Archive - September 2005September 26, 2005: "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind?" September 16, 2005: "Grueling Week of Ceaseless Compositional Toil" September 7, 2005: "Some Quality Pencil-and-Piano Work" September 26, 2005: "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind?" I was thinking maybe this entry should be not about ideas but about realities — the kind of mundane, uninspiring, and oft-unmentioned details of the creative process that often seem to get washed over as we turn our attention to stuff that makes better copy. As prosaic as the nuts and bolts of writing are (at least for myself), I still find it remarkable that there's by and large a kind of self-imposed taboo on discussing them, both among other composers and non-composers alike. This seems undesirable in that it erects a mystique around the creative process and often serves to obscure rather than elucidate. I happen to think there is something very special about creativity, and I hesitate to say even magical; however, this deeper mystery is often clouded by the sham mystery that is often constructed around the creative artist—one that must be struck down so that the weirder, more wonderful mystery can then come into focus. Back when I was in residence at Villa Montalvo I had the pleasure of participating in a documentary that was being put together by Patrick Wilkin. Patrick is primarily a writer, so he had some interesting ideas about the creative process which jived with some of my own, ideas which he hoped to articulate in a film which would feature several artists of different disciplines at work in their studios. Patrick's approach interested me in its bold resolve to capture the ungainly reality of creative work, it's messy, inefficient, and often haphazard network of intent, accident, and circumstance. Too often artists are perceived as colorful, loveable bohemians, with just the right touch of fashionable prole-chic and perfectly-groomed eccentricity. Moreover, the creative process itself is often viewed as so profoundly sacred that it is best approached with a kind of pale, incurious reverence. Indeed, there very well may be something deeply spiritual or what have you going on there, but it's not the exalted vessel but its simple, human contents which interests me. Something real has been lost by this misunderstanding, something roughly analogous to the loss of genuine spirituality in our culture and its replacement with secular religion. There's a bait-and-switch swindle that goes on every day, which each one of us participates in, in which true awe and searching is exchanged for the incurious reverence for a poor magic. I think that's why I feel like the debunking of popular artistic myths, while ostensibly destructive, is a necessary action in order to comprehend and participate in one of life's most profoundly generative experiences. Lest I stay aloft my soapbox any longer, here's a laundry list of my own admissions: Sometimes, when I'm working, all I can think about is how much I'd rather be doing something else. Not a day goes by when I'm not distracted by the basest physical impulses — for example, to lie in bed, take a walk, or (lately) order some naan. Usually, these impulses win out, as I'm at heart a sensualist and find very little of immediate interest in even my own work. Sometimes I'll try and try, go after something musically, and never achieve it. Most pieces of mine have at least a few spots which I honestly lacked the talent or ability to realize. But I try to move on. I plan perhaps in excess, and often where the music starts to come alive is where I've fouled up my own intentions. I've written, and will probably continue to write notes or whole passages for which I feel nothing. Rarely these are cut, but more often they remain to haunt me when I shrink a little each time those spots come up in a performance. I've made basic notation mistakes which, when realized in a rehearsal, work much better than my carefully-wrought intentions. It's good to be very quiet about those and enjoy the credit you receive for an idea that not only is not your own, but was actually at one time categorically rejected by you. I stress and plan almost constantly, but can only spend about 3 or 4 hours a day composing in earnest before I'm winded. I've had exciting, unique ideas which I've never attempted to realize because I knew an ordinary, easier-to-execute one would do. I've made sketches of pieces that were far more beautiful than the resulting piece itself. I often feel so completely devoid of musical ideas that I just play with some kind of manufactured gesture to get the ball rolling. Sometimes the musical idea doesn't arrive, so I give the musicians my manufactured idea instead. I have and continue to seriously consider abandoning my career in music and working something safer that stays in the office or cubicle when I go home at night. I could go on, but I think this forms a fairly effective little confessional. So now I've revealed myself to be little more than a con-artist, bored and barely punching the clock. It's a sham life doing creative work, isn't it? And yet… Sometimes, unpredictably and completely in spite of myself, something different happens. Something unintended, something that drags me above my basest inclinations (if but momentarily), something which makes me forget how tired and fake and pretentious I am and for a little while makes me deeply happy. I can't say I always know I'm there until it's gone, but like a dream dreamt alive it sustains me. It's then that the deadlines and fear and pride fade away, and for a little while it's calm and I'm left alone with myself—myself when I am real.
