The Harmonic Strain
Several years ago, I became involved in a project with a friend in college, who was writing a selection of music in order to sketch some ideas for a computer game he hoped to write. The game never materialized, but the music and its associated epic mythos took on a life of its own. After several months of composition, I began to notice a pattern. I found that since writing music was often an activity done during my “down time,” often after intense study or class time; and thus became a form of releasing tension while under stress. Since I was often writing in times of mental-psychological-emotional stress; the music itself had an dark emotive quality; however, since it was often preceded by periods of intense mental activity, certain aspects of the composition process touched on areas of “genius” in a very literal sense, almost as if partially inspired by some otherworldly force.
While the heroic name of Hrothgar, borrowed from Beowulf, I am assuming will now e a “household word” following the new movie; in 2004, it was only a part of ancient British literature. And I highly doubt if the villain Vulsana has ever taken his rightful place as the Dark Lord. However, I did find that while the story was very sketchy, the music was making progress, until paradoxically, I ran out of information. The genius stopped, in a sense, and I began to struggle.
For the sake of description, I should state for the record that much of the music was harmonically based, with melodies and countermelodies superimposed over the harmonies. Repetition was a watermark of the compositions, but it often served to glamorize any new piece of musical information, a new melody, reharmonization, or change in instrumentation. It also made cut-and-paste techniques an easy may to build tension in already-existing themes. But I found myself in a “harmonic rut,” if you will, a place where I had so developed melodies around certain harmonies that my mind could not “hear” any variations of those harmonies. One chord would lead to the next, and the next, and would resolve in predictable ways. Even if the harmonies I could hear were “unpredictable,” I found that the “surprises” and unpredictablities in one piece would become standard order in the next, and that I was in dire need of change and a sense of having new information to stimulate the auditory sensibilities of the listener, yet without deviating from the sense of “theme” and cohesive I had tried so diligently to create.
In the long run, I took a hiatus for several years, during which I listened to a lot of music from a variety of genres; and when I came back to it, found that I did have some new sources of information. In so doing, I left a worn path; but the “harmonic rut” has been shallowed and widened, which is good. Hindsight being what is, 20-20, I have been thinking through a new way of thematic development, some of which I used before unintentionally, but now intend to use with a greater sense of purpose.
While the harmonic roots can be very similar, certain resolutions in harmonies can be used for different characters. At the very least, multiple melodies. Having more than one musical theme allows there to be much more room for interweaving those themes into more complex compositions. There should be a certain cycle to it – state, reharmonize, then take the new harmony and remelodize. In so doing, produce new information by introducing subtle changes to existing information. Basically, extract a small piece of a melody, and build around it. Take its harmonic structure; build a new melody around it. Take the new melody, reharmonize – mix with something else, then do it again: blend, change.
In a creative process, subtlety is key: endless permutations and combinations of existing information. Surprisingly, the concept is the same in genetics: certain harmonic “strains” are found in different pieces of music in a similar way that certain traits run in extended families. Certain melodic lines can skip generation, only being carried in a seminal form in certain harmonies, only to appear later in a different or expanded form. An analysis of the problem of the “harmonic rut” may have been an issue of trying to produce new compositions with significant deviations from the parent compositions, without any intervening generations of musical development and without the addition of any new musical source material. In genetics, inbreeding can lead to mutations… and with music; too much cross-composition can lead to musical ruts, including sterile compositions incapable of reproducing anything remotely like themselves.
So maybe it’s just a lesson in diversity and change. No musical theme can survive while remaining in its present form: its continued existence depends on its interaction with substantially different musical data, which can produce new strains of musical information acting as carriers for the original creative thought.
