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Why This Additive Formula?
Adding one musical element at a time is an effective way to sustain interest and build complexity. For my personal tastes, however, this technique, like anything else overused, has lost some of it’s charm. When did this technique arise? We don’t find it much in “serious” or pop music, I think. I, of course, use it myself... I hope not too frequently. However, even when I do, it is a kind of “stick this in” technique which, I don’t think, has much freshness left to inspire.
What other techniques do you use to sustain interest?
Comments
I'd wager that in European musical history, it was formularized in the "Theme and Variation" initially and then expanded into orchestral arrangements by adding more instruments. Culminating in the amazing Ravel "Bolero" which describes the act of coitus
as beautifully as any piece of music. The foreplay and use of suspense makes the orgasm a thing of sublime ecstacy.
We don’t find it much in “serious” or pop music, I think.
Unless I misunderstand your premise, I have to disagree. The whole idea of making a song than then provides a chord progression for improvisation that also builds by using tricks like starting with major scale and adding more and more blue notes to bring out the minor core of the blues.
Connie taught you to base improvisations off of a melody and disregard the harmonic framework. In fact, I suspect she would encourage you to replace all the chords but try and relate the improvisation to the themes or feeling of the melody. I've never been able to
understand these ideas and can see why it takes teacher to expose their implementation.
This collage style of layer on more content just doesn't suit your workflow. You rarely
decorate anything which would require improvising over previous recordings. You don't do that but I think there's some real growth for you in that alternative approach. Improvise
2-3 minutes and then play along responding to your own voice but very sparcely. It would
take your skills to another level, IMHO. You can later use the mixer to remove parts you don't like in the final mix.
What I just wrote. You react to your own playing in layered recordings on distinct tracks.
Then do subjective editing in the final mix. If you like it, it probably will hold the interest of the listener.
Thanks for asking... but I was hoping for a discussion of the maths involved in "additive"
______. Still, you make good writing prompts.
Iterative, with additive/ subtractive would be interesting, building off @McD here. There we go again, building and building. It’s what we do. Any creation can be construed as additive, though a discussion on additive manufacturing would be quite fun.
Any one compositional technique if used all the time gets boring.
I'd argue that adding one instrument at a time got its start in serious music: Bolero.
While orchestral music rarely uses that technique so extremely, a pretty common technique is to have themes restated by different combinations and numbers of instruments.
I had forgotten about Bolero. That’s a great example. I had never considered the sexual implications, but yeah, it certainly feels that way when I think about it.
I use “additive” for lack of a better term.
If you are interested in arranging techniques...Snarky Puppy's Michael League has done some "master classes" where he goes through some of his compositions and talks about the compositional and arranging techniques that he uses to develop interest. They are tried and true techniques and he describes them well. You can find them at
https://www.crowdcast.io/snarkypuppy
Thanks @espiegel123.🙏
Whoa that’s some deep stuff that’s greater than my pure pop music knowledge, but I feel like the best, most “well-produced” pop isn’t based on adding and adding but rather arranging using a wide variety of different instruments or sounds for different sections, and purposefully not using an instrument until it is called for in the song (as opposed to a guitar player just strumming and plucking away with different parts all throughout a song). The climax in my favorite pop music usually comes through an extra emotional bridge and then rides out a great chorus or a meh bridge followed by a key change and ride it out.
/total layman out
There's a rom-com called "10" starring Bo Derrick where Bolero is feature prominently
as a suitable piece for coitus. It's 14 minutes and 45 seconds long on a typical recording.
There's an infamous recording where the orchestra jumps from the 1 minute period to the very end and then leaves the stage in disgrace and humiliation. It's rumored some of the
female musicians stayed on stage and comforted each other. Go figure. I can find no Google references to this event.
I had forgotten about that, too. Of course, I was blitzed at the time.
Kinda puts the "stick this in" technique in a different light doesn't it.
Gotta try that soundtrack indeed
@LinearLineman
Remember the "restrained" concept we've talked about a while ago?
Looking at modern electronic music, choosing different sounds filling up the frequency spectrum instead of racing against the existing sounds is one concept.
Another concept is to switch sounds on tracks while the song progresses. In a not too radical but noticeable way.
An even more exciting concept though must be to replace some notes in the copy/pasted track by new notes that work hand in hand with the sounds in the other tracks.
Jacob Collier is a master of this concept (and many other concepts btw) and he got me into experimenting with such myself, mainly in Korg Gadget. Really fun.
@wim... you, sir, have an eye for detail.
Just a noob question, maybe off-topic as you seem willing to discuss about the addition of new instruments and timbre. but isn't the additive formula also something any improviser does when taking a theme, developing it or even deconstructing it ? I mean in a playing fashion, stricto sensu.
I realise it's not exactly the same but introducing elements (well, parts) one at a time was a brilliant tool used in Renaissance choral music, and they used it to perfection.
Okay, the practice may have peaked 400-500 years ago, but I'm sitting in Belgium which used to supply the composers to pretty much every single European royal court at the time, so I feel like I need to mention it anyway. 🤷
I tend to come up with a single idea, then build around it, adding variations, introducing contrasting parts, the usual. As I do this, I make a rough arrangement.
