While most senior thesis writers spend their days hunched over a sea of books in a claustrophobic library carrel, Max Horwich ’08 spends his in a recording studio.
Actually, the music major is working on a senior project that is part recital, part recording and part academic paper. He held his concert, “All and Sundry: The Music of Max Horwich and Friends,” at the end of February, and now spends most of his time in a recording studio, piecing together layers of music for his 12-track final recording, entitled “Sundays.”
“I’m basically exploring, in my project, the difference between performed and recorded music within the pop music idiom, and I wanted to give the live and recorded versions separate treatments,” he said.
Horwich explained that his music very much speaks to his Wesleyan experience.
“I think of the songs as a pastiche of thoughts and emotions,” he said. “Looking back on it, I feel to an extent that the songs are about what my experience at college has been like. When I was in high school, I thought that I was that kid that knew music, but when I got to Wesleyan it was a whole new world that was beyond anything I’d ever imagined, within the Music Department and outside of it.”
Horwich wrote his pop songs—which he describes as part of a folk-country tradition inhabited by the likes of Wilco and Feist—between the winter of his sophomore year and the fall of this year. The live versions, Horwich said, were also informed by the concert films “Stop Making Sense” and “The Last Waltz.”
Horwich began his February recital as a solo set, and then slowly incorporated other musicians with each subsequent song, ending the concert with a 13-piece band.
“My idea for my concert was that it wouldn’t be just a huge ego thing, but that it would also involve bringing all these other people who I’ve been playing with or whose music I respect so much, into it,” he said.
Adjunct Professor of Music Ronald Kuivila, Horwich’s senior project advisor, praised this formatting technique.
“I thought the systematic expansion of the size of his ensemble was a wonderful device that allowed him to establish his core ideas and then discover how they can be expanded and elaborated by other performers,” he said. “The relative freedom the other musicians enjoy is part of the idiom he is drawing on.”
The recital not only included performances of Horwich’s own songs, but also those of his band members, some of whom had not had much experience playing their own songs with a band in the past.
“I also really love that I got to put my fingerprints on songs by my friends that I like so much, and that they got to see their work realized in a larger setting,” Horwich said.
Although Horwich now spends much of his time alone in his recording studio, he still depends on friends like Adam Tinkle ’08, Max Lavine ’10 and Ben Seretan ’10 for help playing instruments on his recordings. He often layers their instrumentals over himself singing and playing the guitar, creating a fuller, almost chorus-like effect.
“Basically, my approach is that recorded music doesn’t need to sound like a bunch of people playing instruments and singing in a room,” he said. “I think that music can be layered, and can be a whole different world that you can play with.”
Horwich explained that this freedom for experimentation is part of what makes recording stand out from performing.
“Whereas playing live is such an immediate, visceral and cathartic experience, recording is a different kind of process, kind of like cooking, in a way,” he said. “You start with the basic ingredients, like the guitar, the lyrics and the chords and you have to put them together. As you go, you decide it needs a little bit of spice, and you add another guitar track to it, fill out the texture a little, proceeding as you go and hearing your music develop in a way that is really rewarding and fun.”
It seems, too, that Horwich’s interest in exploring both recorded and live music will not end with his experience at the University. The avid musician is going on tour during the summer with Seretan, and hopes to pursue his musical interests in Chicago after graduation with another University alumnus.
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