Home
*  *  *
AIM is a proud
sponsor of
DC-ACF's
New Music Salon
*  * *
 Sample My Music
 Dreamanicity
Interviews
Discoveries
Honorable Mentions
From the Collection
ComposerRoundtable
Spotlight Artists
Sign of the Times
Commentary
My Music
Track My Progress
What They're Saying
Humor

 AIM Music Mart

THE INTERVIEW OF WHAT HAPPENS
Conversation and Serendipity with Ray Lynch

  By Christopher M. Wright
  © 2007 Christopher M. Wright
  All Rights Reserved

  AMAZON LINKS BELOW - Listen to Samples

When the spirit moves him, Ray Lynch writes music... gorgeous music.... best-selling music. A new creation might spark from a mouse running across the floor (Ralph's Rhapsody) or a violinist jamming to a work in progress (The Music of What Happens). For Ray, it's never been about the money or keeping up with the latest musical fads. "Some of my favorite music is 400 years old," he unabashedly says. His music is distinguished by its level of craft, lyricism, and beautiful sonorities (combining traditional instruments with electronic sounds), all timeless elements that will never go out of style.

Born in 1943, Ray was raised in West Texas and began studying piano around age 5, taking after his mother and an older brother. Ray turned to the guitar when he was 12 and was greatly moved by the recordings of Andrés Segovia. He studied classical guitar in Barcelona for three years after high school, returning to study composition at the University of Texas. He took up the lute to satisfy the ensemble requirement for his degree, then moved to New York City where he performed with the Renaissance Quartet for seven years. He experienced a personal crisis and dropped his musical career, thinking he would never return. But his Spiritual Teacher, Bhagavan Adi Da Samraj, encouraged him to compose again, starting with devotional chants. Award-winning albums followed - No Blue Thing was Billboard's 1990 Instrumental Album of the Year and Deep Breakfast was certified 'Platinum' (one million copies sold) in 1993. Although the term 'New Age' never really fit, Ray's Celestial Soda Pop became a hit on 'New Age' radio stations, leading to a recording contract with Windham Hill, the preeminent 'New Age' record label.

In this interview, we fire up the WayBack Machine and journey through time. First stop - antiquity....

Ray Lynch: Ancient Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and cultures that existed before that. In particular, I'm talking about The Great Tradition, a spiritual tradition that antedates classical Greece. I’ve always been interested in the ancient world and mathematics but my decision to get serious about them was triggered by a particular piece I was writing, a piece with an explicit and abstract mathematic element. This is very uncharacteristic of me, but I was organizing arpeggiated notes in groups of prime numbers, way beyond the usual groupings of two and three which you find everywhere in music. I was using groupings of 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, and 23 and trying to see if they could be used in a way that was musically interesting. I found that indeed they could but in the process of doing the piece, I became more interested in the prime numbers themselves than the music I was developing through this exercise, and that's what pushed me into mathematics full time. I started looking at numbers to see how they relate, what they had to say for themselves, and later, what their cosmological and mythological significance was. I even developed a 'numerical cosmogenesis'. The working title of the first book to be published next year is: How Do You Get 2 When 1 Is All You’ve Got? I've been on this journey the last five years and it's still ongoing.

The mathematics of the ancient world was profoundly musical. It respected and took into account all of their intellectual disciplines, including the ratios of music tuning theory, the Pythagorean variety. One of the things that Pythagoras discovered - he didn't discover this, actually, but he codified it in a way that has survived - was that ratios involving some of the small numbers, or integers, are the ones that are the most harmonious. Like the ratio of 3-to-2, the frequency ratio of the perfect 5th, which is the most harmonious interval within the octave. The octave is the ratio of 2-to-1 and the perfect 4th is the ratio of 4-to-3. Sixths and thirds are 5-and-4 and 6-and-5. The string-length ratios are the inverse of these. It's the small numbers like these that make the most harmonious musical intervals, so they were given particular prominence in ancient mathematics.

Modern mathematics is not musical in that sense at all. There's no emphasis on one number over another. Particular numbers have no special or inherent meaning but, in the ancient world, they did. An example is the Ennead of Egyptian mythology, with its nine 'gods', or divine principles, each of which was represented by a number. So the Egyptians gave special importance to the first nine integers. Another example is the special meaning and prominence which the Pythagoreans saw in the number 10, definitely a divine number. It was all based on how the ancient world looked upon and understood numbers, which is very different from the way we do today. If you talk about the 'quality of numbers' to somebody today, they won't know what you mean.

