Music Is Everywhere

Here’s an amazing bit of creativity. BerkleeMusic student Jarbas Agnelli has scored a viral internet hit with a piece of music inspired by a photo of birds sitting electricity wires. Check out the video below.

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

I love Jarbas’ ability to spin a piece of music out of the serendipitous musical fragment. Great stuff.

It also got me thinking back to Garr Reynolds recent post, Wa: The key to clear, harmonious design. Amongst the suggestions about the spirit of good design, Garr suggests that we consider,

Avoid symmetry. Symmetry is not bad — and often it is necessary — but in many areas of design it is derided at the easy and boring answer. The natural world — the mountain or the forest — is full of beautiful asymmetry. Balanced asymmetry is natural, and in the natural world is where spontaneity lives. Symmetrical designs lack the feeling of movement or spontaneity that we find in nature. Creating balance and harmony in an asymmetrical design is usually a more challenging and creative approach.

That’s part of the wonderful beauty of Jarbas’ piece – it has balanced asymmetry.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, brining more spontaneity into my compositions and arrangements, making forms less standard, adding odd bars (or collections of odd meter bars), introducing non-repeating themes, or motifs than only happen sporadically (say a riff that only comes in 3 our of 5 B sections). There’s a lot that musicians can learn if we train ourselves to see good and beautiful patterns and designs – either in nature or in the man-made environment.