But There're Only Seven Bloody Notes to Play with!
Following our music-themed issue, GAS Music's Gary Hilton asks, what is music & why does it continue to define us?
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Music moves us, but are we defined by it? Do we all have a personal soundtrack and if so why do our tastes vary from person to person irrespective of status, place and age?
GAS Music's Gary Hilton
Music defines our favourite films, TV shows, products, games, people, places and events. Can you imagine film without theme: James Bond without Monty Norman, Psycho without Bernard Herrmann, Star Wars and Jaws without John Williams, Match of the Day without the MOTD theme?
Everything and everybody needs an identity. But are we creating new identities or just copying? How blurry is the line between creativity and plagiarism?
Where has music come from?
The earliest forms of music were probably drum-based (percussion instruments being the most readily available at the time). We began to automatically combine what we could make with how it made us feel – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response [ASMR], before the psychologists got to work with their acronyms.
It is probable that the first musical instrument was the human voice itself; singing, humming, whistling, clicking, coughing and yawning. By 4000 BC the Egyptians had created harps and flutes, and by 3500 BC lyres and double-reeded clarinets had been developed. Humans are an ingenious and creative species and these noises would have been accompaniments to the images – cave paintings or hieroglyphics – and the stories they told.
What affects us sonically?
There are only seven notes and only two fields, major and minor, but like alchemists, composers try to make gold from base elements, the difference being that composers sometimes succeed. The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows uses one chord, yet we have the genius culture-clash of melody in its East-meets-West drone repetition and ‘heavy rock’ drumming.
In Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah we have a lyric explaining how every song ever composed works: “the first, the fifth, the major lift...”. We dance to disco music because it’s twice our normal resting heat-beat, hardly ground-breaking science, but it’s a rhythm that can’t do anything else other than grab you!
I’m only human, after all.
We are tribal, we live in gangs and we follow, we copy and we evolve by copying, by creating. The history of music and the evolution of instruments can be captured in us banging things, making things up, telling stories, by us entertaining ourselves.
If food + fornication = life, we also have an instinct to fill the gaps and that’s where music, thought, stories, love, religion, superstition, exploration and investigation comes in. The time lapse for the omnipresent trend of ‘pop music’ is only 60 years, yet this developed over thousands of years.
When we look for texture, depth, variety and musical arrangement in music we revisit the 14th century renaissance period; when are shocked by an outlandish solo artist we need to remember the birth of the soloist, the first pops star, which happened in the 16th century with the baroque period.
This in turn opened the stage for the classics of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. The first wave of musical revolution came with 18th century romantics and we argue for the birth of ‘heavy rock’ within Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913). Then we have the explosion through the last 60 years from Bill Hailey and The Beatles to The Sex Pistols and Lady Gaga, Bieber and The X-Factor.
Pigeon-holed humans?
We looked for the best talent to make our orchestras of the 16th century in the same way as we manufacture pop idols on TV today. We are sprinting ahead with pace and looking back armed with the skill to know what we can steal, use and re-use from our past!
The reality of this is all around us, just open your ears:
Pharrel Williams vs Marvin Gaye
The secret of a great tune is simple; good ingredients, well made and well delivered. Like a great story, it echoes a very human rhythm from individual birth and life experience and transports us to that very unhuman place called ‘right now’ – let the music stop you, take you and make you.
As for the future, we need music, but we need new music that “allows the creatives to breathe”. We have to understand the unique chemistry of sound and vision and move beyond the current, narrow alchemy into wider fields of musical invention. We will continue to go back to go forward, just make sure it’s an additive used with respect and we might just create the explosions we need.
The cover from this issue's music and sound design special
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