Your Voice: Consistent Kinds of Choices

Developing a musical voice is about hearing and “radically honoring” the reactions and preferences you have to your works-in-progress.

Developing your own musical style is a journey. It’s very related to knowing how to listen to yourself. It also only really happens over time, your style only recognized retroactively; if you’re thinking about your style as something you need to apply to your work, you’re probably doing it wrong.

I want to take one more look into transcripts from interviews with American composer David Maslanka one more time (sprinkled with some ideas from other folks) before I put them away for awhile. He has some really helpful ways of thinking about what style is and how it comes about.

That sounds awfully familiar…

About 2 minutes into the last movement of Maslanka’s Symphony No. 7 (written in 2004) a solo euphonium introduces the main melody of the movement:

You might be thinking, “where have I heard that before?” Perhaps this 1982 song by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes:

What’s going on here? Maslanka insists this wasn’t a rip off of a popular tune from the recent past, nor was he seeking to make reference to it:

The last movement is song-like, too, and people have told me this sounds a heck of a lot like some show tune or pop tune they have heard. And I don’t even remember what it was…I may well have heard it, but I can’t imagine that there aren’t more than a few tunes that start the way this one does. It’s simple triadic material, and yet the nature of the movement always touches me deeply. So, I think that there is…a kind of open, heartfelt quality that is unembarrassed about being that. There are certainly intellectual parameters to the music, but I think its primary way of being is an open heart. And that’s what it feels like.

In this same series of interviews, Conductor Eugene Corporon provides a key to understanding what is going on here:

“Maslanka describes the work as ‘old songs remembered’ indicating his awareness of the significance that vernacular melodies have had on his music.”…I don’t think he’d say, “No, I’m trying to steal that melody. This is an arrangement of Beatles tunes.” But, he’s synthesized that sense of ballad. And, I mean it with respect, sometimes in his pieces I’ll say, “This is the Billy Joel moment.” And I really love Billy Joel. You’ll have that sense of the repeated chord, you know, that could be in any of Billy Joel’s ballads in the left hand of the piano. But then, he turns that into music of artistic significance within his symphony. So, the listener goes, “Man, I can identify with that. That’s about my life.” Or, “That’s about the music I’m experiencing right now.” I think that’s a real gift…People who are running away from those influences have more trouble than the people who embrace them and say, “Yeah. It’s part of what’s inside of me, and it may come out somehow in the way I write.”

Maslanka, like any other writer of music, metabolized the musical influences around him and they became a part of the way he uses musical language. Sometimes when he (or we) expresses himself, a piece of musical syntax comes out that sounds very similar to that used by someone else with perhaps similar musical influences—in this case, the heartfelt opening up melodic gesture that appears in both his 7th symphony and in the chorus of Up Where We Belong.

Some familiar bits in my own music

I remember sketching out a little tune several years ago and being really moved by the feelings it brought up. How did this tune seem to just write itself? Where did it come from? Take a listen and see if you can place what it sounds pretty much exactly like (hint: I’ve never watched the movie):

I was really compelled by the opening up/closing down feeling brought on moving from scale degree 3 to 4 (bar 1 to 2) and then degrees 3 to 2 (bar 3 to 4). I didn’t realize I was probably borrowing from and outlining a much more famous melody, and I was pretty embarrassed when I figured it out, though I needn’t have been:

What does having moments that sound like other people’s music in your own work have to do with personal style?

The banality of our materials + the unique decisions we can still make

Quoting again from David Maslanka:

What is unique in my music? It certainly isn’t the musical materials because my music is largely tonal, uses traditional instruments and often uses traditional forms. I haven’t invented new language elements, but my voice is uniquely my own…That question of voice is a really important one. And I think the best that can be said for voice is that it is related to the word, “style,” and that style and voice are both the result of consistent kinds of choices made over a long period of time…certain choices keep coming back as primary ones. And I think things that are primary about my choices are often a very solid substantial rhythmic pulse and…certain kinds of rhythmic patterns that appear again and again and again…when simple…seemingly non-original [choices are made] that is because they have been done before, all tonal elements have been done before, all the rhythmic elements have been done before; but the difference is the individual composer’s choice at this instant because of the need of the music. And that is a hard thing to get at, but it’s I think the core of the issue.

This gets at the moment in his 7th symphony that sounds just like a pop song written 22 years prior. For Maslanka, that moment in his music needed the tender, rising melodic line that uses a piece of our shared musical language and syntax—the same piece of syntax the song writer of Up Where We Belong also needed to express a similar warm and tender moment in their music. The journey to those similar moments in Up Where We Belong and Symphony No. 7 are totally different, but each music writer determined their music needed something like it.

Something new from something old

In 1998, Maslanka wrote a letter to an aspiring composer about this challenge of making something new from something old:

You make the remark “It seems like every new idea I get has been done before, by me or someone else.” You have to consider the nature of language. Every word you have ever spoken was invented by others. Grammatical structure has evolved over centuries, and you as an individual user and maker of language can’t do much about it. Attempts at changing language wholesale always end in failure because there is a large impersonal inertia which keeps the language fundamentally what it is. From a “meaning” standpoint it has been suggested by psychological studies that in order form the meaning of a communication to be clear, at least 85% of the information communicated has to be familiar to the receiver. So in the face of this, how can a person be original? You have twelve half-steps of the equal-tempered system; you have the fundamental concepts of pulse and rhythm, the concepts of melody, counterpoint and accompaniment, the sounds of the common instruments and voices. What’s new? You are. You have not existed before in your current form. If you persist in your craft, your way of using the received materials of language will be unique…How do you find your own unique voice? By finding whatever musical idea intrigues you, holds your attention, gives you a strong feeling; by being absorbed in the moment as you compose.

He then makes a comment about how you make and maintain that style that is remarkably similar to the way George Saunders thinks about style and writing:

For me the question of continuity has to do with an “inner reviewer” or “inner tester.” Is my attention held by every instant of my composition? Or is there a nagging doubt about spots or sections? If there is doubt, I will open myself to as many possibilities as I can think of and see if I can find a better solution. It may be as simple as changing something local – a pitch, rhythm, or chord – or it may result in the restructuring of a whole area of a piece. I am able to let go of very good ideas if I can see that they don’t fit, or that they lead the piece in the wrong direction…

…a sense of style and evolving style, all come from the ability of the individual to be fascinated by the moment of music in front of him or her. It is the fascination of the child with the pretty or intriguing object, whether that object has intrinsic value or not.

Developing a voice is about hearing and “radically honoring” the reactions and preferences you have to your works-in-progress. Emulation is useful for learning and discovery, building your craft to give you tools to make your music express different things. But it’s learning and knowing what you like that lets you know when, where, and how to use your craft to express your uniqueness.