I was listening to Bull Black Nova off the latest Wilco album on the way to church this afternoon, and I was struck at how little instrumentation there is at times in that song. This got me thinking about what I was going to blog about (These days most things are becoming fodder for blogging, only I never remember what my thoughts were when actually I sit down to write).

Most people can't verbalize what makes music good. They can't tell you why they like it. They'll say, "It's got a good beat" or "the melody is really catchy". This is, of course, very true. And their inability to ascertain any more distinct reasons than that is no fault of theirs. I understand that there can only be a certain amount of nerdy people in the world who love to think about what makes music good...if we were to tip the balance, we would awaken the dark god of music snobbery and soon wars would be fought over which Death Cab for Cutie album is the best (it's Transatlanticism) not about world's remaining natural resources.

Here's what I'm mulling over. What makes music sound good, disregarding personal taste or genre? Ok, I'm not going to even attempt to come up with a totally unbiased and complete list. I'm simply going to focus on the absence of sound.

Initially, silence is the reason we like sound. The ability to string differing sonic pitches together in a pleasing way was perhaps God's greatest gift to us. That and Jesus. He's pretty great too.

But I would suggest that the use of silence or an absence of sound within a song is often what really draws us. Dynamic, crescendo, and decrescendo are what makes a song interesting to listen to. A couple of years ago a crew from Vineyard Music National paid us a visit and lead a workshop on worship leading. To illustrate the point that musicians on a worship team should listen to each other and consider how what they are doing is fitting into whatever sound the team is trying to create, the VM team began to all play as hard as they could for the entirety of a song, all playing at 100% volume, no change between chorus and verse. It was exhausting to listen to one song like that, let alone an entire set. After two songs of that, I would be done. I would lose interest, and become disengaged--I'm talking purely in a musical sense here.

When the quiet part of the song comes I find I'm drawn in more, I'm grabbed and I want to listen for what instruments are playing and how they will gather momentum again. When I talk about doing this with my weekend worship teams I'll call it "giving the song room to breath". It's a chance for the listeners to take a collective sigh. And this principle is true whether you are playing with an entire orchestra or playing solo at a coffee shop. We do not need to fill up the all the sonic space with sound. When a band or artist does that I find myself very bored with their sound.

I think I could write more but I am already late, so I will end with this. When creating music learning to musically edit yourself is worthwhile.