Music assists him in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion.
When I was 14 I would pick up my brother's bass guitar, and I would just pound on it, having no idea how to play it.
I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn't learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition.
A lot of people don't realize that guitar playing is very much like singing or playing any of the glissando-type instruments - you have to do it in tune.
I do remember, though, when I discovered the third! I was about five years old - it was a very pleasing sound. I remembered that if I hit one note, then skipped one and played the next, I could get this really good sound.
Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.
I'm not a trained musician. When folks talk about 'Well, you go to this or that' - the tenor, or the third part - I don't really know what they're talking about.
I sometimes try to write something that is actually really simple and I can't do it. So, then, it's not simple anymore. It's really hard and it gets all messed up. I sometimes sit down and try to write a song with just three chords and it doesn't work.
All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.
Those three chords were part of my life - G, F, Bb - yeh, it is, it is, and I can't help noticing it. But there have been other things nearly as close to it which people haven't noticed, other things we have done.
I don't know one note from another.
I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.
Whatever is original in my writing comes from my musical apprenticeship. I look for rhythm in words. I imagine words as if they were musical chords. Often I'll write something, read it, and find it musically unsatisfactory. There is a musical imperative in my choice of words.
A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.
If you feel you have the right key, you try to make some phrase or sound that will fit.
I'm trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.
You can play the piano with the white keys only or you can play it with only the black keys. But for harmony you must use the black and the white keys.
