And I done made a short thing for a string quintet...
The other day I was going through a load of old files (half-written songs, pieces of written music, etc.) on my laptop and found a folder marked 'ChinaDrôle'. ChinaDrôle was a super short lived minimal(?) project I started because, when I was about 18 I got super into minimalist style film music - I think it was walking home from watching Persepolis, for which I really liked the soundtrack, that I got the idea. This is a common theme, I would hear something I like and be like 'have to do that!' then write an album's worth of unfinished, never to be finished songs and forget about it...
Anyway - while rooting through said unfinished ChinaDrôle songs, some of them boring, some of them half decent. I found a couple of bars of a thing I had been writing for piano and violin, that I had totally forgotten about, and I didn't think it was half bad. Here in Bologna one of my (two) classes is this epic music theory course on Harmony and the Baroque and all this stuff that I have no training in whatsoever. This isn't to say that what I've done here has anything in common with that music, or that I've even necessarily followed the rules of that music, or music in general, but the course had helped me a lot to see why I do what I do and why I like what I like, and it's made finishing this, rewritten for a string quintet, really interesting. It's totally flawed, but I think it sounds nice, and I sort of like the idea of writing music for films, I wrote a short score for a person I knew's play once, and it was a good feeling.
On the course and why I'm enjoying it. A lot of people I talk to are anti-theory, saying that it limits your creativity. I've always sort of seen that as total crap. I get the point, for sure, if you let theory overrule your confidence in your own creativity, that sucks and you're probably going to end up a really boring artist. I read somewhere once that primarily making art is just about having good taste and a sense for what time you're in, the rest is about having the craft to realise that good taste for your time, and that takes practise and, quite possibly, theory. Theory just seems to me like a set of tools you can use when you get into trouble, that can help you appreciate things you and others do regardless of whether they form a part of a theoretical structure, and that can give you a reference and a context for when you want to break the rules. If I think about it, I'm not sure anything can ever be cutting edge if you don't have a little theory first and a knowledge of what came before, because without that you don't know what you're rejecting and why what you're doing is necessarily new, you're just moving about in the dark hoping to get lucky. Sure, that's fine too. But it also explains a lot of bands that only ever make one good album and disappear.
Theory can be elitist, which is bad, and in the end if it sounds or looks of feels good, it's all good. But I definitely get a bit of satisfaction in being able to say why Bach, for example, would be super pissed at the way I'm did this, but doing it anyway because it sounds good to me and I actively know what I don't like in the parts of theory and harmony I'm not using.
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