The Psychology of Music: Arranging

Today, we discuss a topic that doesn’t get discussed often but which is key to making powerful songs: music arranging. We explore the reason arranging is so critical and why a good arranger understands music psychology.

 But what is arranging, and why is it so critical to great music production?  

Arranging is the art of organising musical ideas into sequences that have meaningful trajectories, to captivate an audience and lead them on the journey of your song. It is the masterful expression of each musical section to serve the music’s narrative, allowing the artist to lead audiences through a narrative. We often don’t think of all music as narrative, but any music, in any style, is a narrative we convey to an audience, and great arranging is the art of organising that story into flowing trajectories.

In the past, arrangers were sought after for their skills. They complemented the songwriters and musicians by taking the initial set of ideas and turning them into a masterful production. In Latin music from the early 1940s, 50s, and all the way to the 70s, this was the case, with masterful arrangers such as Johnny Pacheco and Bobby Valentin crafting amazing salsa songs for the famous Fania All-Stars. These arrangers would craft songs that were powerful, captivating, and told a story.

 But what is arranging and how is it done ? Especially since the ‘official’ role of the arranger has all but ceased in our culture.

The arranger made great songs because they understood music psychology: the art of affecting people’s minds and emotions through music. They used this skill to drive their music creations.

I found this same phenomenon in my research within religious rituals, where musical structure is of utmost importance to the projection and effect of music. The form, or structure of the music, holds musical ideas together in a format that has psychological meaning, often leading to altered states, spiritual possession, or uplifting atmospheres. These forms are so culturally ingrained that they are passed down through generations, across continents, and through time. Furthermore, these forms are so powerful in affecting human psychology that they are present in many forms of music from around the world, music that also seeks to create heightened moments of ecstasy. One example is certain styles of electronic house music.

Electronic house music has its origins in Chicago and New York, in clubs like The Warehouse and The Paradise Garage. Initially filled with predominantly Black and Latino gay men, it was referred to as “going to church,” a reference to the spiritual effects of the experience in those early days.

 What was it that made these events so spiritual? And what is the connection here with religious rituals?

Music changes, contexts change, and people change, but the fundamental core of human beings remains, something we share with every culture in the world: our shared human psychology. It is a fundamental aspect that is ancient and persists despite all the sophisticated ways we try to change and differentiate ourselves. Freud popularised the early study of Western psychology, which was the study of the human mind. He studied dreams, which are common to all humans, and proposed a system for interpreting them. Another human cultural characteristic is mythologies, the stories that we have passed down through generations and which are produced by most cultures around the world. Joseph Campbell found that cultural mythologies from around the world were so similar that he proposed a fundamental form inherent to all of them, which he called: the Hero’s Journey. This insight was derived from Jung, who proposed that the goal of human life was to individuate, which is to grow through challenges into a new self. Jung saw this psychological truth as our fundamental nature and purpose for being here on earth, embedded in our psyche as archetypes. In this view, we don’t just write myths in a Hero’s Journey style, we embody the Hero’s Journey by our very nature.

These archetypes are what guide us as human beings to grow, develop, learn, and keep pushing forward: what Schopenhauer called the ‘will to life,’ that sense that we are unceasingly pushing, needing to grow, always facing challenges and trying to overcome them, even when all we want is peace and rest. It seems that the ability to face and overcome challenges is in our bones, it’s our nature, and the fundamental core of our various expressions of human culture.

You may ask, what does this have to do with music arranging?

The point I’m trying to make is that powerful music arranging aligns with this fact: that we as humans are united by our psychological similarities more than our cultural differences, and our nature is to overcome challenges, to grow, continually becoming new selves. Religious ritual cultures know this, and so in order to help their devotees grow, they project a deity that they can identify with, a conglomeration of the highest traits assumed by the cultural tradition. The task of music in these scenarios is to help achieve the direct experience of these deities to instigate growth, development, and ultimately, transform into these new identities. With this in mind, it makes sense that cultures from different parts of the world would have created musical systems with similar qualities. But why?

First, because they ascertained the fundamental core of human nature as a desire to grow, develop, and transform, and second, they ascertained that narratives were the method for embodying these psychological truths within cultural archetypes, that are subsequently portrayed through myths, legends, songs, and art.

Despite the various differences between cultures and their musical sounds, musical forms are primary, being the vehicles for the expression of cultural stories, instruments, sounds, and melodies. Musical forms connect directly with human psychology, and in this way, they connect cross-culturally. By exploring musical forms that create ecstasy, heightened states, and transformations in our audiences, we can learn to create music that aligns with the archetypes that drive our human nature. We learn to tell powerful stories with our music that correspond to our deepest psychological nature, our desire to grow, develop, and transform.

Australian academic and psychologist David Tacey, in his book Gods and Diseases, says that the desire to transform is a basic human quality and is expressed in an array of different actions such as drinking, drugs, suicide, pleasure-seeking, and dangerous activities. This desire for rebirth is embedded in the Hero’s Journey, who rises to meet the challenge and is transformed through the process. We can learn to embrace these truths in our music so that we align our music with human nature. The opposite of this is to only contribute to the superficialities of life, as we see in the varieties of pop culture that provide entertainments and novelties but leave us feeling empty, never really getting to the core of our deepest desires, wishes, and need for transformative experiences.

Thanks for reading. This writing provided the background for the psychology of arranging. In the next newsletter, I will address these musical arranging techniques directly and how they can be implemented in our music. If your want help creating your own tracks using these approaches ,then head over to ​https://www.vincentsebastian.com/shop​ for various free and paid resources that can assist you, such as artist production, DAW templates, or books. Also, you can check out my ​music​ here.