A Quote by Flume

I'm just trying to work out how to write music now, because I've never had the opportunity where my number-one priority is writing music. I don't know how my brain works yet.
I'm often surprised by classical music and musicians. I've met a large number of them because my wife works for the Boston Symphony, and I'm in that world a lot now. I'm surprised at how difficult it is for people who are classically trained to read music or to memorize music, how difficult it is for them to improvise, to just go off and play. It's sort of, it's like terra incognita. They just, (makes noise) they don't get it.
Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don't really know how the music business works.
I know what my sound is. I'm just trying to get it out there how I can explain it. I'm not trying to write or put out some music that doesn't represent me.
I was thinking a lot about music, about how music is mixed and how everything is happening at the same time; it just amounts to how the sound is lowered or raised. I was trying to get that with writing.
I didn't really know a lot about music when I started out, but now I've learned how to write music or make melodies.
Because I work so much, people think that I have a team writing for me, but that's not why I chose to write music for films. I chose to write music because I like to write music. So every single note that comes out of my studio is written by me, and I wouldn't be able to do two movies at the same time.
I work with a lot of music programs and there's a steep learning curve to a lot of them. You can really find yourself trying to figure out how to do things, instead of making music. Now I have another tool with the Surface music kit.
It's weird. I went so far away from music that I had to re-invent music again. I had to come back to music. I had to put music with an agenda down and at least write for my son, write to keep writing, but the idea of having a music career had to go away for a while.
I think the genre of musical theatre, when it started, the pop songwriters of the time were writing the music. I think sometimes when we write musicals now, we keep writing in that same style, as though that's the musical theatre genre... We have to figure out how to tell stories with the music that we listen to now, or we'll lose our audience.
I was very young, maybe five. The opera was very... I was attracted to opera to the point that I think it's the reason I started to write music for films. I never studied. There are film and music school that teach you how to write music. I never studied that. But the influence of opera, which is a combination of storyline, visuals, staging, plus music... that was perhaps the best school I could have had. That's what gave me the idea of coming to Hollywood to write music for films.
If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
My first song was called 'Portrait.' It would just be poetry, and I really never understood how to write the structure of writing a song. I just knew the feeling, and I knew it was supposed to break and change at the same part, so that's how I write music.
After I found out that I was playing music and that I'd have to learn how to read and write music, I started doing that about two years later. Finally, I said, "Oh, that means what I really want to do is to be a composer." But when I was coming up in Texas, there was segregation. There was no schools to go to. I taught myself how to read and how to start writing.
I don't really focus on if what I'm writing is pop or not. I just write music and then I try to figure out how to arrange the things that I write.
I personally feel that there's a lot of music journalism that is dominated by genre, because you need a language in which to write, but actually the things that strike people about music, are very hard to write about, and its sonic connections, it's a sense of harmony that I think we all have even if we don't know how to express it - it's something musical, it's synapse connections in our brain.
Everything is super personal. Basically all of the songs are 'this is my life and what I feel about it.' That's how my brain works and thinks about things. It's really strange because I never really think about what I want to write about - it sort of just comes out. I literally say whatever is in my brain.
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