How to be creative... (Part Two)
This is getting more interesting. Working hard is all good and well, but how do you know if the work put in is so disproportionate to the actual outcome of your labours? Well, I guess this comes only in retrospect, when after a few hours, you look back over your work and realise you've barely scratched the surface. This happened to me this week, with my composition-in-progress. So there I sat, wondering why it still wasn't working and came to a few conclusions.
1. Creation needs inspiration. I don't mean some mystical 'falling out of the sky' kind of inspiration, but the kind of inspiration that comes from experience. For example, being genuinely and emotionally roused to compose or write or whatever, from an experience. An experience of art or music or life or whatever. It doesn't have to be a spectacular experience, if it's enough to cause the desire to create, it's surely enough.
2. You've got to be in a place to be inspired. Physically and/or mentally.. I think. This is a hard one to pin down, so I shan't spend a long time on it, but I don't think New Cross is the perfect place to be inspired. I could be wrong. Then again, neither is Thatcham, so heaven only knows what I should do. I'll leave that one there, though.
3. You need to act on inspiration. Because it goes. Sure enough, I'll just be lazy and let the moment pass, then it's gone and I'm left in the same place I was before. That's my own fault though. I'm just too damn lazy to work on instinct like that.
and finally,
4. You can't supress inspiration with rules. This one always gets me. I get an idea and immediately I'm forced to limit it's possiblities by using notes and rests and all that crap. If it sounds like, I don't know, 'metal scraping against metal in the rain', then write that down, rather than limiting your own ideas with external rules and guidelines. That's a hard one to do, because rules and guidelines are comforting. It needs a bit of a breach into the unknown...
Now I'm not going to run away to rural Scotland with a manuscript book, getting up at 6 in the morning to roam the glens and return with a pocket full of dreams. So I guess I need to figure out where I am now in order to figure out what inspires me to write music. I might end up quite surprised...
1. Creation needs inspiration. I don't mean some mystical 'falling out of the sky' kind of inspiration, but the kind of inspiration that comes from experience. For example, being genuinely and emotionally roused to compose or write or whatever, from an experience. An experience of art or music or life or whatever. It doesn't have to be a spectacular experience, if it's enough to cause the desire to create, it's surely enough.
2. You've got to be in a place to be inspired. Physically and/or mentally.. I think. This is a hard one to pin down, so I shan't spend a long time on it, but I don't think New Cross is the perfect place to be inspired. I could be wrong. Then again, neither is Thatcham, so heaven only knows what I should do. I'll leave that one there, though.
3. You need to act on inspiration. Because it goes. Sure enough, I'll just be lazy and let the moment pass, then it's gone and I'm left in the same place I was before. That's my own fault though. I'm just too damn lazy to work on instinct like that.
and finally,
4. You can't supress inspiration with rules. This one always gets me. I get an idea and immediately I'm forced to limit it's possiblities by using notes and rests and all that crap. If it sounds like, I don't know, 'metal scraping against metal in the rain', then write that down, rather than limiting your own ideas with external rules and guidelines. That's a hard one to do, because rules and guidelines are comforting. It needs a bit of a breach into the unknown...
Now I'm not going to run away to rural Scotland with a manuscript book, getting up at 6 in the morning to roam the glens and return with a pocket full of dreams. So I guess I need to figure out where I am now in order to figure out what inspires me to write music. I might end up quite surprised...
posted by Iain at 5:42 PM
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