Ray: I don't need ideas from mathematics when I'm writing music. When I write music again, I will compose with my feeling and I will know intuitively when the piece is right, when it's beautiful, without mathematical justification. Music is inherently mathematical – the math is built in – so much so that the composer needn’t worry about it. If a piece is truly musical and beautiful, then the mathematics of it is also right. When you know there's nothing more you can do to make it more beautiful, that's when you stop – not for some mathematical reason.

Ray: What grabs me first of all is that the music is very accessible, harmonically. It's not complex in the same sense as a 19th century symphony would be. I like simple harmonies. My harmonic language was basically intact in the Renaissance because I mostly use triads [common three-note chords]. That doesn't mean there's no dissonance in my music. There's always the play between dissonance and consonance in any music. Consonant triads were frowned on when I was studying composition at the University of Texas back in the 1950s and '60s, but simple harmony is one of the things that moves me the most in music. I don't worry about whether something has been done before in the music that I write. In one sense, everything's already been done, but nobody's done it the way I would choose to do it.

Ray: No. I don't worry about whether it's harmonically complex, as such. I don't worry about anything. I will take a very simple musical idea that's occurred to me, maybe when I'm improvising, and I'll develop that. It has its own logic and its own necessity. You have to find what that is by playing around with it. Ultimately, you have to let the material unfold itself, or speak for itself. Then it can be a true piece of art.

Ray: I trained as a classical guitarist and I play guitar by plucking the strings with the fingernails on my right hand, or actually with a combination of flesh and nail. The sound can project, it can be fairly loud. But the lute in the Renaissance was typically played without nails. They had to use quite a different technique to do runs and things, for example. So I had to adapt my guitar technique as best I could to the lute. I kept the nails because I was still playing guitar; and there were some concerts where I played both. One of the advantages of that was that I could project the sound more than somebody who used a typical lute technique from the Renaissance. I could be heard in large halls. Julian Bream played both instruments and did the same thing. Also, playing with the fingernails wasn't unheard of in the Renaissance. I read some commentaries from that period which complained about people who played the lute with their fingernails. I presume it was too harsh or too loud for that context. But that just depends on the player; you can play very subtly with the nails if you choose to do it that way.

Ray: There's a vast store of very good music from that period. I like, for example, the music of John Dowland, the lute songs in particular. [AMAZON LINK BELOW] I've given a couple of concerts that consisted entirely of his works. In general, they're melancholy, and back then, anyway, it was easier for me to appreciate the beauty of slow and profound than the upbeat. [Dowland's motto, according to Wikipedia, was Semper Dowland, semper dolens. ("Always Dowland, always mourning.")].

Ray: Sometimes, I'm just overwhelmed by the beauty of a piece of music. I can't get that from any other thing. That's what I value about music. It enters the being at the level of the heart. You hear it there before you hear it with your mind. If it moves me at the heart, then I know it's good. That's why so many people with so many different ideas about everything can feel the same thing from a piece of music. They can be united in the music. You can go to a concert, you can feel the audience as one being. That's one of the things that can be so great about performing in public. Sometimes this very wonderful thing happens, the performers are really together and the audience is right with them. This whole circle of energy begins and it's almost like a miracle. You can do things as a performer you couldn't do otherwise; the energy is unlimited; any musician will tell you that. After concerts like that, I can't go to sleep. I'm up all night, there's just too much energy in my body.

Ray: Yes, there are pieces that are playful, that have a quality of carefree happiness like Celestial Soda Pop, for example. That's a playful piece, and one that was particularly easy to write.

Ray: Sometimes, listening to a piece of music that's playful can restore that playfulness, which is really a kind of freedom from concern.

Ray: Not exactly, but I was worried about our culture’s vulnerabilities and unconsciousness surrounding our absolute reliance on a fragile infrastructure. It was upsetting but, sometimes, composers can write quite good music when they’re upset. Sometimes, I've performed on stage very well when I was upset. It turns you on in a certain way, it puts you at a depth, aware of something you wouldn't normally be aware of. But, in general, I agree with you. It's difficult for me to write music when I'm upset. But that wasn't what really prevented me from writing in 1999. I was worrying about what was happening in the world and researching what was happening, and spending almost all of my time doing that.

Ray: Yes, I occasionally do that. Sometimes they can be inspiring. In themselves, as you say, they are just mechanical. But Bach, for example, used those devices all the time. However, he used them in a way that was completely artistic and that's one reason why we marvel at his music. He could be doing something quite technical which you might think would turn out to be very dry but, in his hands, it wasn't dry at all, it was great music, almost all of it. So, it just depends on the composer.

Sometimes you can be having a dry period and do something like play with canons or inversions or reading the notes backward and, suddenly, it inspires something in you, you see something and feel something that you can develop. You never know what's going to stimulate a good piece of music. These devices are useful if it turns out that the music that you derive from them is beautiful. Sometimes, mysterious things can happen when you do something mechanical, you never know. You could play a piece of music at the wrong speed on a tape recorder and you'll hear something that you just didn't hear before.

