music as architecture

“When I try to define my work, I keep going back to the language of architecture, because it is multidimensional. I’ve always been drawn to books by architects; I try to look at building plans, to discover the secret passageways architects devise to allow entry and exit, to understand how they might create solidity or flow in a building. These choices resemble those that songwriters must make. When I want to learn from other writers’ songs, I spend a lot of time examining their frameworks, stripping them down in my mind, listening over and over. I feel as though I’m sitting with another architect’s blueprints. I see the patterns within the songs, the word choices they make, the voicings within the arrangements, all that. The most important ingredient might not be the most obvious. An incredible melody might be hidden within a distracting arrangement, or by a dissonant chord structure.
Houses, pianos –these inanimate objects are alive for me. They are made of primal materials: wood, stone, metal. Within such objects you can find an animate soul. If you gathered together a geneticist, an architect, a physician, a historian, a geologist, an archaeologist, and somebody who works with the psyche and said, “Define the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem,” what would they say it’s made of? Is it only the mortar and the stone, or does it contain what people have projected onto it? It has taken something on. It has taken something on that cannot be defined just by using visual perception. You can “put it under a microscope” and you still won’t be able to prove scientifically what it is that people are feeling when they stand facing this Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I’m interested in the composition of an object as it goes beyond the obvious. I feel the same way about musical composition. Songs, texts, are alive. I’m not saying they have two arms and two legs and a head like an alien. But there’s a consciousness there, an autonomy. I’m a co-creator, of course, but this hubris that a lot of writers have in which they think that they’re the Source –that’s a lie.
This is one reason I’m so drawn to a song’s architecture, to studying what a song is made of and why it works, how a sonic space is created that invites people in, what makes a listener start to listen. I’m interested in the moment in which a creation begins to live.”

“I think of the structure of any particular song as a house. The bathroom is the bathroom, and you have to understand the shape of the bathroom and its needs. The kitchen’s the kitchen. Sometimes you want the chorus to be the kitchen in a song. Sometimes you want the chorus to be the shower, very cleansing. Sometimes it’s the bedroom. Or sometimes the chorus is that shower, but instead it’s about being naked and soap and it’s sexy –or it’s not sexy at all, but an eradication of someone or something. It could even be akin to “I’ve gotta wash that God right outta my hair,” depending on what sticky archetypes have been prodding through the night. The point is, even in terms of the emotion expressed, the shape matters before the story does. Without the structure, there’s nowhere for the story to live.”

“(…) I knew it was potentially a good song because foundationally I was working with marble, not linoleum. I like linoleum, but you have to be a little more selective, because linoleum can be a completely bad idea in a lot of structures, whereas marble, if it’s good-quality marble, is always useful somewhere, even if only as the kitchen worktop.”

“Imagine that you have been able to let yourself into this fascinating architectural space but you’re in only one room and you do not know how to get to the other rooms because as of now there are no doorways. It becomes like a sonic puzzle.”

“The belief that the songs are a space doesn’t change. When I walk in it, though, what I choose to hang on the walls and bring into the room can change. But whatever the space, the challenge is to find the root of what and who the song Being is. It might be a lullaby, or a waltz. If I can go back to the song’s original form and retain the core of that form, then I can still thoroughly justify the interior decoration, what I call the rearrangements of the song, in whatever the space is.”

- Tori Amos y Ann Powers, "Tori Amos: Piece by Piece"