Space In Music

Subject: Space In Music
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 08:08 AM

Been thinking. These days with mass choirs with three keyboards, two guitars, a bass, drums and canned excitement, gospel music seems to me to be crammed to the gills with notes and voices. Much of Rock and Roll and popular music feels the same to me. It's as if there was a sense that if you record on a 32 track machine, you have to use all 32 tracks. Most folk music and country seems to avoid falling in to that trap. At least up until now. I think that what always brings me back to folk music, early rhythm and blues (with groups often accompanied only by a piano and drums) the old black gospel and jazz is that there is enough space for me to savor the interplay of voices and instruments. Recording equipment may have 32 tracks, but I don't think my head has more than five or six. Any more than that, and my head starts to reel.

As in painting, and literature, furniture design (think Shaker furniture) and drama, it's the space that focuses our minds on what is being expressed. It can be the nuance of a silent glance in a movie or just a sustained chord of a vocal group that says far more to me than an exploding 18 wheeler plummeting off the side of the George Washington Bridge, or 100 voices shouting Glory!

Anyone else feel this way?

Jerry

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Phil Cooper
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 08:19 AM

I think you're right, Jerry. The space can be as important as the notes played.

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 08:20 AM

Oh yeah... watched Picnic last night, and the most sensual moments in the languorous dance with William Holden and Kim Novak to Moonglow and the Theme From Picnic (one of my very favorite recordings) were at the points in the music where they stop and stand completely silent, looking in to each other's eyes. The moment when nothing seems to be happening, and yet everything is.

Jerry

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Jeri
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 08:35 AM

The imagination flourishes in what isn't.
Nothing wrong with a good bridge plumment or 100-voice 'glory', but if it's a recording, it's going to sound the same way in your head every time you hear it. If it's got that sparseness where the artist leaves places for you to fill, it inspires, and you can hear the music differently every time you listen.

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 08:52 AM

Contrast!

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: C-flat
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 09:19 AM

I couldn't agree more about leaving space and room for expression. As with guitarists, the really good ones know what not to play.
Anyone who has spend 5 minutes in the sales business knows the power of silence and how to use it, although in that sense, it's a silence crying out to be filled rather than savoured.
I think the tendency to over-produce records has been replaced with a more "stripped down" sound in a lot of modern music but there are still plenty of young producers who feel that their equipment and abilities aren't being fully utilised if they haven't got everything working to capacity!
I was doing some recording recently with a friend who was making his first ever venture into a studio. The recording engineer listened to what my friend wanted, recorded the two tracks, added my guitar work to it and suggested we come back in a couple of days to listen to the finished item.
I had warned my pal that a lot of these engineers have their own ideas on what music should sound like but he was still taken aback by the sheer amount of extraneous instrumentation and heavy drum tracks that all but obliterated what were originally simple and melodic songs.
Fortunately modern recording equipment has so many free tracks to use, none of that "bouncing" tracks together like we used to do in the good-old-days, so it was a simple enough matter to begin stripping the tracks back down to a more acceptable level, but it's amazing how many people think that "more" is better instead of looking for subtle ways to accent what is already there.
Spaces, pauses, stops, whatever, are all great song-writing tools and, used well, can greatly add to the message, so lets hear less!!

C-flat.

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 09:34 AM

A full size piano keyboard has 88 keys.

You don't have to press them all at once...
it wasn't designed with that intent...

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Charley Noble
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 09:56 AM

Space is the final frontier!

Someone had to post this and I plead guilty.

Charley Noble

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 10:44 AM

Poor General Pause - he is so underestimated and should be put back in his rightful existence! No stomp of feet, no banging drums - just silence - till the bloody symphnonicians let break loose hell ...

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: mack/misophist
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 10:56 AM

Absolutely! Among the examples, allow me to add the Chinese paintings that leave everything blank save for one corner.

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 12:23 PM

When I think of the folk albums that mean the most to me, the two that still sound as fresh and new as the day I first heard them are the Old Time Music At Clarence Ashley's albums with Doc Watson, and a Piedmont album by Mississippi John Hurt. The recording equipment may not have been nearly as sophisticated as contemporary studios, but I feel like I could step through the speakers, and right into a living room where Clarence, Doc and Mississippi John are playing. Plenty of space to walk in and move around.

Jerry

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Mooh
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 02:59 PM

Right on.

