Composer's Diary

Here lately I've had the great good fortune of having some of the music I've composed over the years performed for audiences larger than the usual handful of musical friends and family members. What has most surprised me about the audience reactions has been the number of people telling me how emotionally moving they found the music. In writing music, trying to evoke feelings in the audience is not something I'm consciously trying to do. My main concern is with coherence, that the music flows with some sort of organic unity, all the while maintaining the audience's interest.

What these audience comments about the emotional nature of the music makes me realize is that I must make the decisions as to where the music goes based on how it feels to me, not just what makes structural sense. The thing is, though, the main thing I'm feeling when writing music is what effort it takes to keep at it through numerous false turns and detours before something I'm happy with emerges. The audience, on the other hand, is blissfully unaware of all that, and gets to flow along with the music and have various emotions evoked by all the little choices I made along the way which ended up working.

One other reaction to my music that absolutely made my heart sing was from Charles, who plays oboe in Rapidan, conducts the Orange Community Band, is a fine composer himself, and who instantly nailed the Darius Milhaud influence on Timepiece when I gave him the link years ago to the Fringe Festival performance. At a rehearsal leading up to our playing the orchestral arrangement of Timepiece he came up to me and said he was really enjoying it because it was "fun to play." For a music therapist, it doesn't get much better than that.

Timepiece Orchestration

The original Timepiece is a woodwind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon) written for a friend back in 1996. The title comes from my having loved Dave Brubeck's Time Out album in my early teenage years. Its most famous track is Take Five with five beats per measure, but there's also Blue Rondo á la Turk with nine beats a measure, with some measures in a 1,2; 1,2; 1,2; 1,2,3 rhythm. The idea of mixed rhythms stuck with me and when I started composing music thirty years later, they were fun to work with, and let me write music that has a fresh sound without being abstrusely avant garde.

The first movement is in measures of 1,2,3; 1,2; 1,2, which is cleanly stated by the bassoon in the opening measures. The second movement is in plain old triple time - measures of 1,2,3. The third movement is in measures of 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3,4 with the clarinet laying out the rhythm in the opening measures.

Two summers ago I was able to commission Tal Benatar, a former Rapidan conductor, to orchestrate the piece and these fall concerts are the first performances of that orchestration.

(This post is a first go at writing something for the program. For audio of the original quintet, more history, and early performance notes, go here.)

Anechoic Chamber

Back in the 60's I had the opportunity to go into an anechoic chamber, a room especially constructed to absorb nearly all sound waves. There's a picture of one here. I found it an uncanny and unsettling experience. Something about getting zero auditory feedback from the environment made me weirdly anxious and I made a hasty exit.

I went looking for that picture not long after I went down to Durham last month to hear a performance of Timepiece, a wind quintet I wrote some time ago. The performance was at a very nice senior living community. The auditorium where the performance took place was especially engineered for amplified sound, and part of that included very sound absorbent walls, floor and ceiling. 

I've never needed a microphone to speak in a room that size, but I did in this one. Because there was zero reverberation, without the microphone my voice just sort of disappeared. With the microphone my voice was much louder than usual, but with all the sound absorption there was no boominess or feedback - and ideal setup for a population with more than average hearing loss.

The wind quintet was not amplified. The horn and oboe were OK with that, but the bassoon, flute and clarinet had to work to be heard. And since there was absolutely no reverberation there was no blending of the timbres of the instruments - I could hear each one individually at all times, but never heard all the blending of the timbres, which to me is the soul of the piece. What really got to me was that when the quintet was warming up in another room with much better acoustics, they got the blends wonderfully well.

Timepiece Performance

This is the poster for a performance of Timepiece down in Durham, NC next week. That it's going to be just off Duke's West Campus where I went to school all those years ago is just some sort of cosmic coincidence. 

Narratives and Enactments

Here a couple of weeks ago Craig, an oboe playing friend from conservatory days, commented on Facebook how much he was enjoying a piece with a 5/4 time signature. I sent him a email talking about how much I enjoy irregular rhythms and included links to The Sashay and Timepiece. He asked for the music to The Sashay (and a midi file, which I had to figure out how to do). He's liking The Sashay enough to work on it and send me mp3 files of each version he's recorded with his oboe, adding some hand percussion, a bass, and tweaking the midi harp playback.

