8/9/05
Well, I asked my brother Pete to blog on yesterday's topic, and he did. Thanks bro! But I decided to give him full billing here. For anybody who wants to know, Pete Terry is a professor of music at Bluffton College in Ohio, was a professor of music at Cal-State LA for some time and before that was at the University of Texas-Austin. His specialty is composition, music theory and electronic music. He's got a number of CDs available, both with his duo, Electrometamorphosis, and as the arranger for religious piano music performed by his wife, Lucia Unrau.


Peter Terry (mail)
8:54 am, aug 9, 2005 EST

Well, I'm the brother Mark mentioned--the musician, so my perspective is from that angle. Not surprisingly, we composers find exactly the same thing--the difference is that the more technically proficient you are in craft the less money there is to be made! Being a rock-and-roller as well as a "classical" composer I'm not as bothered when someone claims more skill than they possess. Arrogance is the only thng that keeps you going when you are being abused by everyone, or as is very common, you hear from people that it must be nice to be so "talented"--like hard work doesn't have anything to do with it. I think that bad writing is much easier to detect than limited skills as a composer--after all the average BB King tune only has 3 chords and uses 12 notes, as compared to writing prose or poetry, and yet not all blues players are Stevie Ray Vaughn. As an admirer of the blues I have finally realized that a really educated blues listener can tell immediately what the player has been listening to, what they're alluding too,and what they can do (or not do) with common material, while the rest of us just hear a pretty good blues tune. Hearing what Stevie did to a Freddy King lick, how he altered the timing in a howling wolf lick and nuanced these things is a level that goes beyond technical proficiency, but probably doesn't have a comparable facet in prose. In music, nuance is everything--I can't imagine being excited by the nuances in a short story made up of 12 words used over and over again!

When I was in LA everyone was a songwriter--and the CDs they gave me were generally decent, but after listening to 100 of them you realize just how good the people who make it in this business are. I pity the A and R guys!


Thanks Pete!
Best,
Mark Terry