Usually Never at a Loss for Words

Usually Never at a Loss for Words

Two songwriter friends of mine who don’t self-identify as composers claim that it is much easier for them to write music than it is for them to write words. Perhaps songwriters have a much easier job of it than folks who only write music since the words they are writing music to are already theirs.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

Huh

Huh?

On Saturday night there was a concert devoted to my music in New York City featuring the world premiere of a work I labored on for most of last year, plus the first complete performance of a work that’s more than 30 years old. Writing at length about that concert here today seems awkward to me since I don’t want to be self-serving. But not acknowledging it at all seems equally inappropriate since it was the event of this past week that loomed largest to me (for obviously reasons) and I at least would like to officially thank everyone who showed up. (We barely had enough seats.) Also, I want to share a fascinating side conversation I got into with two old friends whom I introduced to each other during the late-night dinner after the concert, one of whom I had not spent quality time with in nearly eight years.
The two friends in question—Marc Ostrow and Sidney Whelan—both compose music in addition to their other activities in life, but neither describes himself as a composer. However, although Marc is a music business attorney and Sid is a real estate agent, their eschewal of the word composer has nothing to do with their day jobs. Both feel more comfortable with the word songwriter. Marc writes musical theatre material and also sings and plays jazz piano. Sid has written original material for groups he has been involved in—either as leader or a guitar-playing sideman—ranging from Afropop to rock to Americana roots music; he was the original guitarist in a punk bluegrass band I fronted for over a decade and is currently exploring acoustic blues. Normally, when folks who create music outside the realm of so-called classical music reject the moniker composer, I counter that the word is not genre specific. If someone is creating original music—whatever style or level of notational detail (it could even be completely un-notated)—he or she is engaging in the act of musical composition. In fact, to me, calling yourself a songwriter implies a much more specific skill set; it means you are creating words as well as music. If someone else is writing your lyrics, you are merely a composer! But since Marc and Sid both write their own words, I didn’t put up a fight.

My dander did however get raised a tad when both claimed it was much harder to write words than to write music. Sid explained this by saying that there are over a million words in the English language so the choices were daunting whereas with music he was only dealing with the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Marc concurred. When I as a sometime microtonalist was quick to counter that there are far more possibilities than those 12 (and as a bluesman Sid obviously knows this), he insisted that the range of pitch variance is still clearly smaller than word choice. Of course, pitch is an infinite continuum despite cognitive scientists’ assertions that the human ear cannot distinguish intervals that are smaller than 5 cents apart (roughly 1/20th the size of an equally tempered semitone, e.g. 1/20th the size of the distance between C and C#), which means at best we’ve got 240 possible pitches to work with. Even that number might be overly generous. Aaron Andrew Hunt created a pitch matrix based on the concept of just noticeable differences and came up with a scale of 205 equal temperament which is the basis of his tonal plexus keyboard. I bought one of these keyboards from him and have been trying to wrap my brain around those possibilities ever since; it will probably take the rest of my life.

Yet even if there are more usable words than pitches, or perhaps more words that are generally comprehensible to others, we use language differently than we use music. We use language to do just about every activity in our lives and we all learned how to speak before we had any notion of how words should be put together. Since language skills are instilled in us and are a necessary part of functioning within society, words should come more naturally than music. Even though music is something I firmly believe every human being is capable of playing as well as creating, societies often instill the idea that making music is a specialized skill (and creating it an even more rarified endeavor). As a result, most people feel uncomfortable making music whereas they still use language every day of their lives—since it’s nearly impossible not to. So shouldn’t it be much easier to create lyrics than to create music?

I consider myself a composer and I labor over every single note I choose to share with other people, sometimes for months. I spend much more of my time writing words and far more people have read my words than have ever heard a note of my music. Yet an essay—such as the one you are currently reading—is something I can usually crank out in a little over an hour. Admittedly when I was much younger, I wrote music much faster than I currently do and it was an agony to string words together on a page. I used to brag about writing a piano concerto in nine days, but in hindsight that’s a piece I no longer care if people ever hear. Then again, my prose, poetry, and song lyrics from that time are also unworthy of exhumation.

So then why do others think that it’s easier to write music than it is to write words? Maybe because words are something we are all engaged in, the stakes feel higher somehow. We can do anything with music; our choices with words are much more limited since the functionality of language demands that it has a higher level of comprehensibility. Even though Gertrude Stein started writing prose that defied syntax and coherence over a century ago and many poets and prose writers have explored similar terrain, verbal experimentation seems an even less mainstream activity than playing around with more than 12 pitches. But that contradicts Sid’s million words vs. 12 (or 205) pitches argument.

Then again, effectively putting music to words seems to require that the composer be able to deeply internalize those words and make them his or her own. This is something that can be incredibly difficult to do if those words are not yours as well. Perhaps songwriters have a much easier job of it than folks who only write music since the words they are writing music to are already theirs.