Thursday, May 22, 2008

Where Do These Notes Come From?

When I was a composition major at Oberlin Conservatory in the '80s, my teacher and I occasionally butted heads over what I should be writing. It seemed to me that he considered a lot of what I was writing was somehow not valid because it couldn't be dissected into numbers and forms that he understood.

He was (and is) a good composer, but he is in many ways my opposite. He believed very strongly in the value of a good tone-row, note selection based on numerology, mathematical calculations, and other things that I regarded as having little to do with music. His way of composing worked for him and served him well. However, he was unable to recognize the same in me. Perhaps it was because I had trouble expressing my process to him.

On one particular occasion, I had been working on a trio for alto flute, bassoon, and harp. I brought some sketches into my lesson to show him, and we went over them together. He was paying good attention and seemed somewhat satisfied with the sounds as we recreated them at the piano. After getting an earful, we turned to the written sketches for a little analysis of what was going on.

My teacher pointed to one passage that caught his attention and asked "where do these notes come from?" I really couldn't figure out what he was asking me. "Are they based on a recurring set of pitches?"

Meekly, I responded "they sound good." He could not hide his disappointment in my answer. I honestly believe that he would have been happier had I answered that the notes were based on the Dewey Decimal System. He was so entrenched in his own process and the precision of his notes, that he had no need for notes that simply "sound good." And the sad part is, I bought into it. At least for awhile.

I should point out that the notes I used were not completely random. There was indeed a process of selection I used, but it relied only partially on pre-existing harmonic content, and quite heavily on intuition. I found myself at a loss for explaining this to him, almost embarrassed for using the most creative part of my brain. I recognize that my answer was insufficient, but asking me to explain further would have been of more value than the immediate rejection I received.

Since that time, I have learned to allow more and more intuition into my writing, and with less and less leftover guilt from my lessons. I have come to realize that sometimes the best way to unleash the creative part of my brain is to stop listening to the logical part. Or at least relegating that part to a much smaller role.

During sleep, all parts of the brain remain awake except for the logic center, which shuts down for the night. Without our daytime logic continually censoring our thoughts, we are free to explore our dreamtime ideas, letting them flow without blocking out the ones that don't initially make sense.

Many great artists were inspired by dreams. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed to have dreamed the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in its entirety. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan came to him in a dream as well. Poe, Dali, Ingmar Bergman, Paul McCartney, Beethoven, and Billy Joel all also credit their dreams as a source of inspiration.

I should mention that I'm not a big fan of pure automatism either, except as an exercise to bring forth fresh ideas. In my mind, this goes too far in the opposite direction to be valuable as the sole source of a piece of art. The step that is missing is that of the final filter of artistic sensibility. Whether the notes come from a dream or from the I-Ching, we must always give ourselves permission to bend them, break them, and turn them upside-down. While some proponents of automatism may consider the editing of dream-inspired art to be self-censorship, I hold the opposite position. To deny ourselves creative license over our own inspiration in an attempt to retain a sense of purity or honor to a system, even if that system is a dream, is what should be considered self-censorship. This is where our logic center belongs. As the final step in getting good music to the page.

When we find ourselves caught in this dilemma, we must ask ourselves: Is it more important for my music to "sound good," or "dissect good?" As for me, I will always choose the former.

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