I think these songs are incredible. (You don’t have to listen to all of them. These are links to Spotify.)
Amber
Saor/Free/News From Nowhere
Madrid
Rebeca’s Waltz
They are all beautiful and emotional and, interestingly, slow. I usually listen to incredibly fast music. Having a lot of stuff happen all at once keeps me engaged and gets me excited. Slow music bores me. Except for these songs, of course. Something about them is different.
I think it’s because these songs still have a lot going on. Much of slow music goes back and forth between a couple of chords and has few instruments. In contrast, these songs have rich textures and plays many instruments off each other. Even Rebecca’s Waltz, which only has a guitar, has a colorful harmonic structure. This richness draws me these songs. I have a two-hour long playlist of just slow music, and all of the songs on it are complex in this way.
Most of the fast music I lsten to has the same characteristic – there are a lot of instruments playing complex lines. These songs, though, are much more delicate. For instance, I have a workout playlist filled with very fast music – the type of stuff that is so exciting you have to move your body to it. I use ti to motivate me to run. And most of the songs on it, I listen to on a regular basis, and they get me just as excited when I’m sitting still. These slow songs have a very different effect on me. They make me more reflective, even sad. There have been a couple times I almost started crying listening to them.
I’m sure nothing I’ve said so far is very controversial. I’m setting up for question that I just realized bugs me quite a bit. Why is it that I write only fast music? The slowest song on this website is 140 beats per minute. There are entire genres of music that never get that fast. What’s more, the slow music I have written isn’t very satisfying. My pieces Everyday Warfare and Going Alone have slow sections, and they come out flat. In Going Alone, I unceremoniously transition out of the slow section without any set-up, as though I got bored of the 120 BPM I was working with (that’s slow for me). To be honest, I distinctly remember that when I wrote that song, I was planning on making most of it insanely fast and only wrote the introduction as an excuse to get to the exciting parts.
This is why I spent so much time making obvious observations about music above. I’ve decided I want to figure out how to write slow music. I haven’t given up on fast music. I still prefer it most of the time. But there’s a lot to be said for how much more beauty can be drawn out of a slower piece as well.
From our discussion so far, I think the slow pieces I’ll write will still be complicated. To me, this means that they should be polyphonic, create several different textures over time, and avoid traditional harmonic structures in favor of more colorful ones. I think the biggest challenge to writing this style of music, and the reason I’ve shied away from trying it so far, is because slow music is much more delicate to create. If a fast song ends up sounding brash and repetitive and noisy, that’s actually a good thing. If there are a few notes that aren’t in exactly the right spot, it may be impossible to notice. I’ve had to make melodic decisions in fast songs before where I realized that it didn’t matter which option I took – the song was fast enough that all my options had precisely the same emotional effect.
Slow music is entirely different. Not only does every single note need to be perfect, it needs to be articulated in just the right way as well. Long notes’ textures need to change over time to convey emotion. This is not the easiest thing in electronic music. Most notes have a start time, an end time, and information about how loudly to play, and besides that, they all sound exactly the same. More articulation needs to be added manually and stored outside of the note information. I may need to just record acoustic instruments to get the detail a slow song requires. I confess that I’ve never made musical recordings before!
But clearly, it’s worth the effort. Those four songs are incredibly captivating. Besides that, MIDI technology offers many tools to make fine-grained adjustments to synthesizers, so detail work isn’t as bad as I made it seem. With practice, I’ll learn to be patient enough.