For one thing, he's a wonderful oboeist and I'm having a similar response to the one I had hearing The St Clements Wind Ensemble play Timepiece. Really good players take notes I've written and bring out depths of musicality I simply was unable to even imagine before hearing them.

Another thing that strikes me is that the piece is really holding up with the different instrumentation. I can't wait to compare it to what Susan and Carol do with it, but I'm pretty sure the evoked feelings will be different, though with some overlap. I'm enough of a chauvinist to think two Louisiana ladies with flute and harp are going to excel at evoking the flirtatious movements and banter that was in the back of my mind when I wrote it for them and that I hope is gesturally embedded in the music. 

They have also been steered in that direction because of my having long conversations with Susan detailing what I was thinking at various measures along the way. She suggested I do a post of all those mental visuals that helped me compose the music, but I didn't, and Craig's work is helping me understand my reluctance.

Sometime back I linked to a post of Kyle Gann's where he said he thought of his music scores as lines for a play, that different players and groups of players would perform them differently, just as plays are performed/produced differently. I agree with that wholeheartedly. My feeling is that if when composing music I make it coherent enough for me to feel a musical narrative run from measure to measure, then players will be able to sense that narrative in their own way and enact it convincingly, even if their sense of the narrative is different from mine.

And that's what Craig has done. His take on The Sashay is exceptionally dance-like, and I think because of his amazingly textured oboe sound combining with the unusual rhythms there's an Armenian, near Eastern, Scheherazade feel to what he's doing. He keeps sending updated mp3s that clean up various things, but here soon I hope to do one of those simple YouTube embed posts with the audio as it stands now. Then blog readers can decide for themselves whether there's a convincing narrative and what a particular enactment does with it.

One of the things I most enjoyed back when I had the private practice in San Antonio was the yearly recitals with various clients playing various instruments. There were always a few piano players and I always had all of them play one piece in common with the others, along with the things only they were doing. Hearing different players present their individual enactments of  the same piece was always a wonderful illustration of just how expressive of our personalities making music can be.

Timepiece : Index

I'm delighted to say some people have requested parts and scores for Timepiece and that they've been sent out. Down the road there may be more recorded versions to put up here on the blog, so I'm putting one of those Blogger Gadgets over on the right to enable clicking straight through to this list of the relevant posts, which will be updated as needed.

Here's the audio of the St Clements Wind Ensemble performing it.

Here's the history of the piece.

Here are the performance notes.

Click here for all the posts mentioning the piece.

V.S. Composing Motivation

I've gotten back to work on Louisiana Sashay and am thinking about not doing anymore measure by measure commentary, but waiting until it's finished and put up audio of the computer playing it and make a few comments then. This post is to expand on something that was more allusively present than clearly stated toward the end of this post.

Back in the 70's a college friend developed a real talent for black and white photography. One time I asked him what it was that gave his photos a particular feeling consistency. He thought what I might be referring to was his notion that when one looks at one of his photos, there should be no sense of the ego that took it. As evanescent as that idea is, I knew exactly what he was saying and it perfectly explained what I was seeing (or not seeing) in his work.

Back when I was younger, the music I wrote, mostly imitative of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, was full of ego. Dylan's line, "little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously," comes to mind. Now, though, what ego that's present (I hope!) is just a reflection of how I go about playing the musical game I've set myself with the initial parameters of a piece. I'm never consciously trying "to say" anything. I just want the music to flow from its own nature, be fun for the players to play, and fresh to the ears of the audience. 

Having come of age in the age of angst, with academic atonalists trying to broaden my bourgeois mind and poseurs being trivially transgressive, all I want from my music is that it's fun and engaging to play. Fulfilling that simple requirement, for me, provides a much more valuable experience than trying to carry all that ego luggage.

Here's the last paragraph of the performance notes I sent out with the score and parts of Timepiece:

The feeling tone of the piece is meant to be completely

positive. No angst, anger or depression. Playfulness and
joy, yearning and reverence, exhilaration and celebration
were more of what I had in mind. If you (and an audience)
feel uplifted after playing it, mission accomplished.

