The more I work as a composer the more I realize that the greatest obstacles to getting work done do not so much lay in the body as in the mind. If you're blind, like Joaquin Rodrigo or Louis Vierne were, this is no obstacle to composing so long as you can feel instruments and hear. It was clearly no obstacle in the end for either Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder. If you become deaf and are Beethoven it is no inherent obstacle to you being a composer. To be fair each of these musicians overcome remarkable obstacles but I'm getting to my point about the mind's role in creativity. Mind power, boy! Mind power!
It is becoming more apparent to me as I get older (not that I'm old, I'm in my mid-30s, but I plead guilty to having always felt old at heart) that failures in creative arts (as perhaps anywhere) are failures of mind. When I was in high school I took some cermaics classes and I made a number of ambitious projects, considering I was a first semester student, like a clay doll and some whistles. But in my second semester I remember only making a series of frog whistles and I didn't even have the technique to create the whistle part of things. My more ambitious creations involved multiphonic frog whistles. I kid you not, I created these big frogs that had two chambers and options for playing a few notes. In one case one of the frogs had two chambers that were not the same size and created a surreal tremelous sound. My teacher was impressed at my luck, saying it actually sounded like a frog and that if I was going to make a mistake in the size of the chambers it was a serendipitous mistake. Yes.
Well, that's to say that when working with ceramics my mind was limited. I couldn't clearly imagine all the things I could do with clay, all the possibilities. With poetry I had a clearer sense of what was possible, how I could play with language and it was easier to play with things and branch out into new possibilities. Immersing myself in T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens certainly didn't hurt but that was college. At the rist of pointing out something obvious the difference between an artist and a non-artist is that the artist explores the arts out of love for the art but also to learn where as the non-artist explores the arts for simple enjoyment.
What is the difference between exploring a theme as an artist and being stuck in a rut? One person's theme may be another person's rut and as many have joked Haydn symphonies all start sounding the same after you hear a dozen of them. Phillip Glass works that all sound the same to me, however, sound scintillatingly different to fans of his work just as I can hear distinctions within Haydn symphonies that other people, I'm sure, utterly fail to appreciate or even perceive. I can hear a few seconds of a guitar solo and in a few cases just hear a bass line and can identify an old rock tune. Our brains adapt themselves to become good at the things we believe we need or want to be good at.
Having said all that, the difference between being stuck in a rut and exploring a theme is a painful, obvious, yet mysterious one. If you can't think of new things to do or can think of new things but don't feel that you can or want to do them then that is a sign of a rut. A musician who spends sixty years writing different kinds of blues because that's what he or she wants to do may seem to be in a rut to the outsider but to the blues fan and to the musician this is not a rut but a theme to explore. Arguably the blues musician IS in a rut but sometimes ruts are themes. If the blues musician were to tackle Tin Pan Ally we wouldn't be surprised to see the person crash and burn. If we saw a blues musician sing Tin Pan Ally songs but not write them, that would still be an interesting avenue of creative development. Arguably what Johnny Cash and Ray Charles demonstrated to us in the last century is that singers and songwriters can assimilate nearly anything in the popular style into their artistic vision. These men were reminders that style and substance are not necessarily the same even when they are powerfully intertwined.
And when you survey the greats of pop music you begin to observe that the greats were able to assimilate a wide variety of concepts. When you survey the greats in art you see that this holds true as well. The great classical composers, most obviously in the case of Haydn, assimilated both popular and academic elements of their art. The stratification of high and low art in the 20th century is one of the more puzzling and unfortunate aspects of academic culture. There's nothing wrong with seeing Beethoven and U2 as part of the same continuum of musical heritage. The Rolling Stones and Takemitsu are part of the same heritage, too.
Now at the risk of pointing out what by now would be obvious to anyone who reads my blog I believe that since Christ is reconciling all things to Himself there is no high or low, pop or art, classical or rock. These things exist, certainly, but the divisions between them don't have to, all are united by Christ. So this means that the differences can be respected and celebrated but that they can ALSO be assimilated, minimized, and in some cases eliminated. The important caveat I feel I need to include about the "also" statement is that this assimilation and synthesis can be accomplished without obliterating the unique identity of each style of music. Perhaps an analogy might be to marriage, the man and woman do not cease to be themselves in marriage but in marriage they become not just new people as individuals but something new as a couple.
