Inspirations: Music, art, writing and unleashing the inner geek

As a writer, I have never regretted chugging through the Royal Schools of Music grade system. Music offers skills that feed directly into writing. Learning how to write a tune to words, for instance, rammed home why it’s important, even in prose, to have rhythm.

The panel of one of my analog synths… dusty, a bit scratched, but still workable. Pop quiz: can anybody identify it from this clipped close-up?

There’s a more subtle side to it, too. Music is about evoking emotion in the recipient – the satisfaction of listening, hope, despair, anger, laughter. So is writing. That’s one reason why rhythm of words is important. For writers, as for musicians, it helps evoke a response.

I still have a small collection of vintage analog synths. They all work – including my Moog, which was old and battered when I bought it in 1987. The fact that it functions 37 years after it left Moog’s Trumansburg factory is testament to the quality.

It is also an expressive instrument, meant to be played like a violin, not a piano. You can do things with pitch-bender, potentiometers and modulation wheels that give the sound life. If you have never heard a Moog 24dBa high-pass ladder filter being overdriven, you’ve missed something. Here’s someone using the filter as a resonator. Here’s Erik Norlander playing the biggest Modular Moog I’ve ever seen.

The worn out ribbon pitch-controller on my Micromoog. Apparently Bob Moog invented that device for Beach Boys keyboard player Brian Wilson.

One of the doyens of the Moog, way back, was Brit prog-rock icon Rick Wakeman. He defined the ‘rock opera’ via such classics as Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1974), essentially a modern oratorio.

I saw him in concert, here in New Zealand, last year – and @grumpyoldrick didn’t disappoint. He spilled off a flight from the UK and gave a 2 1/2 hour show, using the Wellington City Council’s Steinway Model D, all from memory. He had the audience in stitches – he is a great comedian. Along the way he explained how he had been taught to put feeling into music. You close your eyes and imagine what you want to convey – the feeling of a summer’s day, for instance.

To me, that summed up music as art. Art is about conceptual shapes and patterns that convey feeling and emotion. Notes are flawed tools to express an inexpressible form – idea, which is emotional. The essence of art is conveying that emotion, however imperfectly, by whatever medium, to others. And that is true of writing, too. The medium is words; but the essence is emotion.

Wakeman was taught that about his art from the beginning. Others, including me, had to learn it later. The hard way.

Do you find art in music, in writing? How do you see these things?  is music inspirational for you in these ways? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: music for the writing mood

One of the best tools writers have is music, for many reasons. One of them is something to listen to while we write – squashing intrusive background noises. And, more particularly, to put us into the right zone.

That, to me, is one of the strengths of ‘music to write to’. It can help create the right emotional space – perhaps the same emotional space as I’m trying to evoke in readers. For me, it shouldn’t intrude to the point of killing the words and ideas. Usually I’ll pick instrumental music, often chamber music, which is able to set a mood without being too intrusive. That, in fact, is exactly what it was written for (Mozart wrote muzak…get over it…)

There is an exception. If I’m looking to write high fantasy I’ll select Epica or Nightwish (the pre-2005 stuff) at planet-crushing volume (several notches up from “11”).

Do you find music helps you write? Does it set your mood? What music works best for you – and when? And does anything with spoken word kill the words you have in your mind? Do share!

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Worldbuilding: putting a soundtrack to your words

Whenever I think of worldbuilding for writers, I keep coming back to the same thing. Worldbuilding is really about creating stuff that evokes an emotion in the reader.

It becomes literally world-building when we write fantasy – often, I suspect, helped along by doses of some suitable soundtrack. Music usually goes together with writing – either being played while the stuff’s being written, or listened to while the book is being read. It’s a way of enhancing the emotion,  almost impossible to imagine high fantasy without some soundtrack to it. And, of course, there are composers who’ve thoroughly exploited the point.

I’m thinking Richard Wagner – nineteenth century composer who envisaged fantasy worlds of colossal scale – vast worldscapes that he painted with sound, story, visual spectacle and the finances of mad King Ludwig. Musically it was very genre-specific – if he were alive today, he’d be a heavy metaller.

Wagner knew how to put arguments through music. He was a ‘metaller’ not just through his vast soundscapes – the bombast, the soaring vocals, the colossal orchestration, the overblown sets – but conceptually. He wrote high fantasy that spoke to the mythic beliefs of his mid-nineteenth century society. That particular aspect found an unfortunate audience of evil in post-First World War Germany, who managed to twist his ideas to their dark ends. (They did this to everything they touched, of course). There’s a great documentary by Stephen Fry going through those issues.

But setting that aside, high fantasy remains a staple of heavy metal today. and I think the guy who pioneered the idea was Wagner.

