From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
I
Using the studio as a musical instrument begins when the transformations of sound, if effects, become essential to the piece. In classical music, the recording studio is exactly a recording studio--a sonic camera. In rock, the role of the studio has progressed from this over the years, but for most conventional groups it is usually not much more than a set of very sophisticated effects pedals; the nature of the transformations is peripheral. The true musical (as opposed to reproductive) potential of the studio is tapped when groups and composers build sounds and structures which are not possible to realize outside the studio, and which truly contribute to a work, to the spirit of a work in particular, even though that work may contain more conventional musical material recorded in "photographic" passivity.
For example, to underline the idea of symmetry in a text, that text may be reversed on tape and edited together with the original--a device used, for instance, on the Art Bears song "First Things First." This truly contributes to the spirit of the text, and is something that can only be achieved in the studio (unless you have learned to speak your own language backwards). Of course there are disadvantages to making the studio essential to the music in this way--most obvious is that live performance is not possible. In my own experience even the simplest studio transformations are very difficult to set up live; it is probably best not to attempt it, but to start from the other direction--exploit the particular nature of live performance, including its unpredictability, even its imperfection, and write for live performance alongside studio composition.
I have been using the studio "as a musical instrument" for the last seven or eight years, and I probably learned more about musical composition in general in the first few years than I would have if I'd taken a course. Every week is different and poses new problems, the solutions to which I usually find by instinct more than anything else--it is only afterward that I can see intellectually why one thing was right and another wrong. Instinct is an underestimated authority. It can be sensitive to very fine distinctions, making aesthetic choices difficult but inescapable. (Debussy wrote somewhere that he could spend days trying to decide between two piano chords.) Studio composition in particular poses new problems--for example, how to organize textures. In fact it poses far more problems than a composer who has only ever written notes down on manuscript paper can imagine. Traditional composition involves determination of the basic parameters of pitch, rhythm, harmony, and (since the end of the last century) orchestral color, but the studio composer is required to determine everything beyond these, and moreover, to determine them once and for all--a daunting task.
II
My own work method is disorderly and unmethodical. Pieces may start life after "accidents" happen in the studio, or I may have a definite idea for either the structure of the piece, its content, or its "spirit"--usually the latter--supported sometimes by definite musical ideas, such as melodic phrases or chord sequences or sets of concrete images. However, I have never done a piece which has not changed considerably from my original conception of it by the time it is finished. I find that the music tends to "write itself"; I guide it in the directions it seems to want to go, and don't worry too much if my original conception has not been preserved intact. I have worked particularly with field recordings, and these are as good an example as any of something about which traditional composition has nothing to teach us, but which can be treated as musical events in themselves--indeed, must be if a piece using them is to work. Here I should say that I mean a piece using them without any modification, rather than a musique concrte work that uses them as starting points for the morphological transformations which are the real material of pieces in this genre. Using field recordings, untreated, subjecting them only to collage and juxtaposition, teaches you a great awareness of their psychological as well as musical characteristics. In the same way that a melody may produce an emotional response, sounds from the environment all have their own psychological "color," which has to be considered alongside their pitch, rhythm, duration, texture, dynamic, and so on. One learns in particular how such sounds can function in the structure of a piece; how, for example, the ambience inside a cathedral can "drive forward" short, isolated sounds--which is much the same function harmony performs in "driving forward" melody in traditional music.
I prefer to work at night on my pieces, mainly because the studio environment is very distracting during the day--with people going to and fro--and I find increasingly that I'm at my best creatively when I can have complete privacy and it is quiet and still. I may make substantial progress on a piece during an eleven- or twelve-hour overnight session (most pieces take between fifty and two hundred hours to complete, depending on their length and the amount of studio treatments involved). Composition can be very dull at times; it can look like cat's meat when you don't seem to be getting anywhere--but then something unexpected happens and it suddenly all seems worthwhile.
Originally published in The R Records Quarterly
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