I guess if this long ramble means anything at all, it means first and foremost that a creative worker's attempts at connecting to the community, or to history, or even to his or her own work is secondary to the need to connect with the self. Despite my sundry doubts, fears, and failings I persist in pursuit of that rare moment when I can rise above myself, and I am so deeply thankful for being able to participate in that journey in the first place. [Back to Top] September 16, 2005: "Grueling Week of Ceaseless Compositional Toil" Glad to be blogging again—I've just come from a particularly heated session with the Funboard, and as I hammered down on its wobbly, unweighted keys I started to get a hankering for a break. It's nice that the Casio literally exudes fun when played, but at times its cheeky buoyancy becomes simply too enjoyable. Not much to report this week in terms of the composition of the piece, except that it's going, slowly but surely. That and I've decided to keep my opening tune after all, and have also made the realization that I'm going to have to hunker down and make sure that I've really stretched my imagination for the wildest variety of ways my two musical “worlds” can possibly interact—it occurred to me that my self-imposed restriction to these two elements has become tedious in my sketches, and I need to challenge myself to always keep everything fresh and relevant. In other words, this is a “slow week” for blogging, which is another way of saying that it was a grueling week of ceaseless compositional toil! Funny how actual work is a lot less engaging to write about than doleful inaction. That said I'd like to use this entry to discuss a few of the issues relating to the piece which aren't strictly compositional, but which as a composer it's my responsibility to deal with: 1) Preparing scores and parts. When the piece is done, that's just the beginning, as I'll have to stand back and decide the clearest way of expressing my intentions in a musical score. Next comes the extraction of parts, and with it a careful survey of each player's role and a lot of me sitting with an air-violin miming everyone's movements to make sure I didn't ask something dumb of the players or worse yet, something impossible. This tends to upset the neighbors, but I'm hoping that relocating the practice to the seclusion of my own apartment rather than smack-dab in the middle of the hallway will dispel some of the bad feelings. 2) Live electronics. I've spent a good deal of time discussing my electronics needs with the Kronos sound engineers, which is necessary for two reasons. First and most obviously, sometimes having only a limited knowledge of audio equipment and miking techniques leads one to suppose things that aren't remotely possible; less obviously, a great deal of what falls into the realm of the possible is nevertheless extremely cumbersome and damningly cost-prohibitive. This is good to know, as the burden should always be on the composer to consider his of her work as a total package, one which includes practical concerns of equipment and expense and one in which many elements besides the composition itself interact to determine the reception and ultimate fate of that same composition. For example, I initially wanted every player to have a stomp-box which would allow him to feed into a distortion unit at will. As it turns out, this is possible, but it also adds another 150 or so pounds of equipment which must safely be packaged in crates and flown over the country with the quartet—not exactly something that would make you grin if it were your job to organize and budget that kind of thing. The alternative, with sound engineers controlling matters from a mixing board, just passes the buck and necessitates hiring four highly-trained specialists, all of whom have the score essentially memorized. That's even worse, but it's also kind of a hilarious mental image. The solution we hit upon involves using bridge pickups, which will cause the sound to distort when a quartet member plays close to the bridge but leave it virtually unaltered when the bow is placed farther away, over the fingerboard. This is by far the best solution, but it necessitated mild corrections in several already-written passages and a massive re-thinking of a certain pivotal moment. 3) Pre-recorded electronics. I'll have to get the quartet to record a few passages for me, which will probably involve another cross-country trip. Then I'll have to muster (read: fake) all of my tech-savvy sequencing skills and use a slough of computer programs and a couple old Vox organs to get the sound I'm looking for. Anyway, this should help give an impression of the kind of work that composers have to (or at least should have to!) deal with when not actually composing. It's not the kind of job I'd recommend for someone who wants to get their art on with nary a care for the reality of busywork. You don't get dessert if you don't eat your lima beans, kiddies. I have no new pictures this week, so I'll include an old one. It's me in Cleveland sharing a tender bonding-moment with an enormous, pastel-colored turtle. For more on the exploits of my slow-moving friend and his even slower-moving composer pal, tune in next week. [Back to Top]
