There’s a big debate that’s all the rage these days, did you know? It goes something like this: is music better because of technology or not?
Someone was telling me about a band who was playing original songs. The problem was that they had 20 different parts. One section was a forceful metal beat, followed by a forceful rock beat, preceding a forceful funk beat, and so on and so forth. 20 parts.
As a drummer, we are not trained for that kind of format. We come into any piece of music expecting up to 3, maybe 4 different grooves, not much more. And even if we have famous examples of people in the rock world who wrote more complicated forms with a flurry of beats (I’m looking at you Frank Zappa!), most of what we grow up listening contains less than 5 drum beats.
He then told me that although the band had played with drummers before, and they had laid the tracks of their own guitar and bass playing, they had made the drum part with 2 fingers on a controller! He wasn’t complaining about the complexity of the challenge he was facing because he’s an excellent drummer and a consummate pro, but he admitted that it was his first encounter with that kind of thing.
I thought about it and, because I also have a solid training in classical music, I realized that the greatest composers, the Bach, Beethoven and Mozart of yesteryears did just that. Sure, they didn’t have a computer, but, arguably, they had something similar: their mind.
Should you ever listen to an entire movement of a Symphony, you will quickly realize how mindboggling it is. The theme, whatever it is, is promptly replaced by another part played by other instruments, then followed by yet another section sounding different in orchestration and arrangements, that one announcing a third that precedes a fourth, that present a fifth, and you’re not even 40 seconds into the tune. The trick, and that’s why these composers are considered the greatest, is to keep it coherent because, yes, you can have all the sounds and harmony of the world, you still need to guide the listener to where you want them to go. If you can convey an emotion in the process, even better!
When people write music on their computer, they are, all of the sudden, provided with an immense orchestra and they can do whatever they want. But, and maybe the mystery is laying just there, how you put those songs together is the difference between a Hans Zimmer and an unknown doodler.
Technology is too vast of a subject to treat correctly in one blog. I barely scratched the surface of creativity here, you could write encyclopedias about it. Still, there is that “X” factor when Mozart’s music brings us to tears.
