On 10 Apr 2005 at 18:39, John Howell wrote: > Your question implies that composing and arranging do, in > fact, have spiritual . . .
I object to the introduction of the term "spiritual." > . . . and inspirational aspects, and I'm not at all > sure that's true, at least not for everyone and not all the time. It > is a very 19th century and a very Romantic assumption, but I tend to > favor Stravinsky's instructions: Set aside a definite time every day > for composition, go into your studio at that time, and compose! What do you do during the times when you don't have any decent ideas, either in the form of brand new ideas or in the working out of older ideas? > I suspect that the composers who do feel a spiritual aspect to their > work are going to be the ones who are spiritual outside of their > composing, and I also suspect that those who wait for inspiration are > not working musicians who have to deal with deadlines. Until I actually started composing (by accident, 8 years ago), I would have gone along with you on this one, but now that I've done no small amount of it, I don't think it's a rational act, at least not for me. I am continually amazed at how many times I find connections between parts of something I've written that I didn't consciously put there. Most recently, I've been working on a piece where I intended to introduce motivically related material first, then gradually reveal the "theme" on which the whole thing was based. Well, it turns out that my original motivic material works perfectly as counterpoint to the the actual theme. I didn't consciously write it that way -- but my inner ear knew what it was doing, and did the job, nonetheless. I wouldn't refer to that as "spiritual," just non-rational, unconscious, and, because of that, somewhat mysterious and inexplicable. Ideas come to me in all sorts of places, while waiting for the subway, while lying in bed at night before I fall asleep. Indeed, certain things I've largely "composed" while lying in bed, unable to release my mind from the conscious working out of ideas. There are a number of aspects to this, though. There's a certain kind of large-scale planning that I do in these circumstances (determining the large subsections of a work and the type of material in each subsection), but also small-scale working out of ideas (including contrapuntal working of semi-fugal or imitative materials). But mostly, the details come to me inexplicably, just when I least expect it. Sometimes that's when I just sit down to clean up a previously worked-out section of a piece. Sometimes I sit down for 20 minutes to do a little bit of cleanup and emerge 4 or 5 hours later with a piece that's twice as long as it was before I sat down. I find that, most often, if I have a germ of an idea, I can work it out. It's only when I'm casting around for basic material that I get nowhere at all. And I still depend to a large degree on "inspiration" for those basic ideas. I do find it easier to compose when I've got either a text or a pre- existing musical theme that I'm working on. Indeed, in those cases, it's usually pretty easy to do, almost as easy as "arranging." But it depends on the type of relationship between the intended composition and the pre-existent material. But "spiritual", well, I *spit* on that word -- it has nothing to do with that. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
