Semi-OT: A winning observation about composition

[David Emm]

I love stories with a musical element, especially when they lean a bit abstract. This one is requiring me to slow down a bit, which is perfectly welcome. We're all about the great god GAS, but considering the >why< driving it is fascinating. Books such as this sometimes help me to get a better grip on it and even find inspiration for a new composition or three. If this quote raises your eyebrows a little, consider it a good appetizer. It rang a bell I immediately recognized, yikes...

     

"She is torn between the desire to explain what she is trying to achieve with her music and a pre-emptive understanding that she will never be able to. She wants to unburden herself on how hard it has been to write it, and everything she’s written these last few years. Once, when she was young and lacked self-consciousness, she lived in a state of grace. Everything came easily, felt exploratory. The gift would guide her. It kept her company. Now, the gift hectors and berates. Each new piece is an arduous task, wrestling something unstable and invisible into form, like fitting the west wind into a duvet cover."
       ~ Patrick Langley, "The Variations"

 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/742229/the-variations-by-patrick-langley/

[Anderton]

2 hours ago, David Emm said:

Once, when she was young and lacked self-consciousness, she lived in a state of grace. Everything came easily, felt exploratory. The gift would guide her. It kept her company. Now, the gift hectors and berates. Each new piece is an arduous task, wrestling something unstable and invisible into form, like fitting the west wind into a duvet cover."

 

I must be doing something wrong, music gets easier for me and I also believe the quality is better. But, I'm not self-conscious about creating music. It's for my own pleasure, so being hectored and betrated would kind of like being hectored and betrated by bowlling balls if I liked bowling

[KuruPrionz]

I simply allow creativity. It comes and goes. I don't worry about writing songs at all. It just happens. 

I do think that playing hundreds if not thousands of different songs including my own loosens the grip that I once had on my creativity. I don't try to write the "best song" anymore, I just allow what happens to happen. Sometimes I have a sentence pop into my head, sometimes it is a line of music. It doesn't matter, creativity is not a precision activity, it is random. 

[David Emm]

17 hours ago, Anderton said:

I must be doing something wrong, music gets easier for me and I also believe the quality is better. But, I'm not self-conscious about creating music. It's for my own pleasure, so being hectored and betrated would kind of like being hectored and betrated by bowlling balls if I liked bowling

 

Fair point and in fact, very fair, because we're all on KC. I find it a bit harder to get to work at times, but once I do, a semi-reversed form of GAS kicks in and I'm back to being joyfully immersed in what I have. What I'd LIKE and what I NEED are distant cousins who just give one another the stinkeye from across the room at family gatherings.   

 

OTOH, when I just can't get rolling and I really wanted to do so, I'd like to have some old synth whose Infant Failure Mode could be measured in seconds. Then I could take it out back and address my momentary creative block by smashing the damned thing into a tree stump until I find that inner peace within myself. That's often when I stumble over the inversion I needed, so I run back in and lay it down. Sometimes after I trip over the dead KC-500 holding up one end of the coffee table.