Live Approach

Past events and Reviews

Our Approach

Grunt Productions has always taken their approach to music seriously. Take for example, the clarinet improvisations of Mark Buckingham ; here, although the technique is extremely hard and complex the actual event of creating music has an 'effortless' quality.

When this is applied to a band situation, with perhaps eight players improvising together the task is more complex technically; and there for it has to be even more effortless, playing in the moment as not to 'walk' over somebody else’s playing. Wolf Harth's review describes this very well.

What is Music ?

1. The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre(*1)

When you look at definitions of music there us usually reference to the fundamentals of music; Rhythm, Melody, Harmony, and Timbre (*2) . However all this does is describe the elements of music which we know today and can understand. By dividing it into these sections and seeing how they relate to each other can we really understand why people started to make music and use it for so many roles? An analysis of music as most music dictionaries would describe is therefore the wrong direction. Let’s look at another definition.

2. An artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner. (*3)

The key word here is communication. Music is a very deep form of communication, it must be, if it wasn’t a lament from Yorkshire played to somebody from the ivory coast could be misunderstood as a declaration of war. That can happen with language but it can’t with music, a laments sad everywhere on earth. It is a fair assumption that music came first, as the animals communicate to each other though rhythms and songs without the strictness of language.

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Written by Harry Whalley (c) copyright 2003 - please use the permission only

1. Dictionary.com
2. The musical companion victor gollancz ltd 1934
3. Princeton University definitions