I had a revelation a few weeks ago that I need to get out onto paper (albeit digital paper). It concerns my philosophy of ambient music, and more specifically it concerns the ambient music I want to compose. I was listening to the song “The Whaler” by the band Thrice. It comes from an album that depicts fire, water, air, and earth. This song falls under the water section, which is the moodiest and most atmospheric section of the album. I realized a key thing while listening: the song doesn’t talk about water for water’s sake. It creates a metaphor linking the sea to strong emotions of loss and disconnection (“Will you be coming home to me?”). The song ends with a very ambient choir of voices. I realized a second key thing listening to this section: the song makes the ambience beautiful, not the other way around.
When I compose ambient music, I usually use the ambience as a starting point to craft a song. This creates a void of emotion. Just read my artistic philosophy taken from my Soundcloud.com webpage:
“Ambient music can be defined as a type of music that evokes a ‘sonic geography’. In other words, the music creates an atmosphere that helps transport you to a landscape, environment, or place. This is the aesthetic I use to approach my compositions. Many of my pieces contain very little in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, or form. Rather, it features slowly developing washes of texture, timbre, and colors of sound.”
There is very little warmth there. On the other hand, the haunting lyrics in the Thrice song make the ambience a much more potent musical device. I would like to resolve this disconnect. I want to find a way to inject life and emotion into my ambient music. That’s when an idea hit me. Ambient music architects these sonic environments for the listener to temporarily reside in. One idea would be to craft this environment as a thinking space (or, I think the compose John Adams once used the term “memory space”). The listener can bring their emotions into this space and use the time to untangle their feelings.
Immediately after I started to contemplate this, another idea spawned out of this idea. Again, ambient music is in the business of creating environments. Why not encourage the listener to reimagine the environment they are listening to? The ambient music would be a miniature exercise in helping the listener imagine “how to make the world a brighter place”. It would be a thought experiment on how to change the world for the better. There is a quote from George Bernard Shaw that is very apt: “Some men see things the way they are and ask, why? Some men dream of things that never were and ask, why not?”
This is my new philosophy. Putting this into practice and making an actual ambient composition that fits this philosophy is going to be difficult. I predict it will take many years before I solidify this idea into something tangible. In the meantime, it can’t hurt to try. I sure am excited.
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