Ted: I’m a master of cryptography.

Ted: You actually can’t export me to Syria.

It seems like an impossibly long time ago, but once upon a time, it was actually summer.  It was warm and sunny, and life was considerably more carefree than it has been since school started up again.  I was working my internship, singing with my a cappella group, and more or less just having the time of my life.  One weekend, a friend of mine who’d recently graduated and was working for Microsoft Games (Hi Karena!) decided to get a bunch of people together for a night of good ‘ole fashioned karaoke.

You see, before there was Rock Band, before there was Karaoke Revolution, there was karaoke.  Straight up karaoke, complete with terrible MIDI instrumental tracks, questionable transcriptions of song lyrics, giant tomes full of song titles and six-digit codes, and more reverb than anyone could ever possibly need.

So I found myself with around 12 other people, most of whom I didn’t know, in a little Asian karaoke place somewhere in the middle of Seattle.  We didn’t have much in common other than we were all friends with Karena, but we sang anyways.  We sang the classics, we sang Backstreet Boys, we sang harmonies with each other, we sang in key, we sang off key.  Hell, we even sang the guitar parts to “Knights of Cydonia” by Muse, complete with requisite headbanging and hardcoreness.

It was good times.

In my composition class the other day, while doing a harmonic analysis of a minuet & trio:

Isn’t that just about the worst chord in the worst inversion (iii64) you could possibly use as a pivot ever?

Yeah, but when you get to real music and you’re Haydn, you can do these things.

Basically, what happens when you progress to the third class in the MIT Music department’s composition offerings, you start tearing apart the system of nice-to-haves and never-dos that you’ve spent the past two semesters building up.  Rules turn into guidelines, and eventually turn into recipes for writing boring, formulaic music.  As my professor told me: writing one parallel octave is a mistake, writing 23 in a row is exciting.

Why did you write that voice leading there?  It doesn’t quite resolve the 7th regularly.

I don’t know. It sounds beautiful to me.

Somewhere in between the 12 hours of dance per week I’m putting in, the composition class I’m taking, and the Romantic music analysis class I’m taking, I’ve found some time to discover something a little bit comforting about the nature of art.  And by art, I mean the larger sense of the word.  Music, dance, Python, whatever tickles your inner sense of pretension.

The struggle between form and freedom.

That is the only reason I have yet to write a Python script to automagically generate my composition assignments for me.  It honestly would not be terribly difficult, because there are enough rules in play for many of the assignments that one only makes a few decisions before the rest of the notes just inexorably fall into place.  Writing music is not about being correct though.  Writing music is about that moment when you accidentally play a sharp instead of a natural, and you notice that it sounds infinitely more exciting (after all, what could possibly be more exciting than a misplaced augmented chord?), or when you deliberately scatter unresolved melodic lines about a deceptively complete harmonic cadence to nag at the minds of your listeners.

Rules give these little transgressions a framework.

You can’t really break rules for fun and profit if there aren’t any rules to begin with.  Rules create expectations and tendencies, and only then can you manipulate those forces to add some pizazz to your plain ‘ole I-IV-V-I progression.  Breaking, as an improvised dance, would be incredibly difficult to pull off without a huge vocabulary of moves and sequences to draw from.  It would also be incredibly boring if that’s all anyone ever did.  There is a sense among bboys that whatever you decide to do, be it adding some Latin flair to your style, freezing completely when nobody expects it, or running around pretending to be an airplane, if you do it convincingly and with confidence, then it works.

In math, 1+1 will always equal 2.  In art, 1+1 could equal 2, but it might equal 22 if it’s more beautiful that way.