Rereading Homer’s Odyssey in the summer of 2022 really got me hooked on Greek mythology, setting me on a broader quest for the stories and themes that find expression in my music. For me, music’s limitless story-telling capacity is entirely matched by its ability to engage and move us by means of sound alone. My fascination with both story and sound helps drive my creative work in music.

 

I am also obsessed with riffs and riffing.

 

In much of my music, the forms are built on riffs, repeated rhythmic figures similar to the literary devices a skilled poet or speaker uses to craft a coherent, unified narrative. This structural grounding puts me in touch with the Apollonian origins of music as an ordering of sound relationships that already exist, as Apollo’s real-life follower Pythagoras demonstrated with his musical ratios. Apollonian riffs.

 

As an action, riffing is the spontaneous improvising that poets and musicians do as they explore sound and develop ideas through unfiltered self-expression. One of my favorite stories about riffing involves an Odysseus-like figure, Apollonius of Tyre, who spends his first night as a mysterious guest in a foreign palace improvising—riffing—on his harp, to the delight of the king, who then gives permission for Apollonius to marry his daughter. Apollonius riffs.

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These two aspects of riffing—the riff as a structural foundation and riffing as a sounding out of ideas and emotions—come together to help shape my musical creativity.                     

Geoffrey Dean

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