Music/Spiritual Practice

This post by Pliable gets at something I've tried to talk about here from time to time, i.e. the parallels between engagement in music and engagement in a spiritual path. He's talking about Zen Buddhism, but I think other paths would qualify for this discussion.

Accepting parallels between engaging new listeners and transmission as practiced in Zen Buddhism takes us down an interesting path. Transmission is totally dependant on physical interaction between teacher and student.

His use of the word "transmission" implies something of more value than mere entertainment to pass the time. "Physical interaction" allows for the deeper communication possible with embodied cognition and mirror neurons. It also allows for the connection between the performer and audience Hilary Hahn has spoken of.

All the dogmas that have developed around reaching new audiences involve adding insulating layers between performer and listener; these range from performance conventions to digital concert halls and virtual orchestras. Yet, if the analogy between classical music and transmission is valid, the process should be reversed. We do not need more intermediate layers. Instead we need high voltages to flow between superconductors (pun not intended) in close promiximity to one another. Which means more live music, physical interaction between audience and performers, music education, music therapy, amateur, youth and scratch orchestras and similar initiatives. And less of an awful lot of things we are getting more of.

It amazes me that more people don't see things this way. It delights me that one of the few happens to have one of the most widely read blogs on the planet. 

Another way of putting this is that there's a lot of attention paid to the very top of the music making pyramid, but not nearly so much to the rest of it down below. In schools, lots of money and time is expended upon the small minority of students in the band and chorus, while the majority are shut out, sometimes very rudely. Many people seem to view music making as something to be left to the elite, but the new research coming in is telling us it can benefit us all, not just the technically advanced. 

One of the main causes of this focus on the top of the pyramid is the ubiquity of recorded music with all its technical perfections. People tend to conflate the value of technical skill with the value of simply making music and listening to it. To my mind the main issue is that there be a match between the music being made and the audience's ability to appreciate it. It's that connection which is important, and technical wizardry can either be a help or a hinderance. A priest or lama helping someone along the path doesn't spout the arcane points of theology until the student is ready. Getting someone on a good path and helping them stay on it is more important than trying to impress them with your knowledge.

This all reminds me of why I write music. For me, the point is to create music the players will enjoy playing and the audience will enjoy listening to. If that happens, the connection is made and the benefits of music will flow from that connection to all concerned. The most heartening thing about the reception Timepiece is getting is the sense it's largely successful in those terms. (More on this compositional motivation here)

(Pliable continues down this path here and is kind enough to mention this post in the footnote)

Timepiece : Audio

Here's the audio of the second performance of Timepiece by the St Clements Wind Ensemble at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland this past August. I still have a hard time believing my great good fortune in having such fine players perform the piece.

If anyone is interested, I'm giving away PDFs of the score and parts, only asking in return for a recording of the piece and a photo of the players I can put up on the blog if it's actually worked up. My hope is that there can be multiple interpretations of the piece that work as well as this one. The address is MusicMakersMusic at AOL dot com. Let me know whether you use A4 or 8.5 x 11 size paper.

Thanks again to Jonathan West for making this all possible and for his terrific editing of the piece for performance.

The program note giving the history of the piece is here.

The performance notes which talk about what I was trying to do are here.

V.S. Odds and Ends

I've gotten a minute's worth of music that, as of last night, seems to work. This post just to mention a few ancillary things.

Finale - I love it because it allows for my various non-standard ways of doing music notation, but that very complexity can be a problem when I can't remember how to do something, either because the latest update changes something, or because I simply forgot due to not doing that task for a year or so. Case in point is the time signature. When I was going back over Timepiece to make parts for a local quintet to read through (they liked it), noticed that I'd figured out how to have something like 3+3+2+2 all over a single 8 below back in 1996 and just had to look to see how I'd done it.

Resolution - Visually it's how many pixels per square inch. In audio it's something about how many bits per something. On tv when they pixel-ate something to obscure it, we notice the boundary of the high and low resolution. In writing music I try not to have any boundaries like that in the rhythm (no bursts of 32nd notes in a stately half note/ quarter note melody) or harmony (no sudden shifts out of key/mode. I think it also applies to other ways I judge the music I write that are tougher to write about, like gesture.