I make no bones that a theological agenda drives all of my composing. If Christ is uniting all things through Himself (Collosians) then the path for the Christian musician is clear, to explore through music how this reconciliation happens. For others this happens through direct song-writing. For me that sometimes happens but I have a less direct approach, an approach I admit may be too esoteric for most people to appreciate. On the other hand, perhaps less direct approaches that are informed by reflection are what is needed. Would Andrew Stanton have gotten to a point where he could give us Finding Nemo and WALL-E if he had spent all his career in VeggieTales level didacticism? Probably not. I covered that issue interacting with Matthew Lee Anderson's work and won't recycle that beyond saying that the older I get the more I observe how young evangelicals want the status of being "culture shapers" without actually being culture shapers. I also notice that the be fruitful and multiply set seem to think that if we just outbreed the Muslims we'll re-Christianize society.
All of that preamble is to say that I have made some important progress on a project I have been working on for years. Thanks to studying the fugue at the end of the Hammerklavier and sifting through the analysis Charles Rosen did of the sonata as a whole I have returned to a sonata I have been working on that has a fugue as its closing movement. For years I have been fascinated by exploring a three-movement cycle that goes like this: sonata, aria, and fugue. I have been attempting to find ways to tie together the three movements and inevitably I would have to study Beethoven to get a clearer sense of how this could be done. For my piano sonata that took me a decade to complete I had to study Schubert but Schubert, you know, was in the shadow of Beethoven. Now that I have studied up important works by both composers I have a clearer sense of how to proceed in my own work.
I would probably bore you if I attempted to explain how I have managed to solve the structural problems in the fugue I'm writing for viola and guitar. I will, however, take the liberty to share things I have learned from other musicians over the years. Perhaps the most important of these lessons for me in the last few months is this:
1) Some of the most important work you do is AWAY from your instruments.
I first heard this advice from a fellow composer who was a very accomplished composer and pianist and had years of experience singing in choral groups. He found that both in studying music and in writing music it was valuable to tackle a score on its own terms, studying and memorizing and analyzing it apart from being at the keyboard. There is a temptation to let your fingers do the walking and cheat your way through playing something it that you may, in truth, not really understand. Now it is just as true that many a musical work does not reveal itself until it is played but that is another form of knowing. That is also, to be a bit too simplistic, a PERFORMER'S way of knowing music. For a composer the advice that it is valuable to work away from your instrument is vital.
As a composer it is hard to emphasize this enough. The initial inspiration may come to me at an instrument, whether I am playing piano, playing guitar, or singing, but the actual WORK of the work frequently happens somewhere else. I'm not even talking about working on a computer, I'm talking about sitting down with pencil and pen and an eraser and paper and working things out by hand. I will even manipulate melodies as I go on the page and sing the results back to myself to find out how I feel about them. If a melody sounds good forward how will it sound upside down? What if I break out a fragment of it and sequence that? What happens if I sing a melody backwards? If the melody isn't very pleasing backwards what little changes can I make so that it will be pleasing backwards? Suppose I take a gesture form the melody and alter each note by changing the gap between leaps by one step each? Suppose I attempt to present the melody in its primary form over an augmented retrograde inversion in the bass line beneath? Maybe it wouldn't work but it might at least be interesting to try.
2) always be willing to change the form of the work to fit the substance of the idea.
The axiom that form follows function is essentially true. Perhaps it is TOO axiomatic but there is still something to it. I do believe Beethoven has proven to us that ideas that can work as a fugue subject can ALSO work as a sonata theme but, again, Beethoven is so far out at the conceptual limits of what is musically possible I would urge people to be careful. You won't discover a melody that can be transformed into both the foundation of a sonata theme and a fugue subject right off the bat. In fact as I have been arguing implicitly through this whole blog entry you won't even be capable of CONCEIVING of such a thing until after possibly ten to fifteen years worth of work in music.
If you find yourself committed to working on an idea as the basis for a set of variations and find that in the end none of the variations as variations are winning you over but that you can repeat individual variations over and over again as stand alone ideas you MIGHT be looking at something better used in a sonata form. That was the discovery I made for a sonata I am working on now. If you find that something you wanted to turn into a fugue presents too many difficulties for generating satisfactory counterpoint you may be looking at a variation form idea if it is pregnant enough for embellishment, or you may be looking at something better employed in a dance form.
