1:25 a.m. I have had a hard few weeks. I missed the deadline to hand in my composition portfolio and was given a vague extension to sometime this week that I am now starting to worry about.
Music is hard. Actually, more to the point, composition is hard. Very hard. I was talking to my good friend John Lely in the university cafeteria last week, and we were discussing this very issue. I told him that I found composition "terrifying". I don't think I exaggerate. Composition is all about making decisions regarding sound and I am incapable of making these decisions. Well, I am incapable of making them with any kind of speed, anyway.
I told John about how I am obsessed with the freedom to compose. The freedom to decide. I told him how I wanted to know my potential materials and how to use them with an absolute freedom, without necessity to adhere to guidelines, but to be truly creative. I thought, in essence, that the possibility exists to do anything with the spectrum of sound available, known and unknown, that we are free to compose precisely as we wish. I even made the effort to understand what materials are available, and I think I do understand in a broad sense. I even made lists and charts and lines of the possibilities of sound. It's a little like opening a box, and what I have now are more boxes. Every now and then I might learn some more of what is in the boxes, but I know more stuff is there, and I can even hypothesize on their nature. If only I could see them all, I could be free to compose without hinderence or resistance. What freedom! But now, in yet another late night compositional struggle, I realise that it is no freedom at all. I gaze at all my materials and their possibilities and I am paralyzed. I haven't clue of what the hell to do with them, and it makes me feel like someone who has never studied music in their life. So I start to make more charts of possibilities, so I might make a decision. But it is of no use, because the same thing happens again. And again and again and again. It is a most sobering experience to realise that while you think you have been creating, you have only been acknowledging what already exists. Even if others may protest it, I consider that I have failed to reach my objective.
That word I used earlier, 'resistance'. When I talk of resistance, I mean anything that affects or influences choices to be made in composition. I had long considered resistance counter-creative, something that hinders the creative capacity, which is why I been fighting it for so long. But John spoke of resistance as something to be thankful for. It gives creativity a context and materials a boundary. And contrary to what I thought, it gives a freedom to compose, which is what I have been going mad trying to achieve for so long. I now think resistance will also enable me to see my materials, when I have merely been dazzled by them up to now.
Perhaps this is what composition is really about: making clear what was previously out of focus. We cannot create something that does not already exists. Perhaps my job as a composer is to hold sounds up to people so that they may hear. Damn, it has been too long since I have heard a thing. It's too important to gloss over. Nobody enjoys any music because it's form or maths or whatever. It is to do with what is heard. As Stravinsky said of Pierre Boulez: "I like Boulez because I like Boulez." Everybody says that Feldman's music is so beautiful, yet he uses the minimum of material. It is a joy to hear Feldman's music, because you can hear the sounds themselves. The system is nothing but a conduit for the sounds. I used to get so hung up on people who were obsessed with systems and forms for composition, because it seemed ridiculous to me that one might focus more on the way something is produced rather than the end result. Obeying a form and not your ears. But now I see that systems and forms, instruments and contexts - "resistance" - isn't the enemy I thought it was. Resistances are conduits for sound.
I've been going about this all wrong...