Writing for particular players/instruments - Listening to the local group read through Timepiece reminded me that I'm always thinking of what the individual players are doing, and whether or not it's interesting. Dr. Andy told me once that in the Bach B Minor Mass, in one section the cellos have the same repeated quarter note for measures on end. When I'm writing for ensembles, in my mind it's however many soloists coming together for the piece, and everyone gets some time high in the mix. In this piece it's trying to keep the harpist interested and to see just how many ways the harp (for which I've never written before) can make music.

Computer Playback - Besides not being able to write music without a keyboard, having the computer play back what I've done is essential. I don't have theory mind and simply cannot manifest the music in my head by reading a score. I've always thought the computer playback is sort of like an X-ray that clearly shows the interior structure of the piece, but that the true nature of the piece is revealed only by performance. That's part of the reason my hearing first performances of things I've written is such an amazing experience.

Attention - One of my complaints about the concert band repertoire is that most of it seems an early incarnation of the MTV gimmick of constantly shifting the image to hold the attention of an audience. I keep thinking the arrangers decide on what transitions of speed and tonality and articulation they what to teach the kids and then forage about for bits of music to put between them ;-) But I've come to realize I do the same thing, just without the shifts of speed/meter and tonality. Once I write something that seems to work for a few bars I'll often try to extend it for longer than it wants, not catching at first that it's becoming boring. Many of my deletions of the last several measures and starting over are due to this. The other deletions are, of course, trying where to go instead. It really is like some sort of glass bead game, and when it works there's a wonderful feeling being connected to something outside myself.

V.S. Time Signature

Here are a couple of sketches in the time signature I'm thinking of using, having beats in two groups of three followed by a group of four. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. To get Finale to automatically beam the notes in a way that shows that grouping I have to use a compound time signature of 3/8+3/8+1/2. To avoid making things look needlessly complicated I'll probably hide that numeric time signature and let the beamed notes (and dotted and undotted quarters) speak for themselves.

I like using the rhythms that can spring from unusual time signatures. Trying to get something that works is almost game like, as there's that feeling of things falling into place when you get it right. I've used this beat grouping before and like it a lot, both in the third movement of Timepiece, and before that in a solo piano piece called Soaring. 

So that's the starting point. Having set the basic parameters as laid out in these posts, the next step is to write 16 measures or so that are interesting and solid enough they can be extended into a whole piece. While I think about structural stuff at this point, once I get going it's written note by note by, measure by measure, straight until the end. I recently fired up an old computer to find a piece I'd forgotten I'd written and found it, along with numerous discards that never took off. The hardest thing is when you work on something for hours and come to realize you need to toss it and use that experience to do something much better.

(Should add that the key signature went to F minor from F major due to those extra flats just coming naturally to my fingers when doodling around with this time signature and thinking about what melody to give the flute that would show off that quality of tone Susan can generate in the middle to low range.)

Timepiece Commentary

Over on his blog, Jonathan West has a post on his summer concerts and talks about playing Timepiece at the Fringe Festival. 

Timepiece Performances

This past Thursday and Friday the St Clements Wind Ensemble performed at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Here's the set list:

                           PROGRAMME

Sonata in D K 381                   W A Mozart
                                                  arr Michael Round

Nonet Op. 31                            Louis Spohr

               - Interval 15 minutes -

Timepiece, for wind quintet     Lyle Sanford

Wind Quintet (1964)                 Ketil Hvoslef

Serenade No 2 in A,
Op 16                                       Johannes Brahms

Just looking at that induces euphoria and cognitive dissonance in me in about equal measure. 

Jonathan West shepherded the piece to performance and reports it got a good response both evenings. He also says the five players want to polish it up a bit and perform it again sometime, and that other players expressed interest in getting the score and parts to play themselves, both of which are about the best reviews possible for me.

Icing on the cake was hearing that they performed the piece standing, which is something Jeffrey Agrell and I went back and forth on a while back, agreeing that playing standing increases the chances of connecting with an audience. 

In the next month or so it will be two years that I've been keeping this blog. The ways blogging has connected me to the great, wide world keep surprising me. These performances of a piece I wrote 15 years ago would never have happened without the connection to Jonathan via this blog and his. That this is the new normal for youngsters now growing up astounds me.

It looks like there'll be a recording of the performance available on down the line. Maybe when I hear that I'll really believe this has happened. 