At the risk of speaking too generally my discovery in the last fifteen years has been that if a melody does not lend itself well to a fugue exposition it will not necessarily lend itself to a sonata form either, and vice versa. I don't want to waste your time by explaining precisely why. I"ll just make an appeal that historically the sonata replaced the fugue as a way to express the most abstract and intellectually intense musical ideas in the Classic era after the high Baroque era came to a close.
3) If it is really worth doing today it will still be worth doing next week or next year.
This might seem counterintuitive but it is true for composers. Don't let your obsession with being goal-oriented blind you to art as a process. Getting something done does not in itself prove that you got that thing done well. Shostakovich used to remark that he would solve the problems of one piece when he tackled them in the next piece he wrote. Villa-Lobos clearly had a similar aesthetic. Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach pretty obviously did not. Haydn was writing works for hire and seems to have been somewhere in the middle.
If you have a scrap of melody or a chord progression that you think needs to get attention now then by all means plug away. But it doesn't hurt to also ask yourself, "How happy will I be with playing this thing exactly as it is four or five years down the road?" Think of rock bands that don't play their earliest songs anymore.
Especially if you ever consider being on the road or having works published or performed consider that when you work on something the throw-away bits may be the bits the world knows you for. Ravel rued the day he scribbled out "Bolero". He's probably even luckier to have never lived long enough to see how the music would eventually be used in some films. This is not a paragraph appealing to the ideal of timeless art that will outlive you, it's a reminder that you will have to live with what you have created so make sure you don't lower your standards so much you spend the rest of your life realizing that you, like John Lennon, have a few songs that are well-known that you hate and feel don't represent your best artistic self.
Paradoxically the works that we toss off casually may be most indicative of where we are and who we are as artists. There is a carefulness to art that can hide rather reveal the true nature of the artist. I am at a point in my life where the material I whip out in a week feels about as indicative of my work as the pieces I toil over for years. That may be good or it may be terrible.
Another way of saying this is that if there is something worth doing it is something worth RE-doing. To descend to mere jocularity a friend of mine was explaining to my brother how he and his wife were trying to have children and had not had success. My brother said, "Well, if all else fails try, try again." The friend chuckled and told my brother that put that way it didn't seem quite so frustrating. Koholeth wrote that there is nothing better for a man to do than to enjoy the work God has given him to do under the sun and lamented that when God does not give a man enjoyment of his labor or possessions the man is miserable indeed. Part of working in the arts is you can discover whether or not you find joy in the work itself or whether it is something else, something I'll get to in point 5. For now this latest thought allows me to transition straightaway into observation 4.
4) You create to continue learning not to prove what you have learned.
I'm willing to go on a limb and assert that this is the difference between an artist and a dilletante, however wildly the technical skill or appreciation may differ across the arts. The difference between scripture and a catachecism is that the first beckons us to join in the life long struggle across space and time and place to discover Truth while the second tells us what we must affirm the truth to be. Both have value but the second could not exist without the first. The second affirms the scope of mysteries revealed in the first that cannot be exhausted. So it is with the distinction between great art and other kinds (whether middling to good to bad to awful)--a great artist creates to continue exploring and learning while a middling artist may well set out to prove a point.
Hollow didacticism and truncated definitions of the human experience are hardly the sole domain of the religious but the stereotype is not without warrant. There is a role for didactic art, obviously, and Bach wrote quite a few explicitly didactic works but the process of discovery is not simply that of the student but also the teacher. THere is a difference between sharing something with someone else that is for you a moment of discovery and sharing something because you believe the world needs a public service announcement of what you know that the world would be better off for knowing. Even an ego like Beethoven's could have moments in which the core of the artistic moment is, for want of other words, humble.
