The great composer Igor Stravinsky once said, “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles…The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.” By choosing a set of limitations or “compositional parameters” a composer can find direction and exercise his or her imagination. While it may seem counter-intuitive, this approach tends to encourage creativity rather than stifle it.

Screenwriting pedagogue Robert Mckee suggests that “talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put rocks in our path, barriers that inspire.” While we can deliberately choose some “limitations” or “parameters” sometimes they occur without choice. Let’s take for instance Olivier Messiaen’s “String Quartet for the End of Time.”  In 1940 he was a prisoner of war and had limited access to musicians or instruments. He made due with the instrumentalists available; a pianist, violinist, cellist, and clarinetist. This unconventional ensemble gave Messiaen a “playing field” to work within and stirred his imagination to create a charming and evocative piece of music. While this is a radical case, limitation also occurs in other more conventional forms.

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[Welcome to the first installment of Abstract Theory with The Human Abstract guitarist A.J. Minette. Through this column A.J. hopes to enlighten and enliven the metal readership on some of the finer points of the theory behind music and music composition in a way that's not overbearing or elitist. We hope you enjoy. -Ed.]

A lot of people like to claim that they love music, or that their life IS music, but how many of us actually give our undivided attention to listening on a regular basis?  One of the best lessons I learned while studying classical music in school was, “The greatest composers throughout history were an incredible balance of passion and intellect.” As listeners, we often take notice of how a piece of music moves us on an emotional level but it’s important to point out that we can also be moved on an intellectual level as well.

Understanding music on a deeper level leads us to a greater appreciation. Let’s take a Bach fugue for example. While the subject of a fugue (opening theme/melody) may be pleasant to listen to, we are intellectually stimulated by its use of counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, and formal architecture.

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We are often asked how we train the MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys, and the answer is surprisingly simple: we just play them metal. That’s one of the key reasons we selected monkeys to do our bidding. Yes, they like to throw poop, but they are excellent typists and just fucking love metal.

And now a scientific study at the University of Wisconsin confirms this little fact (about monkeys liking metal, not them being excellent typists). Satan Rosenbloom just showed us this story about the study, which found that monkeys prefer metal to classical, jazz, and even a certain classic rock giant:

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