titles of musical compositions may be indicated by

You’ll deliberately choose, arrange and play musical materials so as to evoke that image or feeling that somehow connote ideas beyond the domain of music that are able to cross the bridge from the mind of the artist to the mind of the audience. It may be that you’ve decided to write an instrumental song about a topic. This label will trigger vibrations on the gigantic, invisible cultural web your music sits in, whether you like it or not. If music is, as Rilke said, the ‘ language where languages end‘ then the title you give it will be the only words associated with the music, initially at least. The words in the title emerge from a key phrase, usually in the chorus. If you’ve written a song with lyrics in it, it’s relatively easy to name. Obviously this language, including the title shapes the algorithm that is likely to get the music to your ears in the first place.

Online platforms for music distribution demand a title as well as other information about genre and style (which Tyrone and Lesley, the ukulele and double bass duo I make music with, tend to confound). In the live moment the titles may be spoken rather than written. Your live audience needs to label your songs too, so they can remember them should they wish to return to them, or even be alerted to when they start and finish. Your musical collaborators need to know the names of the materials they’re working with. It allows control, however provisional, over whatever it is you’re building. In the private domain, your own filing system, whether it’s on a computer or in a paper notebook, generally asks you what you want to call things. Titling has both practical and aesthetic dimensions. Things needs names so they’ll come when you call. They form part of the paratext of an artwork, the writing around a work, like the little label near a big abstract painting that ‘frames’ the image in your mind – perhaps not as vital as the physical frame that locates its boundaries and helps you stick it to the wall – but still an important part of the invisible engineering that helps artworks perform as bridges from one mind and heart to others. Is a title provided by the composer a deep and complex representation of process and meaning, or is it just a screw out of a jar randomly selected to keep the customer (and the market) satisfied? An instrumental’s title may the only language directly associated with the music. I’m the lyricist in the duo, among other things. When it came to titling each of the songs on my own collection of ukulele and double bass instrumentals Tyrone and Lesley Have No Words (2021) I faced the problem head on. After all, they’re instrumentals with no words to nail them down, and could be ‘about anything’. After having told us an engaging anecdote about how he’d derived the title for his instrumental ‘Virginia is for Loners’ (a play on the tourist motto Virginia is for Lovers) he self-deprecatingly suggested he could call his compositions anything at all, tell a story about it, and we’d be none the wiser. Later that week I was in a tiny bar, witnessing a concert by American acoustic guitarist William Tyler. Was that exact screw the cause of my inconvenience, or had the business proprietor who sees a hundred punctures a week sensed my need for meaning as a customer, simply reached into the nearest jar and given me a metal placebo to satisfy my desire for causality? As I drove away I wondered about the authenticity of that artefact.

Titles of musical compositions may be indicated by