The Musical Connection to Architecture from a Composer

Steve Horowitz is the creator of odd but highly-accessible sounds and a diverse and prolific musician. Steve’s music integrates his experiences as a bass player and band leader with his explorations as a multifaceted composer. Steve has been honored with a Grammy and a Webby.

This week’s Podcast guest Jim Kalbach, is a Principal UX Designer with Citrix Online and an active speaker, writer, and instructor on business design, user experience, and information architecture. In the interview, Jim’s take on systems architecture and music composition.

An Excerpt from the past podcast (This was a fascinating conversation, I encourage you to browse the transcript):

Joe: Well, you had mentioned that your father was an architect, and I had talked about statistical and quality with you. From your viewpoint, what is that relationship that math has with music or that architecture might even have with music?

Steve: Right. Yeah, and we were talking about this a little bit, too. There is a composer, Johannes Xanakis, who was both. He started out as an architect and also became a composer and quite a famous composer, and I think that there are a lot of parallels between music and architecture, especially if you talk about writing music for commercial purposes–whether it’s film or TV or games, any of those things–that there’s the old architectural adage that “form follows function” really does apply in those cases and what’s you’re really trying to do is you’re very much like an architect.

An architect goes to build a building, right? So they have to sit down and say, “Well; first of all, where’s its going to be? What’s the client looking for? They want this; I want that.” They have to balance their creative judgments based on many, many, many factors in terms of how they’re going to be able to build this building and then you get into the materials you’re going to use and how you’re going to put those together–very similar with composing. You have to think about, first, what the audience is, who it is if you’re working with a director, then they’re going to have, you know; that’s the equivalent of working with a client if you’re building and building, how are you going to juggle what their needs are, what they want and get them what they want and, at the same time, put together a building that will actually stand up.

Now, at the end of the day as an architect, when you’re done, you’ve built this giant building, and you get to stand in front of it or a house or whatever and you’re like “ah; I built that.” Now, as a composer, as a musician, at the end of the day, I’m not sure, we’ve been as functional to the general population at large with our creations, so if there’s one difference between architecture and music, I think that might be part of it — it’s very rare you’ll see a building built for building’s sake but, in music, you will many times hear music made for music’s sake and for the edification of the composer and not necessarily for an audience or a client.

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