This last one is more observation than anything shared with me
5) Pursue the arts out of love of the craft and not to feel special
I worked on literary magazines in both high school and college and I met a few would be poets and artists and dreamers. Since I attended a Christian college I got to see and hear stuff prefaced by the inevitable, "God gave me this ... ." A number of my acquaintences cynically took to rhetorically asking themselves whether God REALLY gave this or that person such and such, the rhetorical answer being 'no'. I opted for a different approach. God giving you a poem or a song or a story does not mean you have no obligation to shape and mold the material yourself. Whereas God might tell other people exactly what music they needed I always have had the distinct impression that God wants ME to rewrite stuff. I shared this with my composition professor and he laughed.
So far as I can hazard a guess what inspired these people to write their poems or write their songs or make their paintings is that they felt the love of God. Feeling the love of God is wonderful, feeling special is wonderful. We all want that. No one on earth or under the earth or above the earth doesn't want to feel special and loved. In a culture that worships artists of varying sorts as heroes, whether novelists or musicians or painters or actors or directors or poets or entrepreneurs it is the easiest thing in the world to want to go do something and be something so as to be special. There is a fine and puzzling boundary between embracing the arts because you feel touched by the divine participating in the arts and feel drawn closer to God (any unbelieving readers, bear with this, I'm writing as a Christian and I get that your experience will be different) and embracing the arts out of a sense of or a desire to be feeling special.
Jesus said that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and that the good man out of the treasure of his heart brings good things while the bad man out of the treasure of his heart brings bad. Paradoxically there is absolutely nothing about the arts that will make you feel special. Indeed, you will be a nobody. Beethoven was a nobody to many people. Many people today have no idea who J. S. Bach was. Tomorrow many people will not know who Bob Dylan is, most of the world, really. As Koholeth put it, there is no memory of that man. If your heart is not full embracing the arts will not make your empty heart full. If you attempt to fill your heart with something so that your art will be full it won't get anywhere.
Now the truth is I am not sure what I do matters or that people will much care about the music I write. I often wonder if my music is too uncompromising to get played or for people to appreciate it. I am also anxious in performance settings. I would much rather write music that other people can play that to put my head on the chopping block of an audience if I can help it. I admit to generally having a failure of nerve. I also see clearly that being a composer or a writer or whatever will not in itself confer any meaning to a person.
Man does not live by art alone and God did not design us to be alone. I bristle at the Driscollian propensity to argue that this means people should be married because of how it tends to be employed and because it seems as though it forgets that one's identity is ostensibly in Christ. Well, by the same measure, if you attempt to find your identity in your art or your boyfriend or girlfriend those things will die and shrivel up at some point. Even egos as large as those of Beethoven or Bach were working out of love, love for the craft and in their own unusually usual ways love of neighbor.
All that said, people and not things love you and make you feel special. If you want to feel special go get a boyfriend or girlfriend or spend time with your mom and dad or your friends (and you probably have a few). Don't go become an artist or a writer or a musician or a composer or an actor. You won't matter, you won't feel special, you probably won't make any money, and no one will ever know who you are, most likely. If by chance I'm wrong on all those counts you STILL won't feel special. If you feel special and in the spur of the moment write a poem of gratitude to God for feeling special, awesome. Don't send it to me. Becoming an artist of any sort to differentiate yourself from family or friends will yield nothing for you. You might even find that if you embrace something to be special that someone else will overtake you in the thing you chose because you hoped it would help you stand out. That totally sucks but then again we don't know who will be better than us and there's always someone.
Yet if the beauty of the art and the world around you is something that spurs you to continue exploring a medium; if the beauty of friends and family or some other loved one fills you with joy and the sheer work of working within a medium continues to inspire you; if after three to five stupendous challenges you happily think "What's next?"; if every setback becomes a challenge to surmount and inspiration to exploring new possibilities of learning and sharing then by all means become an artist of some kind. That's awesome, even if you're Phillip Glass and I absolutely detest your music I won't begrudge you the joy of sharing the beauty of the world with people even if I'd rather I didn't have to hear your music.
So them's my ramblings on that topic. Better that than boring all of you with technical minutae about modal mutation in a subject and how it lends itself to rapid tonic to mediant modulations, right? :)
Jesus said that it is better to give than receive. It is in giving that we receive and it is in dying we are born to eternal life. Even among those who are not Christians I find it incontestable that the artists who perservere do so out of love for their craft and out of love for their neighbor. The affirmation of the self is not the point, even the expression of the self is not the main point but a kind of fringe benefit.