Lessons Learned: Cooking

Hello, and welcome back to Lessons Learned, where we’re all about stealing from other creative media and applying their unique concepts to composition. Today I’m going to be talking about cooking. I’ve long been a fan of the cooking-to-composition metaphor, and every established composer to whom I’ve mentioned it has loved it as well. Cuisine, as it turns out, has a lot of cross-applications to composition, two of which I’ll discuss below. Before I begin in earnest, though, I’ll just note that I’m re-writing this post for the second time because my computer at my job, where I do most of my writing for these things, couldn’t figure out how to save the document. So, if this post seems like it was haphazardly thrown together in an afternoon, that’s because it was.

Lesson 1: Parts of a Whole

                Back in my youth, when I was still learning to cook, I was left at home alone for a weekend while the rest of my family went camping. On one of those evenings, I was feeling experimental and decided to throw a bunch of my favourite spices into a meatball dish I was making. The result was, perhaps predictably, inedible: it turns out that cinnamon, cardamom, allspice, garlic powder, and cumin don’t mix particularly well together on top of turkey meatballs. This experience taught me a lesson that I’ve carried with me into my composing work: no matter how great a single element of a piece may be, it’s only ever going to be one part of a greater whole.

                This is a principle that’s applied to every piece I’ve written thus far, and will probably apply to all the music I write in the future. In the beginning of my process, I will sometimes generate elements with vastly different flavour, whether it be harmonic, rhythmic, or timbral. One of the most important skills I’m learning to develop is that of identifying which elements belong in a given piece and which don’t – for instance, a dominant seventh chord might sound jarring in a piece built from a twelve-tone series that doesn’t privilege that particular harmony. Often, these decisions can be heartbreaking: for each piece, I can name at least a half dozen times where I needed to dump material or cut extraneous elements out. Nevertheless, neglecting this process can result in a piece that’s a muddled, incoherent mess.

Lesson 2: Find your Flour

I’ve never eaten raw flour, but I’ve been told that it’s not a pleasant experience. On its own, flour is relatively inert: it remains in its present state for months or even years if stored properly. When combined with water, however, it becomes gluten, a structure for all manner of delicious doughs. Once flour is transformed this way, it can’t return to its original state. It’s a foundational element, a staple in a plethora of dishes that can inhabit various gradations of texture from pastry dough to bread to cake batter, depending on what it’s combined with.

When I’m putting a piece together, I always to try to find that piece’s flour – a unifying concept or artifice that ties elements into a coherent bundle. It could be a concept or a concrete musical idea, but I most often find that my flour is texture. I can mess around with harmonies and rhythms all day, but I usually can’t do anything with my materials until I have a moment-to-moment framework into which I can slot my materials. Texture accomplishes this task handily: a simple decision of which elements are going to take the foreground and which are going to sit in the middleground and background allows me to glue my elements together in the form of one or more musical phrases. Once I’ve got three or four phrases, the piece begins to write itself.

This process of finding flour is, for me, the hardest part of composition. The only way to know whether or not a texture will be appropriate is to write it out and listen back to it in my head, a process that could take up an entire composing day and gets deeply frustrating after the first few tries. Nevertheless, simply identifying this part of the process has helped me structure my composing time; if I know that it’s time to look for flour, I can make sure to set up my environment and schedule so that I have plenty of time and room to stim, pace around, sing to myself, and write things down without having to commit to an idea I don’t like. Hopefully, this metaphor will help you in this process as well.

Conclusion: the Ineffable

                While I stand by the above comparisons as metaphors that have helped me refine my composing process, I also think that breaking down music and food into their component elements brings a risk of mistaking a dish or piece, for an exact sum of its parts. In truth, there’s something ineffable about food in the way that chemical elements interact in conjunction with forces of heat, cold, and fermentation. A pizza isn’t just melted cheese, toppings, and sauce on top of cooked dough, after all; it’s a goddamn pizza. In training for composition, we’re often taught to look for specifics: notes and rhythms that add to or detract from a piece, structural elements that can be described with words, instrumental techniques that can be physically performed. It is, without a doubt, necessary to be able to identify these specifics; however, the more music I write, the more I realize that there’s something more to each piece, something that only results from the combination of elements and can’t be directly identified.

                Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this week’s ramblings and I doubly hope that someone, anyone, learned something from them. I’ve managed to post on time for two straight weeks now, so that means I’m a good writer and deserve a nice treat and prime search results and nothing I say or do for the next little while can be impeached. See you next week!