The answer is obvious: it depends. And on many factors. For me, the main one is motivation. Why did I decide to make a piece of music? If someone asked me or commissioned it, I start by reflecting on that person’s expectations and how they intersect with my artistic journey. It’s important to emphasize this addition because I don’t believe in making music solely to achieve others’ goals. For me, any project, even the most commercial or functional, needs to somehow entangle with one of my compositional identities, and this usually requires an effort on my part, that is, to put what is proposed to me into a perspective that interests me, without deviating from my interlocutors’ idea. You can see that this stage is not simple, and even when I decide to make music of my own volition, I need to think about where it could be played or heard, who its audience would be, and what resources would be needed for its creation. The first step, in any case, is always reflection. Not reflecting (or reflecting poorly) will certainly complicate things in the subsequent steps.
Depending on the music in question, this reflection can take time. Moreover, despite the suggestive photo I placed above, reflecting doesn’t just mean thinking about life. We reflect with books, people, and, of course, the internet. We hardly ever refrain from expanding any idea we have on the web, consulting websites, contacting people, watching countless videos, and always keeping an eye on Wikipedia. I will mention two of my experiences with these reflective stages prior to “getting down to business” with composition – and it should be clear that each piece of music created, to a greater or lesser extent, would serve to elaborate a distinct example.
It is the theme song of the children’s show “Pequenices,” by dancer Fernanda Boff, therefore a commission. As often happens during the staging of theatrical performances, the musical composition was not a creation subsequent to the rest of the content, but concurrent. This means that I needed to make music based on ideas, rather than on scenes—the entire show, in fact, is procedural, as it directly depends on the interaction and proposals of the children participating in it. What did Fernanda tell me?
(a) That it was a show about travel;
(b) that there would be a machine that the children hook into and travel around;
(c) that there would be imaginary places where they dock, where anything can happen;
(d) that there were some ideas up her sleeve, but that the children’s imagination would essentially drive the entire plot.
With these ideas, I went back home, already in deep reflection. Well, what would you do with this information? In my case, because of the machine and the show’s foundation in imagination, I initially thought of something in the realm of science fiction. After some more time, I realised that this idea was more specific, that is, not ‘science fiction’ in general, but specifically that related to extraterrestrials, flying saucers (because of the machine) and distant planets (because of the unusual places that would be imagined by the children). ‘Star Trek’ and, as a bonus, the entire sci-fi imagination of the 60s and 70s came to mind. Off I went to watch some episodes and listen to the music from ‘Star Trek’, as well as some films and series of the genre. It’s worth listening to again:
But “Pequenices” wasn’t necessarily about space travel, with ETs, laser beams, and teleporters! It was essential to ensure that the music did not limit the possibilities of the show. With that in mind, I shifted to the idea of a song, with words that would encourage the children to imagine and travel during the performance (the idea of an orchestral composition, inspired by Star Trek, would, however, be used in another part of the show). Combining song, travel, and the 70s, where could all this lead? To Raul Seixas, of course. And to Os Mutantes. And to Novos Baianos. And to a bunch of stuff that appeared on YouTube. Here the idea was narrowed down for the composition of the song “Tem gente maluca comigo!”: a light psychedelia, with some touches of spoken voice and noise in the melodic line and blending of different styles. (Allow me a bit of musical jargon: I was also inspired by those crazy progressions of triads that I hear in many songs of the genre, which are sometimes quite traditional and sometimes mix different modes with irreverence: “Gita” by Raul Seixas is a typical example).
On the other hand, I thought about avoiding making these references obvious in the song, to not make it seem vintage. It was with this reflection that I started improvising the chorus of “Tem gente maluca comigo!” at the piano, but that’s another step in the process, right? Check out the result:
Now a piece I decided to write on my own. One day, while improvising on a very good piano, I was playing chords full of notes and lifting my fingers one by one. It then sounded a great chord of ten notes (one for each finger), and as I released the keys, it “slimmed down.” There’s nothing new in this technique, as I remember a piece by Robert Schumann that used it. However, by focusing solely on this play, my improvisation consisted of doing this faster or slower, lifting from bottom to top or top to bottom, from inside out and outside in, and so on. It was then that the image of a sound blot came to my mind, something that emerges and disappears, which you can’t see clearly, just as smudges really. With this idea, added with the use of the pedal and chords that appear progressively, instead of disappearing, I began to compose “Introverso,” which you can check out here:
The idea of a sound blot remained in my imagination and persists to this day. After “Introverso,” I adapted this concept in “Liamalha dos Dizeres de Amor” and, more recently, brought the blots even to the score in the miniature “Perfume do Jardim de Entulhos.”
I hope that, despite the individuality of the examples, this post has made clear the importance of reflecting on music, even before working with sounds. In my lessons, I often say that music is made of sounds AND IDEAS. Those who resist reflecting on the music they want to create end up failing to connect it to the world. And connecting music to the world through thought is essential for that music to make sense. As a preliminary reflection (when you think about the music you are going to make), this kind of thinking allows you to have sound ideas, to want to experiment, and also to listen and see other things, and this is what I call inspiration, much more than a magical gift that suddenly falls from the sky.
In the next post, the question that will guide us is: Where does the music go?