Attaching music to the high fantasy we read or write also makes it speak to us today. “Real” music in any fantasy setting would have to be made by instruments of the setting – voices, certainly; and if you read The Lord Of The Rings, you’ll find Tolkien inevitably describing some - including the single uplifted voice above the noise which then became a motif for at least one Led Zeppelin song. But I suspect a lot of readers more usually associate Middle Earth with Howard Shore’s movie soundtrack. Or maybe Bo Hansson’s slightly weird album from 1969. (Hansson’s often credited with inventing prog rock with that release.)

It was that relationship between music and concept, I suspect, that prompted Sophia Coppola to use early 1980s gothic-pop – Siouxie and the Banshees and The Cure mainly – as the soundtrack for Marie Antoinette. In the conceptual sense, she was arguing, French royals and nobility were to 1780s French society what the ‘goths’ were to the 1980s; disconnected, odd, weird. It was a pretty compelling idea, in fact. And what a wonderful way of putting an argument – through music.

What it boils down to is that music can help us get a different angle on the world we’re building; it can colour the way we imagine and see it; and it can colour the reading experience. It becomes an important part of the whole, I suspect. And the ‘ideal’ music for any story will differ from person to person.

Do you listen to music while writing – or associate particular music with particular books or stories?

*** Reminder: if you want to win a copy of Convicts – signed by me – check out this contest. Final week. Runs until 28 July 2012.***

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Musings on the Kiwi music scene

J. Eric Smith, inventor of the concept of ‘blanga’ as a way of describing some Hawkwind tracks, contacted me this week. I’d referenced his idea in a post last Xmas eve. His blog’s a great read (spot the Zappa title references, among others). And he mentioned that Kiwi musicians punch very much above their weight, internationally.

I agree. I’ve been meaning to post on that for a while. Music is an interest of mine – in fact, I spent longer learning music than I did writing or history.To me, music and writing are the same thing – expressions of imagination that evoke emotion.

Nobody’s far from the music scene here. For instance, one of my friends at high school in the late 1970s had a sister who sang in a local band, Raven. Her name was Debbie Harwood, and she went on to a hugely successful career, including When The Cat’s Away, whose songs were iconic in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Friends of mine in Dunedin were around the music there in the early 1980s. This city had its own sound – epitomised by bands like The Chills, Netherworld Dancing Toys, Verlaines and The Clean. Mostly based in George Street. They were universally smart, clever and really innovative. One of the Verlaines, Dr Graeme Downes, heads the music department at Otago University today.

I have to mention The Gordons. Prototypical thrash and well known for being loud – as in, they had more amperage than anybody else. You didn’t have to go to a concert. All you had to do was arrive in some town nearby. Or park a spaceship off an adjacent planet…

There was even a Kiwi synth-pop band, The Body Electric – complete with manually triggered sequencers. Pre-MIDI days, this. Alan Jensen, one of the keyboardists, later produced OMC’s ‘How Bizarre’ (1996).

I’d done electronic music and knew how Moog synths worked, but this was something else. A friend of mine who later fronted a music slot on TV under the curious stage name ‘Crispy Fresh’ worked in one of the instrument stores and introduced me to this new world of synths in the mid-1980s. ‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘Polyphonic’, and promptly whapped out the first bars of Bach’s 2-part invention in F-major. ‘Skite,’ said Crispy, who wasn’t formally trained (but he had a better music career than I ever did).

Some of the people from this era are cultural icons today – notably Dave Dobbyn, who has been writing anthems that capture the New Zealand spirit for 30 years. I think the single from his Footrot Flats album, Slice of Heaven, would do as our national anthem. So do a lot of other people.

The venues these bands inhabited were legends. The Gluepot at the top of Auckland’s Ponsonby Hill - now demolished. The Cricketers Arms in Wellington. The Cabana, nestled against the Napier hill. That’s still running – it’s owned by a friend of mine, and he’s getting some top names in there.

And that’s without mentioning the dozens of others since -  like Flight of the Conchords – who have done so, so well. The Kiwi sound today is international, slick and utterly professional. There’s Shihad/Pacifier, who were big-big-big in the States – changed their name to Pacifier, then changed it back. Three weeks ago, they performed 200 metres from my house. Loud. I listened to the concert in my lounge. Heard of Fat Freddy’s Drop? They’re local in my town – but internationally known. You need to listen to their stuff. 

Not forgetting the Wellington InternationalUkelele Orchestra, featuring Brett McKenzie. Here’s a clip from a 2009 concert they did in the Michael Fowler Centre. I was there. It was a wonderful evening.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

The cunning musical commando Louie Louie stunt

A while back She Who Must Be Obeyed came home with a ukelele. I can’t actually play one, which rather spoiled my effort to produce the ‘Smoke On The Water’ riff. Came out more as ’Cat Scratch Fever’.

