Music is a visual art | Hunter Ewen | TEDxBoulder

If you close your eyes and listen to music, do images arise in your mind? Hunter Ewen uses visuals to better codify and describe the music he composes.

Hunter Ewen is a dramatic music composer, educator and multimedia designer. During the day, Dr. Ewen teaches strategies for digital creativity at the University of Colorado, the children’s collaborative art center Reel Kids and the City of Longmont and as an independent educator. At night, he composes, solders, choreographs and directs interdisciplinary projects around the world. Experimental performance practices and unusual notation figure prominently in Ewen’s works. A believer that compositions should be both seen and heard, his music looks as strange as it sounds. Swirls, squiggles, arrows and fangs often replace traditional notes and rests. His aesthetic preferences gravitate towards yowls and yips and wails and squeals, towards screams that masquerade as art, towards clamor and deviance. Ewen’s music swings from chandeliers.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

I'd like to tell you
about my eureka moment.

Now, I'm a composer,
and I work a lot with visual scores,

but I didn't always.

For a long time,
I struggled with my music.

I had a very specific idea in my mind

about what I wanted
my music to sound like,

but I always felt like something
was lost in translation.

I mean, I liked the music;

I just felt like it wasn't quite me.

Now, this particular problem

came to a head one day
in rehearsal about ten years ago.

I'd written a piece of chamber music,
a very complicated piece,

and I had a specific
special effect in mind

for my horn player.

I wanted her to sing into her instrument.

My notation looked like this.

(Laughter)

Now, she was playing it perfectly,
exactly how I had written it,

but it wasn't even close
to what I had in my head.

So I changed some of the notes,
some of the rhythms,

thinking that maybe if I tweaked
the notation a little bit,

suddenly she would tune in
to whatever it was I had in my head.

Didn't work.

"Can you try it this way?"
and she did - didn't work.

"Can you try it that way?" - didn't work.

And eventually we were both
a little bit flustered,

and she finally said,

"Well, Hunter, what the heck
do you want it to sound like?"

I took a minute, I thought about it,

and I said, (Wolf howl).

(Laughter)

And something clicked.

All that time, I had wanted a wolf howl.

(Laughter)

But nobody could understand that,

not even me,

through this ridiculous notation.

So the next rehearsal,
I changed my score to this.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Now, this is a magical thing.

That wolf solved a number
of problems all at once.

It helped the performer to get
inside my head a bit more,

to perform it exactly how I wanted it;

it added a little bit of visual intrigue

to the score;

(Laughter)

and maybe most importantly,

it finally let me zero in on what it was
that I actually wanted to say.

And after that day, I started to realize

that the notes, the rests,
the articulations, the dynamics,

the language that we use
to talk about music

isn't nearly as important
as the visual image

we get from our music.

I could write all the notes in the world,

but if that performer
doesn't have that mental picture,

it's all for nothing.

And so I started straying more and more
from this traditional notational model,

trying to show my music
instead of tell my music.

Suddently, I could make my music scream.

Or overwhelm.

Or accuse.

Or pinch.

And people started to get it.

By giving them this visual metaphor,
it was suddenly easier to communicate.

I felt like I had this superpower.

I could finally express
my music's nerdiness.

(Laughter)

Or its repetitiveness.

Or its optimistic spirit,
with hands pointed up to the sky.

Now, it may sound counterintuitive,
but the more I hid the rests,

obscured the notes

and broke from that traditional
notational structure,

the better everything worked.

Performers thought more deeply,

more artistically,

more creatively.

They brought their own personality
and experience to the performance.

And I'm not saying
that this is a perfect system

or that all music works this way,

but I am saying that thinking
about music in these terms

gave me a very specific
kind of scaffolding

upon which to build music
that was more meaningful,

that I felt communicated more.

I had finally separated
the code of the music

from the music of the music.

And once I did that,
the results were exhilarating.

I had audience members
come up to me after shows

with fully fleshed-out stories

that they had imagined
during the performance.

