Creating a stir

A few days ago, we in the United States celebrated the Fourth of July, the most patriotic holiday of the year, a day on which millions of Americans wave flags and watch fireworks displays and had barbecues and all that fun stuff. I'm not big on much of that sort of thing, but I did let my five-year-old son watch a bit of the fireworks on TV.

As we watched, we were treated to some very patriotic-sounding music that I'm sure brought tears to many eyes and stirred nationalistic feelings in numerous people across the country. It got me thinking a bit about what element, exactly, creates that stir. Certainly there are certain pieces of music that are traditionally played at patriotic events, so we come to associate them with patriotism. But there seems to be some underlying element to the music that follows a common theme. It sounds patriotic.

A similar sort of thing happens with Christmas music, or with "summer" music, or lots of other things. There is something about the music itself that brings forth the feeling of a particular holiday or time of year just by the sound of it. This is useful for a songwriter, and it is something worth thinking about. Being aware of such things allows one to bring those elements forth in a song at will.

In thinking about patriotic music, there are numerous technical elements that can work together to bring across the patriotic, Fourth-of-July feeling. A 2/4 time signature with a heavily accented first beat helps. Lots of brass, maybe a high flute line with a lot of trills, major key, etc. It has always struck me that patriotic music resembles a less chromatic version of circus music with a bit more oomph to it. I suppose that's appropriate, considering the daily circus in which we live.

The point of this blog entry, though, isn't to deeply analyze what makes a song sound like a piece of American patriotic music on a technical level. It is to say that by examining groups of songs on a technical level and drawing out their essence, we can stir similar sentiments and put them to use in novel ways. For instance, we could make a protest song that sounds like a patriotic song. We could make a Christmas song that pokes fun at consumerism.

We should do what we can to make ourselves aware of what elements of particular types of music bring forth certain kinds of sentiment in people and make the use of this knowledge part of our repertoire as songwriters. Songwriters - and writers in general - must be manipulators to a degree. We must know how to evoke feelings in people in subtle ways through the use of sound and lyrics. By examining how music affects people in various ways, we can learn how to affect them similarly and use that to our own ends.

Reading that back, it sounds a bit sinister, but it's not. Manipulation is part of art. Artists manipulate their surroundings into art so that the art can, in turn, manipulate those taking it in.