If a songwriter attributes his/her creative abilities at least in part to drugs, it doesn’t make much sense to contradict their opinion. It’s not like you can say, “No, drugs didn’t help you — they hindered you”, if they were in an altered state of mind while penning a hit. So you can look at […]
Music develops and changes over time as a kind of evolution: it takes what’s happened before, copying it to a large extent, but making small changes that move in a slightly new direction. It’s what biologists call “descent with modification from a common ancestor” in their field. We like to think that the music we’re writing is […]
Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” was the number-one single on the Billboard charts for 2014, and by any measurement you choose it was the most commercially successful song of that year, with 13.9 units sold. If there was ever a song that could be called an “accidental hit”, “Happy” fit the bill perfectly. It innocently inserted itself […]
A 1-hour TV drama spends at least the two-thirds of that hour developing a story that pulls the audience in and poses questions that they want to learn the answers to. As the show nears its end, you’ll be presented with the strongest, most spine-tingling event: the main object of the script. All questions are answered. For example, a […]
You may have just as many people who hate your music as love it, but that shouldn’t bother you too much. Hoping that everyone loves what you do is unrealistic. Any time you express your thoughts, opinions and feelings in musical form, people will react; sometimes in favour of your art, and sometimes against. The […]
Many of you know that one of the enjoyable things I get to do now and then is to take a symphony orchestra – specifically, Symphony Nova Scotia (SNS) – into schools, and play some exciting orchestral music for young people. In the main, our audiences are between ages 5 and 12, though occasionally we present our performances […]
