.
                So, I’ve given many reasons why music isn’t universal. So why do I think it is. Honestly it’s a simple reason really. Music affects us all emotionally. We may not have the same reaction and it may not illicit the same emotions, but there are pieces and songs that we connect with, that give up hope, and joy, make us feel loved, make us cry, make us feel happy and sad. All of these emotions are universal and what helps define us as sentient beings. When we listen to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony we may not get the same emotional response, but as one listener to another we can connect over how it makes us feel, what we like about the piece, and what we don’t like the piece.
In the end music connects us in ways that we may not be able to in any other way. Just because I don’t fully understand a piece of music, what the text says, or why the composer wrote the music, doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it and get meaning out of the piece. 

I’ve been thinking about my writing prosses a lot lately. I’m coming off a long stint of writers’ block.   When I have these periods of writers’ block, I start thinking about how I can improve my writing process and I’m in the process of doing this. So, I may ramble some. Please forgive me. I’m going to break this down into two parts. The way that I work on children’s pieces greatly differs from how I work on more mature works.

When I begin working on children’s work the first thing that I think about is the techniques that I want my player to learn and practice. For example, maybe I want my performer to learn about rolling chords (arpeggios). This will be the focus of the piece so the piece that I develop will stem from this idea rather than from the musical themes themselves. Once I have the main technique decided and a couple of themes written using the technique, I begin looking for other techniques that are similar or that will complement the primary technique. This will end up being a secondary theme or a development of the main theme that I can use to help spice up the piece. For the most part my children’s pieces follow standard structures such as 4 bar question and answer phrases, 8 – 16 bar sections, etc. Because of children limited technical abilities pedagogical pieces tend to be highly structured and highly limited in scope. One of the reasons I love writing beginning pieces is because it limits a lot of decision making. This box that pedagogy pieces put you in helps me to be more creative be I have to try to make the piece interesting and still focus on the primary objective of the piece.

Writing more mature works is a different story and seems to be something that I struggle with from time to time. I have discovered if I have a premise or a title to work from that it makes writing much easier. For example, a couple of years ago I wrote my piece Ancient Alchemy. I knew that I wanted the piece to focus around the four elements and because I had that starting point the work seemed to fly by. My first step after getting the thesis, I started writing themes that reflected each of the elements and finding techniques that would help color these ideas. The next step was laying out the ideas that made a logical progression in my mind, followed by connecting these ideas together. The next step for me is where the real heart of composition lies, that’s in editing. At this point I have put together an audio file (usually MIDI) so that I can listen to the piece over and over again. During this editing process I make adjustments to things, change layouts, add dynamics and articulations, and begin to slowly build the piece into something that I like and am happy with. This process takes lots of time an effort. There are times when I hear things that I absolutely hate, but am not sure how to correct it. This is when I go back to the beginning of the process and begin again with just that small little piece of music.

I am always looking for new and more efficient ways to compose, looking for new ideas to improve my writing process. One of the things that I often turn to is articles on writing stories and novels. Surprisingly there are a lot of similarities between writing a book and writing a piece of music. Somethings that I have looked at and/or learned are about structure, form, keeping on track, etc. Even participate in NaNoWriMo, except I work on music instead of a novel. (NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. It’s an annual event that generally happens in November and it is used to help novice writers to complete lengthy projects. It started in 1999 as a challenge to write 50,000 words within a month. It’s a great program. I’ll post a link to the website below.)
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This is just a little glimpse into my composing world and what I do. If you have any writing tips, I would love to hear them. I’m always looking for new perspectives and new ways to make my writing process better. ​