I snapped this pic of a Brugges house while floating past it in a boat.

That’s not the dumbest thing I’ve tried musically. Ever see ‘In Brugges’? That scene where Brendan Gleeson confronts Ralph Fiennes in a tower. That tower’s where the town carillion sits. The thing goes off hourly with some mangled classical piece, usually Beethoven, which sounds weird in twelve-tone tuning.

I found out it’s possible to play it manually,but She Who Must Be Obeyed wouldn’t let me approach the enquiries desk. She knew what would happen. I’d go in on the basis of some suitably grand pop-classic by Beethoven, but I’d actually play something really stupid, probably ‘Louie Louie’. This is mainly because there are amoeba on Saturn more capable of playing 200-year old classics than me. But I think Mr Berry’s music is as legitimate as anybody else’s. It even has the same chord progression (match it against Bach’s Two Part Invention No. 8 in F Major, for instance).. Everybody else thinks it’s dumb three-chord rock that should not sully famous instruments.

That is why She Who Must Be Obeyed wouldn’t let me try the carillion in Brugges. Or the commandant’s piano at Port Arthur in 1998. Last year when were looking over the Governor’s House in Parramatta, I suggested Lachlan MacQuarie’s old piano needed testing. ‘No it doesn’t.’

I’ve only ever got away with this once. A while back we visited a piano shop and found a 91-note Bosendorfer 9-foot grand. Best piano in the world. Warmer than a Steinway, to be treated reverently, played professionally – in short, loved, musically. At least until I arrived.

‘Can I have a play?’ I asked the eager sales rep.

‘Sure,’ he said. I sat down at the piano, and looked across at She Who Must Be Obeyed, who had that ‘I know what’s coming now’ look.

And she was right.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Are Apple accidentally censoring our music?

According to this report, if you upload one of your songs to ITunes Match, and it contains profane lyrics, that version is automatically replaced with a ‘clean’ version.

Another report indicates it’s a bug, which is being fixed. Personally I don’t listen to rap, I don’t own anything made by Apple or use their services. I shouldn’t care. But it highlights something else – thin end of the wedge stuff. Where will censorship go in the cloud age?

Cuss-words change over the decades – go back and check out what was thought offensive in the nineteenth century. They tell us a great deal about the prejudices of their time. And swearing loses meaning if it is over-used.

Besides, as Zappa pointed out, words are just sounds. What counts for more is the intent behind any word or phrase. If the intent is bad, any word can be offensive. In fact, if I want to create something outrageously offensive, I think I could do it way more effectively than a rap song that drops 288 f-bombs in 4 minutes 33 seconds. And I could do it without using a single cuss-word, crass reference or indeed, anything explicit.

The recipient’s imagination is all you need.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Top Gear, Umlauts and Lemmy

Umulauts ain’t what they used to be. Nöt since Lemmy got going ön them.

Back in Pre-Motörhead days, the umlaut was a sober, functional addition to the German and Finnish alphabets, among others. One that made pronounciations more obvious. Enter Lemmy and Motorhead. Emergent metal; the hard-edged cousin of prog-röck, vast sound built around fuzz-tone guitars.

Umlauts just worked, and not over the traditional letters either. This was umlaut as iconography, not language. Metal never looked back; Gothic lettering and ümlauts were only the beginning of a helter-skelter cascade of Tolkien-esque fantasy imagery, Nördic mythölogy – änd music that eventually featured full orchestras, choirs and operatic vöcals (kicked off by Brit prog, but picked up by Finnish and Dutch bands especially). None of it involving aütotune filtering.

A generation-long evolutiön of awesomeness, much of it, to my mind, originally set on its way by fölks such as Lemmy – musically and conceptually.

What brought all this on is my discövery that New Zealand Ön Thë Move is Book of the Month in this mönth’s New Zealand edition of the Top Gear magäzine.

Nice review, but for me what counts is being mentiöned on a page in a Top Gear product with Mr Kilmister. A motoring magazine and metal. I am unwörthy, I am unworthy…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2011

Viking axes and operatic metal

Some things seem to be meant to go together -  butter and toast, for instance. Or, rather more recently, fantasy novels and heavy metal.  There’s a whole sub-genre of music, mostly metal, mostly Scandinavian or northern European, which is founded pretty heavily in The Lord of the Rings. The late Bo Hansson started it in 1970 with his pioneering prog-concept album Music inspired by The Lord of the Rings. Closely followed by Led Zeppelin , (Sil) Marillion , Blind Guardian, and duly sent up by Flight of the Conchords.

You can see it on album covers – the guitar-as-axe wielded by an armoured fantasy warrior over a field of bloodied corpses. Epitomised by the late Frank Frazetta, who illustrated albums for such luminaries as Yngwie Malmsteen.  Roger Dean pioneered the related ‘floating island landscape’ form 40 years ago (gakk!) with his prog/metal album covers – Yes, initially, then Asia and others - which I always thought were the visual inspiration for the later novels in Larry Niven’s Ringworld series. And, of course, a movie I fell asleep in.

