Music 256A Reading Response 6

Elena Stalnaker | Fall 2021

Reading Response ~ "Artful Design" Chapter 6

For some reason I kept reading this chapter about game design through the lens of music composition.

When I first read the definitions of Ludus and Paidia on pg. 330, I immediately felt this favoritism towards Paidia. I'm not much of a gamer (yet) and love to make music, and thought at first that made my kind of play more alligned with Paidia. But, on pg. 331, improvisational music is listed close to Paidia, and playing music from a score is listed closer to Ludus, so I'm not sure where that puts composition, especially in the way that I do it. I tend to improvise around an idea that occurs to me, either an expressive goal or a musical fragment I hear in my head, and often it feels more like I'm listening to music playing in my mind that I'll be able to hear more fully if I just listen hard enough, rather than "making" something. I know this isn't how everyone writes music; one of my composition major friends told me about how he maps things out with numerical proportions in time and considers which compositional philosophy he wants to use for the piece, drawing off of his historical knowledge of past composers. I was briefly tempted to try and learn enough about the history and philosophy of composition to join him in that method, but I feel a strange resistance to changing the way I do it, because I like that even though I probably am using certain rules to guide the structure of the music I write, I am mostly ignorant of what they are, and therefore am going totally on intuition and experience. I think part of my resistance to educating myself more on music composition comes from wanting to maintain the experience (or illusion?) of Paidia over Ludus, because for whatever reason I seem to like Paidia more. I wonder, though... is not knowing what structure you're using the same as not having it? Can Ludus become Paidia if you don't know the rules/conventions you're supposed to be following?

I was also intrigued by the instructions in part 2 of the design etude on pg. 352, "Imagine and Sketch". The concept of working backwards from what you want the players to feel, and creating the mechanics with that aesthetic goal in mind, modifying based on what dynamics actually emerge, reminded me of my/many people's process for composing music. I almost always start from a feeling and then make music to try and express that feeling, almost as a form of heightened journaling. When I took a couple classes of a composition seminar before I had to drop it, the professor (Francois Rose) encouraged a similar approach, instructing us to start with an "expression" and constantly check the music we were making against that goal. I think it's interesting that the artful design methods Ge teaches are often so similar to the methods for making more traditional forms of art.