September 7, 2005: "Some Quality Pencil-and-Piano Work" I don't particularly have much to report this week, loyal bloggeurs, except that I've managed to chill out to some degree and hunker down to the business at hand. I don't have any amusing pictures/audio to share this week (or even any less-amusing blues lyrics); I also don't have much to say for myself as to why I've been able to calm down for a while, which seems even more ridiculous in the midst of our latest and greatest national disaster. There's an eeriness beyond simple sadness in composing stylized bluesy laments as New Orleans chokes down its own drowning dead…except that Muddy's levee burst with the power of the ineffable, and now that the situation in New Orleans has been demystified it's hard for me to feel much more than regret, and maybe, shame. Sometimes life can pass away, pass through you so suddenly so that what should be sadness is only crippled regret. That said, I've been working on the first half of the piece fairly smoothly for my standards, except that now with school in full swing I wish that there were more hours in the day! On a good day I can only accomplish maybe 3 or 4 hours of actual pencil-and-piano “work”, but these have to be good, well-spent hours or the effect is lost. Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with things, and my main concern as I do the grunt-work of writing the piece is to think ahead to the final score and parts and what the most effective and performer-friendly way of marking down my ideas will be. I decided that my initial hunch might be right about my “tune” being too complex in itself, but I also figured it was best to move on and work on the main part of the piece and to allow my subconscious to hash this out. (I mean, come on, subconscious, you're not all that busy projecting my unfulfilled desires into dreams, censoring embarrassing bits from my ego, and the like…you best get crackin'!) I'm happy to say that I figured out a few things that were holding me back, in the sense that I couldn't really get much further in the writing of the piece until they were decided. In short, I decided to balance my large-scale move to C-sharp in the first half of the piece with a large-scale move to C-natural over the course of the second half; this provides some tonal direction without locking me into distinct keys at any one point; in fact, it's very similar to binary dance forms from the 17th century and early sonata-allegro movements in the 18th. To clarify, here's a “what's what” of the tonal elements in my piece: 1. Pre-recorded tune: solidly in C-sharp minor 2. Expository section: two worlds becoming aware of each other, only at the last painful moment acknowledging each other's existence along with the presence of the C-sharp, that original thorn-in-the-side. 3. Increased tension between the two worlds, culminating in a more clearly-articulated statement of the opening, then but barely-glimpsed tune in C-sharp major. 4. After a climax, only ghostly, claustrophobic strands are left hanging, restricted and bound to the past by their insistence on C# and refusal to admit C-natural into their vocabulary. 5. The music struggles along on it's way to C-natural, enabling some kind of catharsis, finally singing freely in C major. 6. The recording returns, in the minor, calling into question all the change and progress in the piece, seemingly unchanged—except that everything is in C minor, not C-sharp minor. Outward defeat, inner freedom; an invincible, crystal spirit, shards gleaming bright as they rotate in the gloom. The one thing (there's always at least one with me, you'll see) I'm not quite sold on is the apparent resolution in section 5…part of me is attracted to the idea of making a climax so devastating in section 4 that the music is forever altered, crushed and imprisoned through to the bitter end. This strikes me as kind of morbid, but I'll wait until I've got the piece written up to that point and see where it tells me it wants to go. Even with the mad amount of planning I do, it's useful to leave some of those more sensitive issues up for grabs….like great films, the characters in great music are driven by their own motives, emotions, and unique personalities, not manipulated by the strings of any stodgy “plotting”. It'll be exciting to live on the edge a bit and try to tune into who these characters are the longer I spend with them. Until next week, adieu (and how I wish I had time to write some saccharine “roll credits” music that would kick in right now!) [Back to Top] |
