Music & Writing
A Workshop for Musicians, Writers
and Lovers of Music

October 25, 2008
Frostburg State University Campus
2008 Faculty TBA

In conjunction with the Allegany Arts Council, the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing is proud to host its first ever Music & Writing Workshop--a program for musicians who need to write, creative writers who love music, and lovers of music who want to write music reviews. The day will end with a small performance.

Featuring four fine writer-teachers with a broad range of experience, the workshops will provide students with the skill necessary to write about about their own music or about the music they love.

Four workshops include Music as Muse, Business Writing for Musicians, Lyric Writing, and Music Review.

Download a PDF of the application here.

Music as Muse

Music as muse, prose as chord, poem as a form of drum? Possible? Definitely. This workshop is designed to increase the level of musical technique in both prose (fiction and non-fiction) and poetry by choreographing the sentence as a unit of rhythm, by exploring the potential meanings in syntax, and by exploiting poetic techniques to create structures near chant and song. We will begin the workshop by examining the sentences of various prose writers and poets who are rhythmically inventive. Participants will then produce short exercises and share new work. In the end, like our new sentences, we should all be dancing.

Professional Writing for Musicians

You've written some great songs-now what? This workshop addresses the "other side" of writing for musicians. We'll look at a variety of examples and try our hands at writing CD liner notes, press releases, promotional materials, and more. Topics will include copyrights, writing for the Web, and electronic vs. traditional press kits. Musicians are encouraged to bring music samples and their current promotional materials to the workshop.

Lyric Writing

Lyrics are an integral part of most songs-whether the singer croons or screams or drops rhymes. But what makes some lyrics stand out? And what is their relationship to melody? To the music? To the audience? We'll be listening to some successful songs of a variety of genres, in order to get a sense of how songs work. Songwriters are encouraged to bring lyrics-in-process or whole songs they feel aren't coming together, as well as their instruments, in order to work on the art of song lyric writing. If you have music but no songs-even better, as we'll also discuss process and come up with some prompts to write new lyrics for existing or new music.

Music Review

This music review workshop will prepare participants to objectively critique both live performances and albums. Engaging in a variety of prompts, we will match writing styles, audience concerns, event and venue details, and performance nuances to different genres of live music; we will target strategies for accurate report and review of shows that require unique specificity; after all, even if a band's set list remains consistent across a nine-city tour, we need to pinpoint the highlights, ambience, and tone of the particular show that we're capturing with words and then commenting on. Likewise, we'll extend our review strategies from performance to finished product by focusing on albums; all participants should bring a complete commercial album (please-no burned CDs without covers or liner notes) worth reviewing as well as a recent biography by the artist or band featured on the album. We'll develop methods and vocabularies for discussing the lyrical craft, song structure, instrumentation, and production of the album's contents, but we'll also consider the album as a whole-its design, title, song order, and immediate visceral appeal. Along with our evaluative criteria for the genre(s) that a particular album might fall into, we'll aim for sharp and professional album reviews with writing that is both vivid and opinionated.