lncluding empty spaces in your compositions can sometimes convey very concrete information about the subject matter of a piece. You can imagine when you describe in notes a wide open landscape, that creating open space in your music is a very good tool.
You can think of other situations where leaving some space in between the notes can be an almost literal reference to the situation that’s being described in the music. This also seems to happen in my kind of filmic composition ‘Staring at the moon’.
Leaving space and creating silence has another important function in music: it creates tension. The listener will think: how long can he keep this up before the part after the silence becomes an independent piece of music to the part before the silence?
The strange thing about silence is that it becomes more important with the years. l crave silence more, it’s as if l’m slowly building up to that ‘greatest silence of all silences’. And l see it pop up in my work more too. Which is something l see in many composers l know: the more years, the more silence.
The construction of your chords can also add to the transmission of meaning. Widely spaced voicings tell a different story from narrowly spaced voicings.
ln my piece ‘Staring at the moon’ l’ve tried to use these techniques to achieve a kind of poetic effect. Or rather, l should say: after l had written this thing l discovered that somehow l had incorporated these ideas into the piece subconsciously. And then could analyze why they work the way they do. But the fact that l used these notions is probably more of an automatic proces based on experience, than a conscious one.
See my vlog below for a detailed explanation, and listen how the thing sounds! Cheers:
***HERE YOU FlND THE MOON’S TUNES: