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…is hearing something awesome in your head and being unable to get it to come out right.  Even after five or six hours of trying.  Listening to things I’ve done in the past made me feel better.

Just as I have no honest, thorough, and articulate answer to the question “Why/how teaching?” & instead want to just tell people to read The Right To Learn, I also have no honest, thorough, and articulate answer to the question “Why/how music/songwriting/ composing?” Been reading a lot of Tori Amos interviews lately, though, and I think this one speaks to this 2nd unanswerable question in a similar way that TRtL speaks to the 1st.

“I remember John Lennon talking about listening to songs that he loved, then changing them to make them his own versions. He would say, ‘God, I love this song. I wish I’d written this song.’ Then it would come out totally different. You might not even know what song it is that inspired you to do something, but there is that ingredient. Sometimes I do think that we’re really just rewriting songs. There are only 12 bloody notes, you know.” ~ Tori Amos

“It is always hard to tell what your influences are. Everything you’ve seen, experienced, read, or heard gets broken down like compost in your head and then your own ideas grow out of that compost.” ~ JK Rowling

Right on, ladies.

Songs definitely have pedigrees; I’m convinced of that. No one and nothing is 100% original. (Not even our DNA, heh.)

This relates somewhat to this post from about a year ago. [One-sentence summary — Attempting to realize an artistic inspiration is terrifying because the instances in which it actually turns out the way you envisioned are so maddeningly rare, and sometimes you have to work at it for an excrutiatingly long time before you get there.]

Making art is like a roller coaster — it’s either really good or really bad. I’m speaking not about the actual product but about the psychological and emotional experience of going through the process. When you make something good that you know is good and that you are proud of, there is no better feeling. It’s exhilerating. On the other hand, when you try and try and try and nothing is good, or it starts good and then goes downhill, it can be heartbreaking. And it shouldn’t be, because creating art is like panning for gold — most of it is silt, but you have to sort through the silt in order to find the gold. Statistically (assuming the geographical circumstances under which one would be panning for gold at all), the gold is there, and if you work at it long enough, you’ll get there, but you go through a hell of a lot of silt in the process.

So when you try to make good art and come up with nothing but silt, you should actually feel good about it because a) you’ve gone through a lot of silt, which, statistically, brings you closer to gold the next time, and b) unlike actual, literal silt, artistic silt often contains its own microscopic flecks of gold, even though you may not see it for a while. Sometimes what tastes like silt at the time is just raw ore you don’t have the tools to refine yet.

But, in spite of all that, sometimes I hate looking at it, and feel worse than when it wasn’t there at all. I feel a little sick for bringing something malformed into the world that wasn’t there before. And that makes the entire process hard to start sometimes.

Does art have to have meaning in order to be art?

That depends on how you interpret the word ‘meaning.’ There are definitely artists who would say that by virtue of its very existance, any piece of art has meaning, that if it did not have meaning, it would not have been created. The act of creating the Thing is a testiment to the fact that it has meaning, if only to the artist. Conversely, there are artists who believe that if you create something that has no meaning, that is not art — that the definition of what is art and what is not lies in intention, in whether or not what you are creating has that sort of meaning to you. Heh. I finally understand what one of my composition teachers at conservatory was always saying — “It’s art if I say it is.”

(more…)

For me, with music, it isn’t a question of whether I like it; it’s a question of how I like it.  I think that part of the reason I can think like that is because I sort of feel like entertainment isn’t the only function music can serve.  I think that a lot of times when people have a gut “I don’t like this” reaction to music, what they really mean is that they aren’t entertained by it.  So now, any time I listen to new music, I try really hard to get past that point of “This is entertaining / this isn’t entertaining” and figure out how I like it.  Because I’m pretty convinced I can like anything, given enough listenings.

Kind of the same with visual art.  Especially if you’re pretty much an ameteur and everything is a “study.” (<--me :) )  You're really lucky if your work is satisfying quickly.  I used to get scared, in a way, of sitting down to work when I had the urge -- I couldn't get past this "what if it's no good?" feeling.  Now I pretty much accept that it's going to be no good pretty quickly.  My solution has been to work through the no-goodness.  If it sucks, change it.  If it still sucks, change it again.  If it still sucks, change three or four things.  For me that's kind of what art is -- changing something over and over again until I find the sweet spot that stays my hand.  Until I have this epiphany -- "Oh -- that’s where I was going with this!”

Well.  Alright.  I very, very rarely know where I’m going.  But I can usually figure out when to stop.

“[W]e only speak so much about memory because it doesn’t exist any longer.” ~Pierre Nora.

…so there’s no wedge. Only some instruments producing soundwaves with increasingly high frequencies and some producing waves with increasingly low ones. We (practicing musicians) hear that as a wedge because (I think) we are thinking about what the notation looks like. Using shape words (or textural words, or what have you) to describe sound is metaphor. In the case of the term “wedge,” it’s a metaphor for the notation. Of course, it’s important to remember that musical notation is itself a metaphor for sound–quarter notes and half rests and ledger lines are not literally present in the actual music. Thus, using the term “wedge” is a metaphor for yet another metaphor.

Nicely caught up? Excellent. Because it gets worse when we regard art on a larger scale.

(more…)

“[Y]ou will make me the greatest sword since excalibur.”

“I will beat my body into ruins for you. Perhaps I will fail But no one will try harder….Come back in a year.”

Such a year.

Domingo slept only when he dropped from exhaustion. He ate only when Inigo would force him to. He studied, fretted complained. He never should have taken the job; it was impossible. The next day he would be flying: he never should have taken the job; it was too simple to be worth his labors. Joy to despair, day to day, hour to hour. Sometimes Inigo would wake to find him weeping; “What is it, Father?” “It is that I cannot do it. I cannot make the sword. I cannot make my hands obey me.”

Some nights Inigo would awake to see him dancing. “What is it, Father?” “It is that I have found my mistakes, corrected my misjudgments…It will be done tomorrow and it will be a miracle.”

But the next night, more tears. “What is it now, Father?” “The sword, the sword, I cannot make the sword.” “But last night you said you had found your mistakes.” “I was mistaken; tonight I found new ones, worse ones…”

Such a year.

One night Inigo woke to find his father seats. Staring. Calm. Inigo followed the stare.

The six-fingered sword was done.

“At last,” Domingo whispered. He could not take his eyes from the glory of the sword …

“I am an artist.”

~William Goldman, The Princess Bride

Attempting art is always risky. That is, the risk involved in attempting to realize an artistic idea is directly proportional to one’s desire to do it. If you’re not really that into it and just kind of doodling something on the back of an envelope, it’s hard to feel terribly crushed when your cow or pony or what have you doesn’t turn out so well. When the Thing’s been trying to claw its way out of you for days / weeks / months and your heart starts to pound a little bit every time you think about it…well…that’s different.

I think that many people who are not actively engaged in creating works of art tend to think of it as sort of an intuitive process–the muse strikes and off you go, letting her guide your hand / body / mind / whatever. And it can be. There are certainly artists of every ilk that work like that. But the vast, vast majority don’t, at least the vast majority of the time.

I think people sort of think of it like a train or a roller coaster–as if the whole process were on rails, on a pre-determined course, and all you have to do is follow where the path naturally leads in order to realize the Thing. But the truth is–for most artists, most of the time–it’s more like laying down the tracks as you go along. Certainly it helps to have them there before the train comes along, but it’s up to the artist to decide not only where the tracks go but what they are to be made of, how far apart they are to be spaced, how they are to be connected, etc. etc. And those are hard, scary choices! The more committed you are to your Idea, the more you worry about making a wrong move and throwing the thing off. Or worse yet, you know where you want the tracks go and just can’t seem to get them there.

And suddenly you’re Domingo Montoya. Your heart knows what the finished product should be, even if your mind doesn’t; that’s how you can tell when it isn’t going well, even though you don’t really know what you’re trying to create yet. On some days, you’re a genius; you’re brilliant. Your hands or pen or body obey you, and every move brings you closer to realizing the Work. On other days, you are an abysmal failure. Nothing you do is right; you were presumptious and arrogant even to try. It will never be right.

In my own experience and (it seems) in that of many other artists that I’ve known, art nearly always seems to fall short of its Creator’s hopes. Personally, I can’t think of any time when it hasn’t. It’s frustrating to look at something you’ve spent so much time on and know that it isn’t quite what you imagined, and the closer it is to the Idea, the more irritating the imperfections are. It’s a little like working a Rubik’s Cube — if you spend a little time and don’t really get anywhere, that’s not really all that bad. But to have the thing nearly perfect and have only a few squares wrong is infuriating, because it’s now a matter of rearranging the whole thing. One of the most valuable lessons I learned at conservatory about making art: At some point, you simply have to stop, and say you’re done. Even if you know you’re not. Otherwise you’ll drive yourself insane.

So I guess what I’m saying is that once you know that that’s how it’s likely to turn out, that you’re likely to feel tormented and inadequate (or at best mildly irritated) when the Thing inevitably doesn’t live up to your expectations, it gets a little scary to even start. It’s tempting to whisper to yourself, “Maybe it’ll go away,” “Maybe it’s nothing,” “Maybe it’s a dumb idea anyway.” Because art is scary. Really scary. There is always the risk of frustration, loss, helplessness, feeling worthless and inept. Attempting to realize an inspiration is a brave thing.

I kind of wish I talked to more people who don’t consider themselves creative or artistic about their artistic impulses. Is the difference between people who think of themselves as artistic and those who don’t a matter of feeling the impulse, or of the drive to realize it? Having been an artistic person all my life, I can’t speak for those people. I can, pretty confidently, speak for people who make art on a regular basis. Everything I have to say is based on my own personal experiences and on interaction with other (self-described) artistic people.

Here’s what I know. When an artist (visual artist, performance artist, writer, composer, musician, etc.) creates art, it generally comes from one of two places. The first place is “inspiration.” You get a flash of something, a hint, a vague impression, and that creates inside you a drive to figure out what the flash was about, to understand the whole thing and how it relates to you and to the rest of the world. You can’t sleep, you can’t eat, you can’t think about anything else. All you can do is sit in front of the canvas or the computer or the staff paper or whatever and sketch and doodle and imagine and let it drain out of you and into your medium until you figure it out and things start to make sense. So yeah. That’s inspiration.

One thing I do know about self-described “unartistic” people (or, as a teacher of mine liked to call them, “non-practicing artists”) is that many of them think it’s always like that. That that’s what artists do: they sit around and wait for the muse, and ideas just pop into their heads, and off they go. But the truth is that effortless inspiration is maddeningly rare. As a composition teacher of mine once said, you can’t sit around waiting for the muse to kiss you, because let’s be real–she’s a lazy wench. And even if she does get off her ass, she might not kiss you in the right place to turn you on.

The majority of artistic impulses don’t come from the muse. They come from sweat. And pain. And boredom. And feeding your brain with other art, shaking it around, seeing what pops up. Hoping something pops up. Begging it to. Art is work. Hard work. You get inspired eventually, most of the time, but you have to work for it.  Another pearl of wisdom from one of my composition teachers: The composers who make it are the ones who can face the terror and uncertainty of thinking and brainstorming and reading and improvising and listening and not listening for days or weeks or months on end without getting discouraged when nothing they write seems worth keeping.  In other words, the ones that sit around waiting for the muse usually don’t.

One of the most beautiful things about conservatory was that as my peers and I became older, more experienced, more sophisticated musicians, we began to take ourselves less seriously. Taking ourselves less seriously freed up part of our minds to think about every aspect of music (our own and others’) more deeply. In retrospect, I think that may be why they saved the most philosophical music theory and history classes for our last years.

During my senior year, I took a theory class on counterpoint (an incredibly broad topic that encompasses, well, basically the entire western canon). It was by far the most valuable and interesting of the theory classes I took while I was there, and one of the reasons for that was because during the second half of the course we spent so much time stripping away the pretentiousness from contemporary music and digging into what’s really going on when a composer sits down to create and notate a piece of music. We spent a lot of time at conservatory across all our classes finding ways to talk about music; it’s not as easy as you might think, especially since we were barred early-on from using statements like, “I liked it,” “It was good,” “My favorite part was…,” “The best part was when…,” “I wish s/he’d…” A lot of times I ended up borrowing textural words; I would talk about a composition being grainy or silky or splintery or thick, and after four or five years about talking about pieces with the same group of people, we started to understand what each other meant by those kinds of words. We also used to talk about the “shape” of a piece—it could have round parts, or jagged ones; it might be flat in some places or have others where the bottom falls out. Once we listened to a piece in counterpoint and the professor asked us to describe it. By that time, that was easy; “It’s a wedge,” the twenty of us proclaimed.

“Alright,” he said, “It’s a wedge. Why do you say it’s a wedge?”

The reason we described the section as wedge-like was because most of the instruments had been playing in their middle registers, and then suddenly the high instruments began working their way up into their extreme high range while the low instruments gradually dropped into their lowest range, leaving nothing in the middle.

“But why use the word wedge?”

“Because of the notation,” someone pointed out. “If you were to look at the score, you’d see the notes for the high instruments moving upward, and the notes for the low instruments moving downward. Calling it a wedge is a metaphor for the notation.”

“Okay, there’s a wedge-shape in the notation,” nodded the professor. “But is there truly a wedge in the music?”

We went round and round about that for a while, finally agreeing that there was, in fact, no wedge anywhere at all, except in the notation. Which is itself a metaphor for organized sound, for something that defies all attempts to perfectly describe it, be it spoken words or notes on a page. Calling what we were hearing a “wedge” was a metaphor for a metaphor.

To be continued….