Free How Music Works by David Byrne

rote exercise,
    or it doesn’t have to be.
    While we were performing the shows
    in Los Angeles that would eventually
    become the Stop Making Sense film, I
    invited the late William Chow,L a great
    Beijing Opera actor, to see what we were
    doing. I’d seen him perform not too long
    before, and was curious what he would
    make of this stuff. He’d never been to a
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    Western pop show before, though I suspect he’d seen things on TV. The next
    day we met for lunch after the show.
    William was forthright, blunt maybe; he had no fear that his outsider per-
    spective might not be relevant. He told me in great detail what I was “doing wrong” and what I could improve. Surprisingly, to me anyway, his observations were like the adages one might have heard from a vaudevillian, a burlesque
    dancer, or a stand-up comedian: certain stage rules appear to be universal.
    Some of his comments were about how to make an entrance or how to direct an
    audience’s attention. One adage was along the lines of needing to let the audience know you’re going to do something special before you do it. You tip them off and draw their attention to you (and you have to know how to do that in a way that isn’t obvious) or toward whoever is going to do the special thing. It seems counterintuitive in some ways; where’s the surprise if you let the audience in on what’s about to happen? Well, odds are, if you don’t alert them, half the audience will miss it. They’ll blink or be looking elsewhere. Being caught by surprise is, it seems, not good. I’ve made this mistake plenty of times. It doesn’t just apply to stage stuff or to a dramatic vocal moment in performance, either. One can see the application of this rule in film and almost everywhere else. Stand-up comedians probably have lots of similar rules about getting an audience ready for the punch line.
    A similar adage was “Tell the audience what you’re going to do, and then
    do it.” “Telling” doesn’t mean going to the mic and saying, “Adrian’s going
    to do an amazing guitar solo now.” It’s more subtle than that. The directors and editors of horror movies have taught us many such rules, like the sac-rificial victim and the ominous music (which sometimes leads to nothing
    the first time, increasing the shock when something actually happens later).
    And then while we sit there in the theater anticipating what will happen,
    the director can play with those expectations, acknowledging that he or
    she knows that we know. There are two conversations going on at the same
    time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told. The
    same thing can happen on stage.
    The dancing that had emerged organically in the previous tour began to
    get increasingly codified. It still emerged out of movement that was impro-
    vised in rehearsals, but now I was more confident that if a singer, player, or performer did something spontaneously that worked perfectly for us, it could be repeated without any risk of losing its power and soul. I had confidence
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    that this bottom-up approach to making a show would work. Every performer
    does this. If something new works one night, well, leave it in. It could be a lighting cue, removing one’s jacket, a vocal embellishment, or smashing a guitar. Anything can eventually grow stale, and one has to be diligent, but when a move or gesture or sound is right, it adds to the emotion and intensity, and each time it’s as real as it was the first time.
    Not everyone liked this new approach. The fact that some of the perform-
    ers had to hit their marks, or at least come close, didn’t seem very rock and roll to them. But, going back to William Chow’s admonishments, if you’re
    going to do something wild and spontaneous, at least “tell” the audience)
    ahead of time and do it in the light, or your inspired moment is wasted.
    But where does the music fit into all this? Isn’t music the “content”