Art and democracy

I spent some time this evening at Border's brushing up on PHP, SQL and other assorted web goodies. Once I finished, I made a bee-line to the poetry section and (randomly) picked up a wonderful collection of essays by Adrienne Rich called Arts of the Possible.

"Art is our human birthright, our most powerful means of access to our own and another's experience and imaginative life. In continually rediscovering and recovering the humanity of human beings, art is crucial to the democratic vision. A government tending further and further away from the search for democracy will see less and less "use" in encouraging artists, will see art as obscenity or hoax."

p.103

I am certainly in the process of recovering my humanity... I hope everyone is as lucky as I am.

Cheers all,
Megan

Weight

Give me silence, water, hope.
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.
Fasten your bodies to me like magnets.
Hasten to my veins to my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.

Neruda

Play that tune

I have been alternating composing with a fun exercise - learn to play the piano part of a pop-ish song from a recording.

My choice has been "The Flowers" by Regina Spektor. It's pretty fun. Intricate enough to be challenging and still easy enough for me to get the gist in a couple days.

I know there are some people who have the gift of picking up a tune off a recording in one or two tries. I am definitely NOT one of those people (yet, hee hee), but it's been pretty fun. The beginning was frustrating because I couldn't figure out what she was doing (which now seems silly that I've got it down).

I don't know if I'll keep doing this. We'll see if I am inspired once more (suggestions welcome :) ).

Peace,
meg-a-leg

At the mercy

This is a quote from Eric Whitacre from the BCM International Discussion Board on the topic of compositional process:

Eric: The truth is that it is profoundly different with every piece. Sometimes I memorize the text; sometimes I don't. Sometimes I start with a musical idea; sometimes with the text. Sometimes I randomly orchestrate ideas, throw them away, and start sketching structure; sometimes not. When I say its not 'efficient', it's because it takes a long time for me to become a COMPOSER again, every single time I do it. I really feel, every time, that I have no idea what I am doing.

I don't know if anyone else has this experience, but I sure know that whatever I am doing doesn't FEEL like a process. That's why my advice is always to just write, and keep writing, until you figure it out. Then do it again.


Later in the thread, he mentioned a snippet of an interview that deals with this topic. If you want to hear it in his voice (a great voice, I might add) check it out here. One of my favorite parts is when he says, "I feel at the mercy of what it is I'm trying to make."

I'm definitely "at the mercy" right now...

Cheers all!
Megan

Three month recap

Here's a recap of last three months of my experimental semester:

January 22 - mid-February: 3 short choral pieces written (Wild Swans, Sea Violet, so comes love). Explosion of creativity. Great momentum.

Mid-February - mid March: Organized conference efforts for Kauffman. One in St. Louis and the other in Austin. Work demands more time and energy. Pulls me away from composing. Very frustrated.

Composed "whatever a moon" for a church choir. Denied a performance. Disappointment. The emotion and musical ideas will show up in another place, but for now, "whatever a moon" is safely hidden away.


Late March: Spring Break trip to Ghost Ranch!! Time to reconnect to myself and others. Relaxing and embracing my humanity ("Your humanity is your pathway to your artistry." No ice queens need apply).

Early April: I decide to throw myself into a wind ensemble piece for the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra competition. More like throwing myself into a brick wall. Total struggle. Played with some ideas but nothing really materialized. Decided to abandon the piece when I knew it wouldn't make the deadline to refocus on my bread and butter - choral music. I feel lighter already.

Looking at it from this perspective, I have had a successful quarter. I definitely can crank things up a notch though. We'll see what happens in the second quarter of my grand experiment...:)

Cheers!
Megan

advice from will

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."

~Shakespeare

Hallelujah!

From Eric Whitacre:

For me, I believe that art should be transportive, cathartic, and ultimately redemptive. I don't believe that is possible in a world of strict serial music.

MDS: AMEN!!!!!

And I believe that music is not intended to be 'understood'. It is meant to be felt. I believe that you don't have to know anything about Beethoven, or classical music, or German, and you can still hear Beethoven's Ninth and walk away feeling like a better human being. Learning about it makes YOUR EXPERIENCE better, but it doesn't make the music better.

MDS: Great points.

What will you do with your one wild and precious life? (Mary Oliver)

From Robert Fritz:

True, for the first ten or twelve years, children are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" But the children's answers are usually discounted unless they happen to follow in the footsteps of one of their parents. Similarly, people often ask adolescents, "What do you want to do when you get out of school?"

Usually, even though that question is asked, the young people have had no educational experience of the creative process. From their vantage point, the game of life appears to involve choosing from among uninteresting alternative proposed by adults.

In the educational system, aptitude is often substituted for vision. For many people, their doing well on certain aptitude tests in secondary school was a great tragedy, because traditional guidance counseling helps students find out what they might be good at and helps them design careers around their aptitude.

Many people have mindlessly followed advice coming out of that mentality and become physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, nurses, and chemists, only to discover to their dismay, twenty or thirty years later, that they never really cared about what may now be the only field or profession they know. A major part of their life was spent developing what they happened to have an aptitude for at age fifteen.

let it take you

"You have to know what you want to get. But when you know that, let it take you. And if it seems to take you off the track, don't hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry. "

Gertrude Stein

letting it run

Author John Hyde Preston once asked Gertrude Stein,

But what if, when you tried to write, you felt
stopped, suffocated, and no words came and if
they came at all they were wooden and without
meaning? What if you had the feeling you could
never write another word?

Gertrude Stein replied, laughing,

Preston the way to resume is to resume. It is the
only way. To resume. If you feel this book deeply
it will come as deep as your feeling is when it is
running truest, and the book will never be truer
or deeper than your feeling. But you do not yet
know anything about your feeling because,
though you may think it is all there, all crystal-
ized, you have not let it run. So how can you
know what it will be? What will be best in it is
what you really do not know now. If you knew it
all it would not be creation but dictation.

Patience on the learning curve

"Composers must put in the time."
~ Frank Ticheli


"This long 'refining' period for me is an extraordinarily painful process. I find myself feeling the highest highs and the lowest lows, and at times it keeps me up all night...My experience has been that in order to develop an idea and bring a new creation into the world, you must go through a certain learning curve. I don't believe that you can be taught this curve, but you must suffer through and find it on your own. And the only way this can happen is by spending hours and hours and hours searching for the answer."
~ Eric Whitacre


One more step, on a very long journey....


~m