Timepiece: Performance Notes

Here are the performance notes I came up with when I first sent off the Timepiece parts to Jonathan some months back. When I play music I've written with friends, I'm there to say how it to play it. Sending off parts to the U.K. for people I've never met to play is a different matter entirely. Posting them now so they'll be here to link in a future post about the limits of notation.

           Performance notes for Timepiece 

There is no Platonic ideal of performance in my head.
Beyond the pitches and the rhythms, all the notation may
be considered as suggestions rather than directions.

A major consideration throughout the composition was to
play with the wonderful diversity of timbres in a quintet.
When instruments are playing similar patterns, the hope is
for near perfect blends creating even more richness of
timbre. A mark of success would be for someone hearing it
not being sure from time to time exactly what instruments
were in the mix.

The slurs indicate phrases and need not be fully legato.

Beautiful, full and unforced tone at all times is more
important than dynamic variation. The dynamic markings
are what was needed to get the computer to play it back
something close to what was intended. The various blends
of timbres depend upon each instrument playing at the
volume level for best tone of any given pitch.

The rhythms, while regular (like a timepiece), shouldn't be
formal. A little bit of a jazzy feel or "groove" would be fine.
The final chord of each section is sort of like Big Ben tolling
the hour. Hold that fermata as long as is comfortable and
let the timbres ring out in a vibrant mix. In performance,
take your time moving to the next section so that chord
can reverberate in the ears and minds of the audience.
(Should there ever be a performance and there is sufficient
time, the sections are meant to be played 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 3.)

The feeling tone of the piece is meant to be completely
positive. No angst, anger or depression. Playfulness and
joy, yearning and reverence, exhilaration and celebration
were more of what I had in mind. If you (and an audience)
feel uplifted after playing it, mission accomplished.

Timepiece: Influences

The most amazing thing to me about Jonathan West and the St. Clements Wind Ensemble deciding to perform Timepiece at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh next month is that it's happening at all. The next most amazing thing has been how on target Jonathan has been about what composers have influenced my writing. I'd never realized how much my music suggests the composers I like. 

The first indication Jonathan had me pegged was in an email he sent after SCWE had worked on Timepiece once or twice, and in talking about Kyle Gann's The Planets he wrote, "it also reminds me a bit of Milhaud's "The Creation of the World", which is for a similar (but slightly larger) ensemble. I think you would enjoy the Milhaud, we played it in Edinburgh a couple of years ago."

In previous emails to Jonathan about Timepiece I'd refrained from mentioning that it was Milhaud's wind quintet Le Cheminée du Roi René that had awakened me to the possibilities of that particular ensemble, as it seemed a bit presumptuous for a nobody to be talking about the influence of Milhaud. I discovered that work back in the 80's and it's one of the few classical recordings I've listened to over time. Its episodic, informal nature and the wonderful uses of the timbres of the five instruments, together and in various combinations, make for a very refreshing listen. 

Then in a subsequent email Jonathan said, "By the way, thinking about Timepiece and running through it in my head has turned up some connections and similarities that might interest you. The use of the irregular time signatures, and the way they give a lopsided rhythm to the piece reminds me rather of the Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm from Bartok's Mikrokosmos. Also there is a bit of an echo of Satie's Gymnopedies, especially in Timepiece 2 and to a lesser extent in Timepiece 1."

When I was in conservatory slogging my way through piano juries, little of the assigned music really appealed to me and I was always on the lookout for music I felt more of a connection with. While I didn't work on the Bulgarian Dances Jonathan mentioned, I did find and work a lot with Mikrokosmos, and consciously used it as a model in writing music for adult piano beginners five years before writing Timepiece. That it was still in my mind, albeit unconsciously, years later, was a revelation.

As for Erik Satie, he is certainly amongst my top favorite composers, and that Jonathan was reminded of him by my music is a high compliment indeed. When I lived In San Antonio in the 80's, which was back before Southern Music moved to its new location, they would let me wander the stacks. Some of my most exciting finds were pieces of Satie piano music that hadn't yet been recorded. Those pieces, along with some of the more well known ones have always been in the mix when I spend time playing keyboard. 

The takeaway on this how it illustrates the involvement of the unconscious in music and music making, and how once it's pointed out it seems obvious. What we are conscious of doing is not all that we are doing.

