It has taken years for it to sink in, but the pressure of the facts has finally created a gem. It occurred to me the other day as I was preparing playlists for my iPod. The music that I love as a composer and performer is very different from the music that moves me as a listener. Composing and listening are two different things.
This isn’t a particularly great insight. There certainly isn’t anything new there that will change the world, but it has made things a little easier for me in my creative struggle. Like any good artist, I compare myself to my influences. I know that I was taught from the earliest days of my career as a composer that I am not like Beethoven or Mozart. I am mortal. They struggled, yes, but I will struggle more. I will likely never see the world from summits of greatness that they now sit upon, but doesn’t mean I won’t die trying. And in the trying, there is the comparing.
It’s very hard to write a piece of music and not compare it to something that is near and dear. To wonder to oneself if this string quartet could sit on the same stage with Webern and not be completely forgotten. These thoughts are counterproductive in some ways, but in a more positive sense they can be used for inspiration. More often than not, for me, it comes down to acknowledging that what I do isn’t what my heroes have done. The pieces that made me want to dig in and try my own hand as a musician are only tangentially related to what I produce. Fripp, Villa-Lobos, Hedges, Belew, Miles, Copland, Cage, Brubeck, and Buckley all find places in my daily musical diet but I will never compose anything that could be mistaken for their work. And that’s OK.
This only scratches the surface of my inner monologue these days that is trying desperately to resolve the music of my influences with the music that I create. Or the even stickier problem of how I draw relationships between what I compose, the music that I love as an aural experience, and the music that is intellectually stimulating but less fulfilling as a so-called musical experience.
All of this means that I’m spending more time thinking about music than writing it. That has to change, but the dominant of my life right now has yet to resolve itself into a little girl, so I have other fires to tend.
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