Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

One of the fortunes we have that were not afforded to Haydn, Bach and Mozart is that we can turn on the radio any time we like and here outstanding music-- for free. Our exposure can be as high as we like. We must appreciate that.

Hold on just a moment... I'm appreciating that....

OK that's good.


Nothing inspires confidence more than hearing something you don't like. You can tell yourself "I can do better than that." Really? "Yeah, I think so." Listening to the radio or CDs exposes you to fantastic music as well as some that you just don't like.

What I've found is what I don't like is music without structure. Especially structure at the bar level. I'm OK with pieces that lack large structure. I don't care if a symphony is in 2,3,4 or 5 movements. But I get irritated when there is no apparent structural organization. I like Mozart's tidy 4 or 8 bar motifs. I like, (perhaps because I'm simple) tension and resolution. I like a good old fashion V7 chord resolving to the tonic. Structure is my friend. Lack of structure is harder to grab onto. It's less inviting and less compelling. It feels dissolute.

So, naturally, it becomes time for me to explore what I despise. And the truth is, even my favorite composers stretch the structure out of recognition. My quest is to understand why and in what ways. What is the order behind their chaos.

The first way I experiment with is simply extending a tension by another bar before the resolution. That's fine. Not too big of a stretch. Not too glaring. Doesn't really detach the audience from the end of your tether.

Then I began experimenting with vaster selections of non predictable structure. Some is acceptable as a graceful pasture for the mind to wander in. Any more than that, exceeds my patience and leads to the worst of all musical sins: boring the audience. I teeter back from the edge and decide that this is as far as I can go at this time.

So there.