Understanding an Artist’s Motivation
“Understanding a musician’s motivations can deeply change your perspective of music.”
You recently read about listening sessions, and learned how to get more out of listening to a song. Reader and fellow-blogger Shankar from NewAgeVibe suggested I explore the topic of song titles.
One aspect that can enhance your insight into a piece of music is to research an artist’s motivations. Pay attention to a song title. In ancient times, the song title used to just be the first few sung words of a piece, usually in Latin. Good example of this is Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (iTunes Link) .
Soon enough, song form boiled down to verse and refrain, and song titles usually just refer to the refrain of the song. But even then, you’ll find song titles don’t necessarily have anything to do with the song directly.
Take a minute to do this experiment:
- Open your iTunes library (or whatever else you use)
- Find a song that has a title that isn’t directly hooked to the content. This can be a song, an instrumental piece (classical or even Rock, like Joe Satriani (iTunes Link) ) – basically anything.
Take a few moments to reflect on how the title may have come to be. Understanding a musicians motivations can deeply change your perspective of music.
Another example: Gotan Project and their Album “La Revancha Del Tango” (iTunes Link). Here, the entire album has different titles, but all pieces are linked to together to form one great work. Often, tracks from this disc sound similar, or musically quote each other.
Spending time on itnerpretation of music is as important as just knowing which chords are being hit. We’ll analyze lyrics of songs in the future to see how some artists manage to package profound and simple messages in beautiful ways. Be sure not to miss it, so subscribe today!
1 Comment
“Understanding a musician’s motivations can deeply change your perspective of music.”
Arjun, you have caught the essence of the whole post in these two lines.