I believe that we unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats. This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be, but I think the path of creation is almost 180º from this model. The rock-and-roll singer is driven by desire and demons, and out bursts this amazing song. The classical composer gets a strange look in his or her eye and begins scribbling furiously.
That doesn’t sound like much of an insight, but it’s actually backward from conventional wisdom, which maintains that creation emerges out of some interior emotion, from an upwelling of passion or feeling, and that the creative urge will brook no accommodation, that it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read, or seen. That insight is that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation. To pre-order How Music Works, please visit our store. Today we’re featuring an excerpt from the first chapter of the book. How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power. His range is panoptic, taking us from La Scala to African villages, from his teenage reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio. Touching on the joy, physics, and the business of making music, he also shows how it is inextricably linked to its cultural and physical context.
Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns-and tells us how they have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators.
He explains how profoundly music is shaped by its time and place, and how the advent of recording technology forever changed our relationship to playing, performing, and listening to music. How Music Works is David Byrne’s remarkable and buoyant celebration of a subject he’s spent a lifetime thinking about.
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