I made up the following little piece several weeks ago while doing some boring work, considered posting it here, and then decided it wasn’t worth it. Just now I remembered it and realized that my quality-control decision went against the spirit of this whole undertaking. So here it is. I don’t think this exactly qualifies for the “iggly” category; it’s more like a character sketch of a person whose emotions are a little bit out of their control.
I have these ideas about writing mostly-traditional simple pieces with approximately characteristic form and material, but making each element idiosyncratic enough that the pieces feel like they have a dramatic/narrative quality, even in a short span. But that’s never quite how they sound. I can make myself hear them that way, but when I just relax into them, they don’t convince me. The skipping-record thing in this piece, for example, strikes me as really unacceptably stupid about half of the time. The rest of the time it comes off the way I intended… but I want better odds than that from MYSELF.
There is a basic principle with composing music: you hear music MUCH faster than you write it, so to make something convincing in listener time, you have to think like an animator and work in slow-motion land. This is true for other arts, too. I have learned to do this for small effects but not for structure – my brain doesn’t feel big enough to hold the mass of a whole sonata form, for example, when it stretches out like an aircraft-carrier as I zoom in to actually write a few bars of it. So I frequently end up making the mistake of miscalculating the dramatic scale and putting things too close to each other to be meaningful. Or else overshooting when I try to let things breathe. I think both mistakes have been made in the course of this tiny piece.
To write to a long form properly, you have to build outlines and skeletons first, so that you don’t need to be holding on to all of it at once when you blow it up to scale. But writing (music or words) to fit an outline is an entirely different experience, to me, from writing whatever the material seems to demand; it’s like a packing puzzle or an engineering problem. I can imagine myself getting so good at that kind of puzzle that I can solve it in my sleep, but I can’t imagine integrating that puzzle-solving skill with the creative functions I already have, which seem to require absolute freedom from outside constraints in order to produce anything convincing.
This problem is a form of a general problem that I have. I and everyone else; it’s a basic human problem. The problem is that given any kind of terms or guidelines, one tends to perceive them as constraining so long as they feel externally imposed (the negative connotation of “imposition” is a reflection of this). To work well within guidelines, one has to identify with them – they must be internal rather than external. This is a problem, in fact, with learning any new thing – until you believe something, you are inclined not to believe it, simply because it is external, it is not yours.* To deal with this problem we have rational persuasion, a mechanism for converting the external into the internal. I need an artistic analogue of persuasion – a mechanism to help me recognize formal outlines, for example, as my own beliefs, rather than as constraints. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any simple answer. If you leave something on the floor intentionally, and then trip over it later by mistake, it is essentially impossible not to be angry at your past self. Similarly, I cannot help but feel that I am struggling against troublesome restrictions when I try to write within a structure of my own design, so long as the “I” who designed it is a past self, external to the present. Hence the need to always been designing on all scales in the present… hence the aircraft-carrier problem.
Without further ado:
Absolutely raw score with none of the important markings
How it’s supposed to sound, except worse
* Then again, this may not be true for everyone. Maybe personalities can be divided into two classes: incredulous and credulous. It seems to me that philosophy works differently for the two types. As an incredule (one of the incredulim), I of course cannot imagine leading the life of a credule – all that email to forward! – but I do envy them their creative fluency.
One kind of interim solution is to cater, for want of a better word, to your current creative inclination toward the short form. The symphony and the novel are not the only valid results of musical and literary creativity. Individual essays, poems, criticism, short stories, and songs (and no doubt other musical forms I don’t know the names of) are final destinations, not incomplete attempts at something longer. One could easily list many recognized writers and composers whose entire oeuvres consists of short-form works. Concentrating your efforts on short-form expression, you may find, at the least, a welcome respite from the struggle you are feeling with the aircraft-carrier problem. Additionally, you could find that either a) you find enough creative fulfillment in producing the short forms to satisfy you (and accumulated short forms become a body of work in themselves), or b) increased fluency with the short form will gradually and eventually bring you to a point where your creative flow and your puzzle-solving abilities will not be knocking heads quite so forcefully.
I feel like there’s a lesson there for other Broomlet readers besides Broomlet himself.
Many musical performers actually seek out works tending toward the succinct, preferring to select, say, from Lyric Pieces, Episodes, Inventions, Sarcasms, Songs Without Words, Canciones y Dansas, Tonadas, regionalist dances, Preludes galore, and so on. There is plenty of happy synergy that can be mined with the symmetric world of receivers and enjoyers of artistic creation.