This will be a quick entry. I just wanted to cover a couple of terms that I’ve found myself using with music students in discussing a concept about composition, songwriting, and production.
The terms are the payoff and earning it. If we consider the program dynamic envelope, or any other way of thinking about the narrative arch of a piece, there is likely to be at least one or more climaxes. Without creating a taxonomy, climaxes could be the loudest or biggest part of the piece, or they might be an especially quiet or intimate moment, or any number of possibilities.
My use of these terms involves the quality of that climax. Does it feel like it properly paid off? Did we get a big enough payoff for the scale and proportion of the piece? A ten minute listening experience with a minimal payoff may feel weak, where as a similar climax in a 3 minute piece might feel epic.
Earning it has to do with the approach to that climax. This is, again, an issue of scale and proportion. Does it feel like we earned the climax? Was there a sense of musical struggle that built up an appropriate level of expectation and anticipation?
In almost every case when I tell a student that the payoff is great, but you need to earn it, I’m really saying that the musical material preceding the climax wasn’t scaled or shaped in a way that seems appropriate to the payoff.
These obviously aren’t traditional music theory terms, but they exist in the same kind of lexicon that might discuss a lift in a song, and the need for our arrangement and production to support that lift.
Students are well served in exploring some isolated contexts to explore tools to achieve these things. These allow us to have some well honed tools in our tool box.
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