Like most kids, I didn’t really care for doing homework. And so like many youngsters, I decided the best way to do homework was to listen to music while I studied.

I put on the album Rubber Soul, The Beatles 1965 album. I tried, but it was hard for me to concentrate on my homework! Not with all that great music going on. During the song “You Won’t See Me” I truly learned what was meant by active listening.

It wasn’t Paul McCartney’s lead vocal that was drawing me in. Instead, it was the background vocal harmonies. This was before I knew much about music theory, but I recognized the dissonance of the major second being sung in harmony, and the stepwise motion to resolving the dissonance. As you can see from the example attached, the voices lead naturally to the harmony of the piece.

I remember losing myself in the piece so much, of not paying much attention to the words, but only to listening to the harmony and its resolution.

Active listening indeed! Homework had no chance.

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illustration by Thomas Fuchs

There seems no end to scientists trying to tie all the abstract loose ends of music into a neat little bow. The latest efforts explore the ways music can take the place of medicine. The idea is to have specific pieces composed not for aesthetic merit, but instead:

…to deliver specific stimuli ‚Äî dosages of rhythm, harmony or dissonance and timbre ‚Äî at the appropriate time and in an effective sequence.

It’s an interesting conceit to consider that we composers–not doctors–have the power to deliver a dose of medicine!

The article references, for instance, SourceTone Interactive Radio, “the world’s premiere music health service.” The whole phenomenon is reported by Matthew Gurewitsch in the New York Times. Click here for the full article.

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I thought about this as I was reading about the Chinese composer Huang Ruo. In the article, he said,

“In China, we never talk about ‚Äòin tune‚Äô or ‚Äòout of tune.‚Äô I think it‚Äôs a very Western thing.‚Äù

Just some things to think about.

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As you develop your own style, is it good to be aware of it? For instance, I know that I like to write in a spare, economical style. I want to leave my audience wanting more; go in and give them a quick rush of musical feeling and then call the piece done. So, you could say that’s one of the hallmarks of my own musical style. But is that a good thing for me to know?

Another example: instead of using traditional harmony, a cadence say, I like to give the ear a hook that takes the place of a cadence. Maybe instead of V-I I’ll use a minor seventh on E “resolving” to a minor seventh on C#. Through repetition, the ear learns that this is the cadence. That’s one way I approach harmony — it’s not traditional nor is it atonal. But is it good for me to have identified this aspect of my style?

One big positive is that, hey, I have a style! On the other hand, I don’t want to get settled in my ways just yet. It’s good to keep evolving. I do wonder about defining my “style”.

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