I play in one such folk group, with 6 or 7 others. Much ado, nothing accomplished sometimes. I've oftimes complained that we don't need a mandolin, bouzouki, and guitar all at once, it clutters up their respective ranges terribly. (If I suggest a switch to bass, it prevents others from switching to non-rhythm instruments (it seems), so I remain the guitarist/time-keeper.) Same happens vocally.

I much prefer smaller combos like the rockin' blues group I'm in. Drums, bass (me), guitar/vocal, sax. Even last week when we added an extra sax and trumpet, the brass acted as a sub-entity and didn't clutter up the sound.

Along with those 32 tracks comes a tendency for producers to take the crisp timbres out of instruments in a "wash" of sound. Reverb and chorus effects, never mind distortion, can make it all sound mushy to my ears. Dis-similar reverb on instruments in the same tune drives me crazy too, as if each were played in different rooms...so much for a "live" feel.

Peace, Mooh.

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Cluin
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 03:30 PM

Excellent thread, Jerry. Nice to see one of those around here.

Yes, we always try to leave a bit of air betweeen the instruments. And work some dynamics into the songs. That includes some effective silence or near-silence. Just because you're standing there with your instrument doesn't mean you have to play ALL the way through the tune.

I'm also a visual artist and I know the effect of space in a work; I often think of music in a "visual" way... that doesn't mean a video or in how it looks to observers; it's a way of visualizing what I hear to "see" it in a new way. It goes the other way too.

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: GUEST,Bob Coltman
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 04:17 PM

Yeah.. I play the banjo that way sometimes, plunk the notes into isolation and just let the silence ring around them.

Music can get way too busy. I intentionally put emptiness in my songs. That is the life of them.

Bob

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 05 Sep 05 - 06:06 PM

Cluin:

When I write songs, there are times when I feel that I am writing the soundtrack for a movie that is in the listener's head. Forget the kid who "sees dead people." I see songs.

Yeah, I hear your music, Bob. The instruments never compete with the songs, and that's the way that I like it. That's especially important to me when I sing gospel. If you can't hear every word, then the message is lost, and there's no sense in singing it.

Jerry

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: synbyn
Date: 06 Sep 05 - 05:47 PM

Dead right- just reviewed Derek Gifford's new CD Sunny Corners and because he leaves the space, the power of the singer / listener relationship whacks you between the eyes. Makes it worth the lyricists' time, too!

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Kaleea
Date: 06 Sep 05 - 06:53 PM

Jeepers, when I saw "Space in Music" I heard ( in my minds' ear) the Fanfare to 2001 A Space Odyssey!

   I'm getting so senile these days I can't remember--was it the Ellington who said, "It's not what you play that counts, it's what you don't play?"

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: sian, west wales
Date: 07 Sep 05 - 09:53 AM

I'm not a school teacher so don't know a lot about the National Curriculum in Britain, but I understand that, in England, the Music curriculum has X number of elements - I think it's 8; things like rhythm, harmony, dynamics, etc. In Wales, there are X+1 elements; the extra one is something like 'pause' or 'silence' or 'space' or something. Whatever. It's what you're talking about here. Nice to think that someone in the Welsh infrastructure thought of including this!

Sorry - a rather prosaic post, but ...

sian

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: mooman
Date: 07 Sep 05 - 10:18 AM

Totally with you on this Jerry. I think the spaces are as important as the notes.

To quote Dizzy Gillespie:

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

Peace

moo

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 07 Sep 05 - 10:32 AM

When I did my first album for Folk Legacy I commented in the liner notes that I felt that when I reached the Pearly Gates, I would be held accountable for every note I ever played, so I'd better use them wisely.

Jerry

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: Wesley S
Date: 07 Sep 05 - 10:59 AM

I think the same things can be said about films today. The directors are not happy unless there is an edit every 2.3758 seconds. No long lingering looks at an actors face so we can discover for ourselves what the charactor is thinking. None of the classic directors would be able to get a job in Hollywood today.

For regular listening I find myself drawn to recordings where I can hear just a few instruments recorded well. As if the musicians were sitting in a room playing together - not building it track by track in a studio.

Subject: RE: Space In Music
From: dwditty
Date: 07 Sep 05 - 03:25 PM

To my ear, there is no finer example of spaces in the music than in the playing of Joseph Spence. I especially like his version of When Santa Claus Is Coming to Town which is almost diametrically opposed to a Christmas song. Oh, and Glory Glory, too. Um...and Comin' in On a Wing and a Prayer! and.....

Those spaces just plain make me smile.

dw