Capital-M Music

Mini-Essays

by Richard Bruner

This page will be a blog of sorts for my Capital-M Music project. I’m going to collect some relatively brief essays here that I write about various concepts that relate to music but don’t really fit into the other categories I have under this project. Some of the longer tips in the Life Tips guide could perhaps also work here. Some of these will be somewhat more detailed write-ups of points that have more to do with playing or improvisation rather than composition or music theory, which you can find in the Life Tips guide or on the Theory Guides page.

Watchwords: A reflection essay I wrote at the end of my first year of graduate school at California State University, Northridge. This essay reflects on what I learned about myself, the world, and music in my first year. I look at it through the lens of three keywords (“watchwords”) that I kept returning to in my personal reflections and in my work as both a graduate student myself and a music theory / musicianship tutor for the undergraduate students at CSUN. The three keywords are “Human”, “Kinesthetics”, and “Pattern”.

On AI and Human Music: A collection of essays / thoughts about the philosophical impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on the arts in general and music in particular, and why human music is such a good thing and computer generated music will not be able to replace it (certainly not for the musicians, and hopefully not too much for the audience!). Followed by another copy of Life Tips General Tips No. 10 (“On Writing Papers”) about why we should continue to write papers ourselves and not just have Gen AI churn them out for us, and a facebook mini-essay I wrote about the reaction to Apple’s iPad ad “Crush” that stirred a great deal of controversy. Now also includes a few links to other articles that I’ve been reading on the subject recently.

On Interpretation and Notation in Music: What is an Urtext edition, why are they important, and what do you need to know to make actual effective use of them?

What a Musician Hears: Why are certain pieces or passages only mind-blowing if you know something about that kind of music, and why are others only mind-blowing if you don’t know about that kind of music?

Music as a Living Thing: A followup to Life Tips General Musicianship Tip No. 2, about music as sound. This essay explores the idea of music as a living thing that changes over time, showing some potential issues with audio recordings compared to live performance. It includes an excerpt of a forthcoming guide to rhythm demonstrating differences in interpretation between professional classical ensembles.

On Ensemble: I’ve always been an ensemble musician. Here’s some of my story and thoughts on the subject.

How to Organize a Large Scale Project: This is a practical essay exploring some tips and techniques for planning a large scale project such as a film score or opera. Written at the request of one of my CSUN friends who is working on such a project right now.

Spectrum of Improvisation: (Coming Soon) Some people might think that there’s improvised music and non-improvised music, but actually like many things in life, what might appear as a binary is really a vast spectrum from no improvisation to full free improvisation. Let’s explore this idea.