Empowering Players

Just this afternoon got word from Jonathan that the St Clements Wind Ensemble has, after two (more than just reading through) rehearsals, decided to go forward with performing Timepiece at the Fringe festival in Edinburgh in August.  I. Am. Over. The. Moon.

Part of it has to do with why I write music. I think the error of the 20th century modernists was assuming radical change was needed to refresh the repertoire. There's all kinds of stuff yet to be written in what I'm going to start calling "common touch" harmonies and rhythms that the modernists flew right past in their quest to be ever so much cooler than the plebes. I use rhythms that are more complex than simple 3 or 4 to the measure, but which still have a recognizable bounce and shape. My harmonies are all tonal, but "modal" gets used as a descriptor, and I do love Gesualdo. 

Also, I'm not sure I completely buy into the whole cartharsis thing. There are times it can work wonderfully, but there are other times that's not what I'm looking for. I do not need music to feel the negative emotions like anxiety, depression and anger. I most of the time want music to reinforce positive emotions in fresh ways. My sense of audiences who've heard my music is that I'm at least partly successful.

But this I why I'm so happy. Below, Jonathan comments:

When rehearsing a new piece, particularly a newly-composed piece where you haven't had any opportunity to listen to recordings, the music emerges only gradually. Initially, you are just concentrating on counting and getting the right notes in the right places. Only after that do you have time to give attention to balance, phrasing and eventually structure and overall interpretation.

And the interesting thing about this process in chamber music is that it is a collaborative process. All the participants have something to contribute to the interpretation, we are not just ciphers working according to the controlling mind and interpretation of the conductor.

That my music can be used for this level of music making - and that it engages the players enough to want to continue working to see what they can make of it - is a whole new level of validation, both in terms of my notions of where music can go and of my notion that small ensembles are part of the answer to lot of Greg Sandow's questions. All the small ensembles (regular and irregular) keeping the culture of homemade music making alive need fresh material, and the latest twitch out of the twelve tone enclave ensconced in the academy isn't very helpful.

And maybe it's because we just went through the Fourth, but this really struck a chord with me:

. . . we are not just ciphers working according to the controlling mind and interpretation of the conductor.

This made me realize I'm more of the democratic/republican way of thinking than the authoritarian/totalitarian when it comes to music making. I've always had trouble with authority figures for whom I could deduce no really good reason for their having authority other than the quirks of samsara. To my mind, it would be a sign of a more vibrant music making culture if what Jonathan is talking about here were simply assumed, and it was the surrender of liberty involved playing for an autocrat that needed explaining.

photo - yard violets, which our Vermont readership (who asked me to write a wind quintet in the first place) insists are flowers and not weeds.

Timepiece ~ A Wind Quintet

(proposed program note for Timepiece)

I've been a Registered Music Therapist since 1980 and first got into composing by writing piano pieces for adult beginners more suitable for their larger hands and mature sensibilities than the children's pieces usually on offer. Then over the years I also began to write music for myself and friends to play, mostly involving flute, alto flute, cello and piano.

In 1994 a flute playing friend asked me to write a piece for the wind quintet she'd just joined and I jumped at the chance because that ensemble combines the intimate expressiveness of a small chamber group with such a powerful palette of tonal colors. The title derives from two of the three movements having unusual time signatures, which allows for creating fresh and innovative music while remaining fully in the tonal realm.

A late draft of Timepiece got a small public reading and was never heard again as some members of that quintet moved away and it never reformed. Last year on Jonathan West's horn blog I read of his interest in finding new music and got in touch. On getting a receptive response I sent him the parts to try out, leaving the final editing for live performance in his capable hands. Were it not for the St. Clements Wind Ensemble, this music would still just be some ones and zeros on my computer. I am immensely grateful to them for bringing it to life.

Lyle Sanford
Orange, Virginia

This very exciting. When Jonathan got in touch recently to say the SCWE had rehearsed the piece and decided to perform it, I felt then it was already a success, their liking it enough to keep working on it.

Were there no demands on my time and I could do whatever I wished, I'd spend a lot of time composing. There's nothing quite like creating new music. Always the first time I hear it performed it's a little like dreaming while awake, with my conscious mind getting hints of my unconscious mind encoded in the music.