I would have performers come
during rehearsal with creative ideas,

thoughts for improvements on the piece

because they finally felt
like they could do something about it,

they felt like they got it.

Suddenly, the music
wasn't an instruction manual;

it was a shared vision.

Everybody felt like they had
a stake in it, a sense of ownership even.

Now, I remember the first time
that I really got to see this in action.

I had written this,

the dénouement of a loud, large,
big piece for wind ensemble.

I was in the audience during the premiere,
and I saw the most glorious thing happen.

From back in the percussion section,

a pair of drum sticks
launched up into the air,

soared over the entire ensemble

and landed somewhere, with a clatter,
in the low brass section.

(Laughter)

Now, I hadn't put that in the music,
didn't know anybody was going to do that.

We hadn't talked about it.

It was a total surprise.

But as soon as I saw those sticks
soaring majestically over the woodwinds,

I knew that was exactly
the right thing at the right moment.

So I went up to the performer
after the show,

and I asked him
why he had thought to do that.

He said, "Well, it didn't look
like you would mind."

(Laughter)

And he was right.

Perfection, finally.

A moment of true musical honesty.

Let's look at a piece
that many of us will know.

This is "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,"

from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.

Now, I want us all
to try a little experiment.

I want us all to conduct this music.

But I don't want to conduct
the code of the music;

I want to conduct my vision
of what I think the music looks like,

which is this.

So if y'all don't mind,

take your fingers,
point them up at the screen

and follow along
as we listen to the opening bars.

All right? Everybody ready?

(Music: Tchaikovsky,
"Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy")

(Laughter)

All right.

Very good.

(Applause and cheers)

So by visualizing this piece of music,

we're all of a sudden open
to a number of things

that we might not notice
when just hearing it.

We can see patterns
and sequences more easily.

We can see which instruments
are playing, and where and how.

And we can see
when harmony becomes melody,

and we can see when there's one note
versus when there's many notes.

Visualization helps us understand,
it helps us get it.

And when you visualize your music -

I'm not saying
that it has to look like this;

it could look like buzzing bees,

popping popcorn,

burial plots,

clocks, eggs, eyes,

squiggles -

is that you start to develop
a sense of visual understanding,

a visual language to talk about
and describe this music.

By adding this additional sense
into our musical toolkit,

we suddenly feel more connected, closer.

The lines of communication
are finally open

when we think about music this way.

And music at its core
is all about communication,

of melody, of rhythm, of meter,

of metaphor, of story and of emotion.

But what happens when we
don't think about music that way,

when the lines of communication get cut?

And this is a problem
that each of us deals with today -

we live in a world
of passive media consumption,

for better or worse,

and when we think
about our media passively,

we don't use our imagination

and we run into problems.

The metaphor, the story,

the deep meaning of the music
starts to get lost.

Music has the power
to exalt the human spirit.

And when we think
about our music in visual terms,

we start to reopen
those lines of communication.

This is something that each
and every one of us can do today.

Go home, get your favorite track
on your iPod, your favorite CD,

your favorite record -
put it on the hi-fi -

and try to paint a mental picture
of what it is that you're seeing.

Does you music look weird
and squiggly like spaghetti?

Or is it sharp and angular?

Is the music round
or is the music straight?

Is the music dense or is it thin?

Is it big or is it small?

Is your music pointilistic

or does it move and glide freely,
organically over time?

Does your music glide
across the floor like a ghost

or does it tumble end-over-end?

Lose yourself in fantastical worlds:

giant explosions,

towering mountains,

scary animals,

flowers,

ripples in the ocean.

Listen to your music.

What does it sound like?

What does it look like?

What does it feel like?

Talk about your music

and listen to what other people
have to say about their music

and talk about the visions that you get
when you're listening to music.

Imagine anything and everything,

and know that there's no wrong way

to listen to, to experience,
to interpret music.

Think about music in pictures,
in story, in narrative,

not in quarter notes and eighth notes.

Because at the end of the day,
music is a visual art,

and all we need to do to love it,

to truly form a meaningful, deep
emotional attachment with that music,

is to get the picture.

Thank you.

(Applause)