Often, the hardest part is when there is a final ”hole”. I know I need something, one final piece, and this can take longer then the entire rest of the song.
Then, when I have it all, I arrange. Most of this involves removing parts. I might remove whole instruments from long stretches, or remove frequencies (although that happens more when mixing).
My point is, you have to add something at some point. And there has to be some variation and growth. But variation and growth can come from removing and reducing too.
oh no! Freud is in da thread! Don’t tell him, you’re smoking cigars
@McD, I do add additional lines on top of my original improv about 20% of the time... just as you describe it.
@mistercharlie: “ My point is, you have to add something at some point. And there has to be some variation and growth. But variation and growth can come from removing and reducing too.”
...best point so far.
I guess one could look at any form, say the sonata, and say it has been overdone. I would personally agree on that one. Most of Beethoven’s sonatas are pretty eh, IMO, except for the famous Moonlight. After all, how many Ludwig sonatas do we remember on a mass scale? OTOH out of 9 symphonies, the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th and 9th are spectacular achievements. WHY? I believe, because The Notorious LVB’s transcendent melodic themes, coupled then his signature instrumentations obliterate the forms they are based on.
Look at it this way. If a cook prepares a spectacular dish for us we concentrate on eating it, not on thinking about the recipe. The recipe falls away during the consumption.
We dredge up the ingredients, quantities, tools, techniques and cooking times if the dish fails, or if it is available to those who wish to repeat it or learn how to make it. But if you are eating the dish and you’re constantly reminded of the paper recipe because you’re picking pieces of it that get caught in your teeth while devouring it... well, that’s not so good.
I think, in great music, form doesn’t merely follow function, but function and form become lost in each other. Inseparable while lost in listening. It’s hard to look at an Eames chair and not think... “Ah, an Eames chair!” But when you’re sitting in it it's an entirely different experience.
When we buy a car we’re allured by the presentation. When we drive, however, all that allure is unseeable to the driver, except as his ego imagines others looking at him as he drives around,
The singled out technique here for inspection.... adding an instrument at a time to add thrill is a great recipe. But if it is largely the only recipe in the cookbook and the listener finds him/herself regularly picking it out of their teeth... that’s another story.
OTOH, people love to hear the same thing over and over.
For centuries, as I understand it, repetition, in ancient Egyptian art, was all that mattered. Who could make the best copy. Stylistic changes were not acceptable.
It’s definitely over-used, but probably in a way that has appeal across generations of music listeners or it would not be popular.
Maybe because the generation of ideas often happens that way? On my own I can only play one instrument at a time, so once I have something it’s building on top of that. In a band improvisation situation it’s almost always one person making a start then others slowly building on it.
However, it’s not that difficult to keep the level of complexity pretty constant throughout a piece of music. With a count in there’s no reason why all instruments used can’t come in together. Now that you have said that I’m going to take more careful note of how songs are constructed and see what proportion build from a simpler start.
I think it is a natural form to build from a simple theme, then adding elements to build to a (musical!) climax. It doesn’t really work well the other way (start big and then take elements away), and simply repeating without change gets boring pretty quickly. I think it’s overuse comes from the way some popular DAWs work such as Ableton, as they almost encourage this type of looping structure, simply click on another “block” to bring that in. So I think that software has encouraged this sort of song structure, rather than having variations where each time through is a different performance.
Fugues are additive, where the same part enters in different keys while each preceding entry progresses on into a contrapuntal accompaniment for the new iteration. J S Bach was more known in his day for his improvised fugues than for his written compositions. Perhaps @LinearLineman, you might find it interesting to blend this approach into some of your improvisations...
I agree that a good improvisor adds intensity by increasing note density and adding additional notes to the initial scale choices.
^this
Undoubtedly there are a ton of songs that build up to a crescendo but there must be a ton of songs that work the other way round, that are hugely energetic then fade out slowly?
Bowie’s Blackstar has a form similar to this.
Cant remember a lot of others at the moment but i don’t think its that unfamiliar a structure for a song to end in a melancholic or dreamlike and subdued state after an exhuberant or frenzied start.
I know for me it's lack of compositional skill and imagination, coupled with the loop-based workflow of the apps I use. Typical (lazy) process is to start with a loop and keep layering on compatible parts until I run out of ideas. Then grab the loops and arrange them on a timeline in various combinations.
I'm only going for temporary self-gratification, so that's good enough for me.
I often imagine deciding ahead of time on a song structure, flow, dynamics, etc. then composing to that, but never actually go there. I usually just jam for a bit, then walk away.
+1, this answer explains it for me in the context I am hearing it .
@TheOriginalPaulB, thanks. I have done some exploration....
https://michaelalevy.bandcamp.com/album/fugue-machines
Fugue Machine doesn’t actually produce fugues, unfortunately.
@TheOriginalPaulB. Are you sure? It has four play heads that can be programmed to begin at different points of the inscribed melody. That sounds like a critical fugue element to me.
It’s an element, sure, but without transposition of the melody for subsequent parts (other than an octave) it’s producing canons, not fugues.
Here is the Wikipedia page on fugues in music. The section headed ‘Exposition’ is particularly relevant to what I was saying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue
Fugue Machine allows transposition to any pitch.
I only see octave, perhaps I’m on an old version.