None of it is surprising. Metal – especially in its symphonic, gothic or prog varieties –  is musically in the same league as Richard Wagner’s operas. He didn’t bother with flippant tales of Spanish weddings or Sri Lankan pearl fishers. This master of the musical segue penned three-day long operas about magical rings, quests for Holy Grails and dragons, narrated with steam-siren ullulation by colossal women wearing horned helms. His mate Franz Liszt invented the concert tour and experienced the whole rock-star phenomenon, including having his clothes taken and ripped by hysterical fans. Think I’m kidding?

The problem today is that sword-and-sorcery novels, which readers might imagine played out to a punishing soundtrack of Avantasia or similar heavy mithril have become something of a cliche. And the onus is on the fantasy author to find ways of breaking the mould.

Hey – anybody out there heard of Trent Reznor?

Relativism and the abstract truth

One of my favourite pieces of music has long been Oliver Nelson’s ‘Stolen Moments’ – a blues-related jazz number that Nelson penned in 1960, structured around contrasting 8, 6 and 2 bar motifs, overlaid with 12-bar harmonic progressions in C-minor. He released it on his album, The Blues and the Abstract Truth. featuring Eric Dolphy on clarinet and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet.

The piece has since become a standard for vocal and instrumental bands alike. Dolphy later did his own version. So did the New York Voices, Lee Ritenour and Stanley Jordan. Frank Zappa’s arrangement, released on his 1989 album Broadway the Hard Way, segued from a cover of the Police’s ‘Murder by Numbers’.

What I find intriguing is the name of Nelson’s album.As a concept the phrase raises all sorts of issues and ideas. Not least of which is the emotional space in which music can place a listener.  But in any case, ‘abstract truth’ provokes other imagery – including the real goal of any historian.

I should explain.  To me history is a field of explanation – and when it comes to understanding the processes of human society there is no such thing as a final answer. Only reasonable discussion. Sure, history can be rendered as lists of dates – we have but to copy such data out of an archive. But as soon as we start asking ‘why’ – trying to penetrate to what the data doesn’t tell us about the past - we end up in swampier waters.

There are many ways we can tackle such a morass. Though sometimes historians start wandering off down what – to me at least – seems to be the wrong path. What I’m referring to is the ‘revisionist’ or ‘post-colonial’  history that has been the ticket to popular acceptability in the New Zealand academic historical scene since the early 1980s. I’ve dug into the frameworks of such thinking in some of my books, and it seems to me that post-colonialism cascades much of its unspoken framework of thinking from a few simple moral judgements about colonial-age events, all founded in the pop-trendy ideas of early 1980s academia. Colonial = bad. Indigenous = good. War = bad. Racism = a white male moral failing. And so on.

Setting aside the apparent confusion in pop-academic circles between analysis and advocacy, to me the main problem with post-colonial thinking remains its shallowness. The basic framework of ideas that guided nineteenth century colonialism have not been truly questioned – merely reversed and intellectualised.

And, as the late Arthur C. Clarke used to point out, intellectuals are people educated beyond their intelligence.

It seems to me that the best approach when analysing any system is to abstract the viewpoint. To look for the frameworks of thinking that shaped each period in our past and to find the relative differences between such frameworks and those of another time – usually today.  That means understanding today’s frameworks too. And to begin, we first have to step back from the whole apparatus.

How did I get to that point? Among other things, I studied at post-graduate level under Peter Munz, himself a student of Sir Karl Popper, the creator of modern scientific method. But in any case (and setting aside Popper’s ideas about falsification), it has always seemed to me that there cannot be an absolute truth in the human condition, only relative viewpoints – though this does not mean subscribing entirely to  relativism, either.

One day I’ll write a book about it. For the moment, what I can say is that once we can understand the principle of ’frameworks of thinking’ – and how to stand back from them - we are in a position to start looking at the many mechanisms that drive people and history.

The truth, in short, is indeed abstract. As, I am sure, Oliver Nelson knew very well.

History by numbers

A mathematician friend once asked me what history was – isn’t it just listing facts? 

Well, I explained, you need data to write history. But history as an intellectual endeavour is about where those facts point – what do they mean? What does the data tell us about the nature of past society and people? How does it reveal the trends and vectors that shaped our past and turned it into the present? 

It’s like the conceptual difference between arithmetic and mathematics, I explained. Arithmetic is about numbers, and you need numbers to solve specific problems. However, maths is about shapes, patterns and the relationships between concepts. It gives meaning to the numbers. 

He got it at once, of course. Maybe you do too.