Category: Sound Ideas

Sound Ideas: Prompt #4

Write a direct melody.

Write the most directly communicative melody that you can. Don’t worry about it being cheesy. Don’t worry about it being obvious. It will be. Or it won’t be. It doesn’t matter. Worry about it being very clear. Make it about a direct emotion.

Record it or write it down.

Now it’s your turn: write, record, or otherwise draft your response using any method that suits your style and skills, then share it in comments. You can embed a SoundCloud player, a YouTube video, a link to a score file—whatever works. Here at NewMusicBox, we talk about music a lot. This project is our way of shifting focus and actually making some music, too. We can’t wait to hear what everyone creates.—MS

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Sxip Shirey

Sxip Shirey is a composer and performer who lives in New York City. His music is beautiful, surprising, deep and will twist your head right around. Ecstatic melody, unimaginable sounds, and deep sexy beats played using Industrial Flutes, Bullhorn Harmonicas, Regurgitated Music Box, Triple Extended Pennywhistls, Miniature Hand Bell Choir, Obnoxiophone, Glass Bowls With Red Marbles, human beat box, and a clutch of curious objects.

Sound Ideas: Prompt #3

Imagine you’re at a new music concert. The artist or ensemble performing is really great, but they open with a few pieces that don’t speak to you. Everything seems grey. You drift into a dull torpor, hardly paying attention. But then, suddenly, it’s as if the air changes: you’re hearing something so outrageously compelling that it registers viscerally, and you snap awake. “What on earth is this?!” you ask yourself with breathless impatience. The music need not be rousing, per se—in fact, it may be the most tranquil, serene you’ve ever heard—but it has a profound urgency and resonance with you that shocks you with its arrival, rendering all other noise in your brain irrelevant.

What does this music sound like? Think big picture (affect, language, texture), but even more importantly, think small picture (motive, rhythm, etc.) Force yourself to hear details. Write down the first idea you have, without judgment; the aim is to get at what needs expression most urgently. There will be something instructive in your gut reaction.

Now it’s your turn: write, record, or otherwise draft your response using any method that suits your style and skills, then share it in comments. You can embed a SoundCloud player, a YouTube video, a link to a score file—whatever works. Here at NewMusicBox, we talk about music a lot. This project is our way of shifting focus and actually making some music, too. We can’t wait to hear what everyone creates.—MS

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Sarah Kirkland Snider

Many of composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s works strive for an indifference to boundaries of style or genre. On October 26, 2010, Sarah released her first album, Penelope, a song cycle with lyrics by Ellen McLaughlin, featuring Shara Worden and Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman. Upcoming projects include commissions for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus for the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s “Reboot” Season, the American Pianists Association, Third Coast Percussion, and violist Nadia Sirota. Since 2007 she has served as co-director, along with William Brittelle and Judd Greenstein, of New Amsterdam Records, a Brooklyn-based independent record label.

Sound Ideas: Prompt #2

Composing is an identity forming ritual. It also teaches us to identify sounds we love and to commit to them in a form. I like to think that each of us has a melody that can stand for us long after we are gone.

Compose that melody by singing it. And when you have it, write it down. And share it.

Now it’s your turn: write, record, or otherwise draft your response using any method that suits your style and skills, then share it in comments. You can embed a SoundCloud player, a YouTube video, a link to a score file—whatever works. Here at NewMusicBox, we talk about music a lot. This project is our way of shifting focus and actually making some music, too. We can’t wait to hear what everyone creates.—MS

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Ken Ueno - Photo by Rob McIver

Ken Ueno – Photo by Rob McIver

A Rome Prize and Berlin Prize winner, Ken Ueno, is a composer/vocalist who is currently an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. As a vocalist, he specializes in extended techniques, such as multiphonics, circular breathing, and throat singing. Musicians who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian, Robyn Schulkowsky, eighth blackbird, Alarm Will Sound, BMOP, SFCMP, and Frances-Marie Uitti. The Hilliard Ensemble has featured Ken’s Shiroi Ishi in their repertoire for over a decade. A former ski patrol and West Point cadet, Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Sound Ideas: Prompt #1

crooked roadVariations on A Theme by La Monte Young

In 1960 La Monte Young prompted us:

“Draw a straight line and follow it.”

The reverberations of this radically simple directive have been vast and profound.

But aside from those that we humans create, there are few if any straight lines in nature. So, fifty-two years later, I’d like to propose Variations on A Theme by La Monte Young:

“Find a crooked line and follow it.”

You may choose to realize this in purely visual terms. Or you may want to follow your crooked line and sound it.

You might walk along a shoreline, singing or playing as you go. You might trace a fixed elevation line as it meanders along a hillside, perhaps translating the contour from a map into musical notation. You might follow the course of a stream and record its changing voices.

Maybe you trace in sound the forms of clouds in the sky. Maybe you choose to travel from Point A to Point B as directly as you can, but the crooked line you follow is the rise and fall of the earth beneath your feet.

Step off the rectilinear grid that we impose on the world and wander wherever the infinitely intricate curves of nature may lead you. Alternatively, you might remain in one place and let the lines come to you.

There should be as many possible variations on this theme as there are crooked lines in the world.

And then there’s the possibility of a polyphony of such lines…

Now it’s your turn: write, record, or otherwise draft your response using any method that suits your style and skills, then share it in comments. You can embed a SoundCloud player, a YouTube video, a link to a score file—whatever works. Here at NewMusicBox, we talk about music a lot. This project is our way of shifting focus and actually making some music, too. We can’t wait to hear what everyone creates.—MS

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John Luther Adams

John Luther Adams, whom critic Alex Ross has called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century,” has created a unique musical world rooted in wilderness landscapes and natural phenomena. His music, which includes works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, soloists, and electronic media, is recorded on the Cold Blue, New World, Cantaloupe, Mode, and New Albion labels. Adams’s books Winter Music and, most recently, The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music are published by Wesleyan University Press, and his writings about music and nature have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies.

Sing, Sing Your Song

Next week we’re starting an experiment here at NewMusicBox we’re calling “Sound Ideas.” The concept is this: We’re going to ask you—yes you, sitting there, reading this post—to create music and share it. And the “we” isn’t just anyone, either. It’s John Luther Adams, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Sxip Shirey, and Ken Ueno.

Once a week we’ll post a prompt from each of these four composers which they’ve crafted to inspire sonic creation. If the idea resonates with you, write, record, invent or otherwise draft something new using any method that suits your style and skills, then share it in comments. You can embed a SoundCloud player, a YouTube video, a link to a score file—whatever works.

Here at NewMusicBox, we talk about music a lot. This project is our way of shifting focus and actually making some music, too. We can’t wait to hear what everyone creates.

If you hate to wait, you can get a jump start using Sweat Lodge’s “New Music Composition Tool,” the ultimate “get unstuck” emergency response kit featuring one six-sided die and two lists of options. Fair warning, however: you could find yourself writing a “Super Long Opera” about a “Dead Person That Everyone Can Agree On.” Hope you didn’t have plans this weekend.

Sweat Lodge's “New Music Composition Tool”

See you next week!