That's why one of the most recent pieces I've written is called The Music of What Happens. I had basically finished recording the piece. On a whim, I asked a violinist [John Gregory] to improvise against what I had already recorded to see how he worked in a studio environment. I thought I might use him in the future. He did six or seven passes through the piece, all of which I recorded. Later, I started playing around with his improvisations, digitally editing certain parts and moving others around a little bit, and it made an entirely different piece in its character from the one I had envisioned when I began. It was just the music of what happens and yet it was a much better piece. It's the same way with any creative person; you're always on the lookout for what might spark something and you have no idea where it might come from, it could come from anywhere.

Ray: As for the timeless part, I don’t think you can talk about it in terms of some elements being timeless and others not so. If a piece of music lasts and continues to move people, it’s because it’s so musical and so integrated that it wouldn’t even occur to anybody to consider its elements as separate things. A good composer is always going for that kind of integration, and I don't think anything would be different in the way that I approach music in 2012. I'm not going to change my way of composing but I have learned over time to just let things happen and not try to control everything. I haven't been writing for awhile, so I've stored up a lot of 'stuff' that can be turned into musical material. I have no idea what will come out, but I will do it the way I've always done it. I'll find musical elements that make sense to me, that are moving and potentially beautiful, and I'll play with them. I'll let those elements speak for themselves and be what they have to be. When there's no more that I can do to make it better, then the piece is done.

Ray: Inevitably, there will be. Technology is moving now at such a rate that it has an effect on the way you work. It can be both positive and negative. Sometimes, the technology can be overwhelming for an artist, it can get in the way. On the other hand, technology and using computers make things possible that weren't possible before. In particular, a composer can write a whole album in his bedroom using the computer nowadays, and very little else. So it has a profound effect and can be very advantageous.

Ray: That's what I meant. You can have your mixing board in the computer, as well as sampled sounds. If you're trying to record a group with acoustic instruments, you need to have them in the studio with a multi-track recorder. But if you're creating the way I create, you can often do it with just a computer and a host of sampled and synthesized sounds.

Most of my pieces are a combination of synthesized sounds, sampled sounds, and real acoustic instruments. Often I'll hire members of the San Francisco Symphony, for example, to come and lay down particular tracks because the instruments are prominent in the music and I want them to sound like a flute or a violin. On the other hand, in a lot of pieces, I use synthesized sounds, not because they sound 'like' anything else, they just sound in a way that I like and they sound together in a way that I like. Not too many of my pieces are purely synthetic, but some are.

Ray: Yes, but I would amend that by saying I'll often use sounds that are supposed to be something like a flute or a bassoon, but you can tell they're synthetic. If that sound itself is beautiful, then I'll use it. Some sound designer came up with this sound for a synthesizer and I happen to like it and it happens to sound like a flute. It's not going to fool anybody, it's not a flute, but it's still a sound that I really like. It shouldn't matter to anybody listening to a piece of music where the sounds come from. It has nothing to do with the music.

Ray: It wouldn't have been created if it were all standard instruments...

Ray: ...because standard instruments can't do that. Sounds are sounds. And sometimes a sound that doesn't sound very good by itself sounds just right when it's in the right company. You can take two bad sounds and put them together and it's a good sound. The only issue for me is whether I'm moved by the music. That's what I value in music. I think that's really what everybody values in music.

Ray: Nothing. I don't worry about that. What concerns me is the material in front of me, and what I can do to make it musical and beautiful. Who cares if it's a Renaissance-like piece or a 20th century piece or anything else? If it works, if it sounds right, that's what matters. If you try to do something that's up to date and current, it has to go out of fashion, by definition. If you wear bell-bottoms, you know in ten years they're going to be out of fashion. Like most composers, I want to write music that people can always listen to and enjoy, and that means that all of my attention and feeling is in the music itself, its inevitability, and its own unique logic and flow, and nothing else. The 'style' of a piece, if you want to call it that, will come out of that core, naturally, without giving it any thought at all. If you find yourself trying to impose some kind of 'style' from the outside into the heart of the music, you know you’re trouble. It might mean that there is not enough heart in the music to begin with – not enough for it to find its own natural expression. A piece without a clear and compelling musical heart is not worth finishing. It’s just not music.

Hear music samples
and buy CD's direct from Ray
at www.raylynch.com

SHARE 
Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit
Facebook | StumbleUpon | My Web
Newsvine | Mixx | Dig Article

© 2007 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved - This material may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten, redistributed, resold, or manipulated in any form.

                                      Piano Book

John Dowland - Complete Lute Works
 

Top of Page