What’s My Line?

Bravo Dan Willis (Letters, Jan. 17)! If your Fundamentals of Music 101 course told you that music is “organized sounds and silences that occur in a specific time and are reproducible,” then I have been composing for you for 23 years.

My compositions contain meters and rhythms that incrementally change from moment to moment in very sophisticated nontraditional ways, unencumbered by the modern conventions of bars, meter and tempo. My compositions include enharmonic intervals, un-hummable melodies and found sound that utilize a panoply of “instruments” and tonalities unrecognizable to most modern “composers” or “musicians.” Yet they are no less engaging, dramatic or musical.

I spend months “orchestrating” every instrument in my work and, unlike most traditional composers, invent or create new instruments for each new work of mine. My works are infinitely reproducible. They contain structure, are organized, and make deliberate use of silence, dynamics, pitch, timbre, rhythm and timing. Just like Silkk, Stravinsky or Satchmo. Those artists chose more conventional routes to express the muse within them by working within artistically “acceptable” confines of meter, rhythm, instrumentation and tonality.

I work outside the mainstream. I would love to publish my “sheet” music but no orchestras currently exist to perform it. You can plunk down five bucks to hear it in a movie theater or you can rent my work in a local video store. You have been manipulated and moved by it your entire film-going life. Do you know what I do? Don’t feel bad, most filmmakers don’t either.

MARK MANGINI

Los Angeles

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Mangini, a sound designer, received Academy Award nominations in sound-effects editing for “The Fifth Element,” “Aladdin” and “Star Trek IV.”

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I concede that, in a narrow technical sense, both rap and rock are music. However, rap and rock are to music as arithmetic is to mathematics.

Just because you can add and subtract doesn’t make you a mathematician, and likewise, just because you can hum a tune doesn’t make you a musician.

ANDRIUS V. VARNAS

Redondo Beach