I’m reading David Byrne’s “How Music Works” and it’s been making me think a lot, about my own music and, because I’m a giant Rush nerd, about Rush and their music over time.

I’m still wading through chapter three; it’s been slow reading. Not only is my time constrained lately, but “How Music Works” is a very dense book, and Byrne’s a fine writer. I’m trying to take the time the book needs.

So far, there are two things that really stuck out to me, related to both my music and Rush: one is how the tools of the trade affect the music, and the other is how live performance shapes how music is written and designed.

Warning: there’s a lot of Rush in this post, but there’s a lot of my music “career” as well — a career that contains a lot of music, but I’m afraid given my circumstances I’m a hobbyist at best. I’ve created music that I think is pretty good (and a lot of awful music too) but I’ve never really marketed it, for a lot of reasons — some of them good — but the fact still remains that I’m not really what I’d consider a professional at any point.

Anyway… Byrne points out that tools affect music in a bunch of different ways.

For one thing, rooms affect the kind of music performed and written (a room designed for choral music tends to encourage Gregorian chants; other rooms are designed for heavy percussion, or projection of sound from one point to another.)

The room affecting the music has some far-reaching effects; bands that write and record in basements don’t always translate well to larger amphitheaters, because the music has been written to fit the basements and not the amphitheaters. (Surprise, right?) But at the same time, we have a lot of music that’s made exactly that kind of transition.

Music that’s written for MP3 players (typically listened to on headphones) tends to have different types of dynamic levels than music that’s written for live performance… but when we go to a live performance, we’re generally listening to music that’s been written for MP3 players.

Also, the techniques of the music change. One thing really surprised me: vibrato is a new thing. He says that before modern recording techniques came about, violin vibrato was kitschy, low, a tool to help the musician avoid the fact that he or she couldn’t actually hit the note — our ears hear vibrato and we pick the right note out.

Nowadays, hearing a violin played “straight” — i.e., no vibrato — sounds awful and weird. In my own playing, I apply vibrato as a technique almost without thinking. I’ll use it on chords, even though I play hard-tail guitars (without tremolo bars).

Aside: Tremolos are misnamed on guitars. Tremolo means a variation in volume, while tremolos on guitars — whammy bars, if you will — vary the pitch, so they’re actually tools for vibrato, not tremolo. A “hard tail” guitar is a guitar without a whammy bar. Overprecise interlude over.

Byrne also pointed out something that should have been fairly obvious (and was, in retrospect): recording changed the entire nature of music. Pieces conformed to the capabilities of the medium; if music was written for wax preservation, well, they tended to use instruments that could be preserved on wax better than others. The 45 — a short record — meant that popular music (music people listened to) was limited by how much of a song could fit on a given side, and obviously that carries over to the “long play” record as well.

Further, being able to easily transfer recorded music meant that the recording became the authoritative version of the piece. It used to be that a live performance was the canonical reference — which means, of course, that no real canonical reference could exist of much music outside of the written sheet music.

But having a canonical version of a song isn’t always a positive — it sets a goal for what listeners actually want to hear. We went from “I wonder what Goodman will play” to “I’m looking forward to hearing a note-perfect performance of…” — a desire we Rush fans are really familiar with, I think.

The use of recorded versions as canonical renditions means that the live performance has a certain set of requirements, depending on the band; if it’s a “jam band” like Phish or the Grateful Dead, one expects less of a note-perfect concert, but for most bands, audiences want to hear “The Spirit of Radio” where “he does the thing.”

I’m guilty of this myself, certainly; in “Tom Sawyer” I’m always hoping Neil Peart plays the drum fill from the record right before Geddy Lee screams “But change is!” (Want to hear it? It’s right here.) He usually doesn’t, and realistically it doesn’t diminish the song at all — but I keep hoping he plays that specific roll.

Lastly, Byrne pointed out that live performance as a process for writing was really important for how music is put together. You can tell when music is written by people sitting in a room, playing things back and forth, as compared to when music is written by capturing a phrase and looping it back over and over again, changing it over time.

The process of writing, and the goal of why it’s written, affects the final product drastically.

Back in the mid 1980s, computers took over for writing and recording music. Rush, being fairly technology-forward, took up the mantle early and well; they started writing things using the computer fairly heavily.

For a while, Geddy Lee (bass guitar, synthesizers, vocals) and Alex Lifeson (guitars) would jam for a bit, capture something they wanted to preserve, and then … Geddy would spend a while transcribing it into a computer while Alex went off and flew a remote control plane or something. They’d use a drum machine to keep the beat for these musical sketches, and then use the results as a basis for the actual recording sessions of their next albums.

It’s a fairly labor-intensive process. It can be useful, of course, and obviously can yield some killer music.

But the process affects the music… and the result is that you don’t get music that’s as cohesive or organic as music that was written by three guys hanging out in a room, banging away at their instruments. A computer doesn’t get tired, and doesn’t need the music to chill out a bit to let its fingers cool down. A computer can keep hammering away at full blast for seven minutes… and I can tell you from experience that music written this way can be exhausting to try to play and exhausting to listen to.

The human ear wants dynamics.

In my own playing, this is a huge factor. I’m a hobbyist, as I said a thousand words ago; I generally write and record sitting in my office, surrounded by books and keyboards and guitars, in complete solitude. For me, the process tends to be noodling on a guitar, hearing something I like, firing up Cubase and saving it — and developing everything else in a song around that. (It’s not a constant process; sometimes I’ll write words first, sometimes I’ll have a harmony in mind, or a melody in my head. The only constant is that I do it alone.)

Even in the past, my music was generally written this way, from concept to presentation: I’d write all of the parts of a given piece, and play it to friends to gauge their reactions.

That’s probably backwards.

It’s part of why I’ve been recording pieces on solo guitar for Youtube these days; I want to record the pieces with “a full band” (meaning that I go back and add bass guitar, drums, synthesizers, et cetera) but the truth is that the “full band” versions still don’t sound right, because the pieces weren’t written with a full band. They were written for a full band to complete, but I don’t have one. (There’s a difference, you know, between adding bass guitar yourself and having a different person playing bass along with you.)

My thought is that “late Rush” — meaning Rush after Grace Under Pressure — had some of this same “problem.” The mechanisms they used to write and record the music meant that the natural dynamics of their earlier days were lost, because the dynamics weren’t necessary in how the music was written and recorded.

Further, the emphasis on live performance by the band meant that quieter, more dynamic passages weren’t as important, because live performances want the energy; since concert-goers are expecting the recorded versions of songs, the performance’ energy is the additive factor that makes the concert worth attending.

It’s interesting thinking. Rush has retired, and in their last few albums actually went back to reconsidering the recording and writing process — and it showed, because their last three original studio albums were some of their best work in years.

But I haven’t retired — in fact, based on my sales numbers, I haven’t even started — and yet I continue to write and record music. These facets Byrne has raised have made me think about what’s good and bad in my own music, and that is a great thing.