Almost A Mood

Mood Music or Snooze Music?

Note: I’m introducing two things here: 1) a paid subscription model (still plenty of free content but more if you help support the process); 2) This new series of musical and literary improvisations. These will be somewhat daily, and not all will be solo piano. Stay tuned.

This track, improvised in the morning after I couldn’t get sleep because I was dwelling on all sorts of things that I couldn’t control (the Chicago Bulls free-agent signings, my father’s health, musical ignorance, hearing aids, and Wimbledon) feels like it could be a mood piece.

What’s that? My understanding is that it’s a piece of music without a real narrative, just an undifferentiated mood. Feeling with no development. Sonic ambience, much like the wind rustling through trees or the tinkling of flatware on plates accompanied by the multiple conversations in a busy restaurant.

But that’s a bad comparison because those are random (as far as we know) sonic experiences, right? Ambient music, on the other hand, is ostensibly organized sound. Just not too organized. The point, in fact, is to avoid too much interesting order, the kind that might tend to make you think. You should be able to start (and stop) listening at any point without losing (or finding) the musical train of thought because there is no train of thought—it is just meant to wash over you like wallpaper.

Again, a bad comparison because wallpaper doesn’t wash over you.

So there is already too much thinking (or overthinking) going on here for this to be an ambient bit of writing.

What is ambient writing? All mood, description, and color with no plot?

And there’s a bit too much musical thinking going on in this little improv for it to be truly ambient: even though the arpeggiated figure that predominates seems to be athematic, I develop it thematically because I can’t help it, thus killing the mood. Call me a sonic mood killer. I can’t help myself.