Design is a vital and often overlooked part of writing music.
I’ve long been obsessed with design – thanks to my long relationship with graphic design by way of concert programs, CDs, posters, etc. I spend at least a little bit of every week with visual design.
Which is why it surprised me so much to realize that it’s so profoundly related to the music I write.
Of course, composers and arrangers think about design as they notate – staff size, font, system breaks, etc. But design extends to choice of accidentals and rhythmic notation for clarity, meter, key, and so much more. We always have choices in how to notate a musical idea, and making those choices is the very picture of design.
Debbie Millman, author of Why Design Matters and host of the amazing Design Matters podcast, recently had this conversation with Dr. Brené Brown:
BB: When I pick up something, an appliance or I look at something, an ad, or I interact with design, a chair, I can feel sometimes like, of course whoever did it doesn’t know me from anybody, but like, that person cares about me. That person sees me, knows me, that person… Like good design feels to me like… I don’t know, there is such a human connection in good design, and I can’t articulate it.
[…]
DM: The most important tenet of design now is really understanding human behavior and the understanding of behavioral psychology as it relates to how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about others, how we share or don’t share, what we covet, what we don’t, everything we buy, everything we purchase, everything we engage with telegraph something about ourselves.
Debbie Millman & Dr Brené Brown’s on Brown’s podcast Dare To Lead
Good design is a way for a creator to show how much they care about the user of their creation.
I think so much as I write about the ensemble who will be reading the music, and how to make it as easy as possible to get the music off of the page. This is design thinking, the same as the UI/UX experts who design websites and the architects who think about traffic patterns in buildings. We are designing for real humans, and it makes a difference.
I notice design failures in graphic design, and in architecture, and increasingly in musical notation, too. I never hesitate to point them out to my students, because I want them to be thinking about design, too. “What would be a better way to write that?” is a question worth asking to yourself, and in rehearsal, as well.