Creative activity can only occur in the eternal present moment.   In that terrifying instant of time that appears as a roller-coaster reaches the top of its upward climb and has not yet begun its downward dissent, one is acutely aware of the eternal present moment of living reality in which all of us create our alternative futures.  It is only in this fleeting moment that the past or the known is transformed with our active participation into the new or the unknown.

    Music emerges from that instant of time in which there is no past or future, no plan or deduction or logic.  As it appears it becomes the known.   The labor or actual work involved in the creation of music resides in the attempt to catch those fleeting instants of time and aural perception, expand upon or develop these musical thoughts, and preserve them so that they become tangible for other listeners in other successions of creative moments of time.

    Musical thought occurs as thought sound, rather than as thinking about sound.  The content of this thought is nothing other than sound: sound that is not referential, sound that cannot be thought of in other terms, either verbal, visual, tactile or emotional.  The logical progression of sound in music is a logic of perceived aural relationships emerging and evolving through temporal extension and succession.  Unfortunately, when this thought process is translated into linguistic expression much that is essential to musical thought is lost, perhaps as a result of the visual and spatial bias of our verbal thought processes.  However, musical ideas and thought processes do exist; we experience their reality even though we lack the tools to adequately describe them verbally.

    While the composer is inventing his sound material he is an improviser and the tools that he uses are his sound producing instruments.  One can distinguish several criteria that  are important for a compositional sound producing instrument.  The instrument must be able to quickly produce a wide variety of sound stimulae that the composer will be able to identify as corresponding, at least in a general manner, to the sounds he is imagining.  Moreover the essential ingredient in this composer/instrument relationship is that the composer needs to sense that the instrument will respond adequately and easily to physical intervention on his part, reflecting his desire to continuously modify the sound stimulus that the instrument is currently providing.  This interactive dialogue between the composer and his tool is adequate for the compositional task only when the composer feels comfortable  with the instrument.  In other words the composer must be able to perform with competence upon his sound producing tool.  However, the degree of competence required need only enable him to think spontaneously, reacting to and modifying the sounds that are being created at each successive moment.  In this regard the composer can be regarded as someone working with tools to provide a model of the work for ultimate realization.

    The compositional process requires at least one other set of tools.  If the composer wishes to preserve his successions of sound ideas for repetition, modification, or recreation at some future time and place, there must be some sort of recording tool.  Memorization,  oral transmission, or any of a variety of notational systems are some traditional recording devices.  In the 20th century, a variety of electronic aural and visual recording devices have emerged.  As a result of the appearance of these electronic devices, the traditional methods of memorization, oral transmission and notation are gradually being modified.

    The training of composers typically has involved the study of existing compositions, the study of performance upon the available tools of sound production or instruments appropriate to the compositional thought process, and the study of the tools of compositional preservation: notation.  Composers have typically functioned as self-employed individuals, producing works independently.  The cost of the tools of composition has been minimal.  The main cost to the composer has been the time spent composing instead of earning money in other ways.  On the other hand, the production costs involved in the public performance of music has often been quite costly, and these costs have been borne by cultural organizations or extremely wealthy individuals devoted to the production of musical works.

    The musical ideas that emerge in the creative present moment of the composer's mind are of many sizes.    Some ideas are indeed small and can thus be immediately grasped mentally, but frequently many small instantaneous sound ideas may occur quickly.   These ideas may be so fleeting and numerous that they are difficult to remember and order without the aid of notational tools.   Nevertheless, when these ideas are represented symbolically and displayed visually the mind can combine and redistribute these symbolic visual tokens for sound as the basis for the construction of large scale temporal designs.  Generally speaking, large scale temporal designs require a degree of abstraction from individual sound stimulae, for the process of shaping sound into artistic units requires that the composer be able to shift his attention rapidly from the smallest to the largest units of the emerging pattern.  Notational tools assist the composer in this process.

    Musical notation is an exceedingly complex system and one which is not easily derived from sound stimulae alone because it is essentially a visual/spatial representation.   It enables the compositional process to occur simultaneously in both the aural and in the visual domain so that temporal relations may be processed spatially at many different levels.  Notational tools that function appropriately must be able to give the composer immediate access to any and all portions of the work in progress both visually and aurally.

    One fruitful object of inquiry is the special musical relation, in our culture, between the notated composition and the performance of the work.  In the era preceding the present electronic realization of sound, these domains of musical production were separated, assembly line fashion, into differently managed groups of workers with separate socioeconomic support systems: the work of composition itself retaining it's vestigial cottage industry character, while actual sound production developed an elaborate and complex structure of salesmen, directors, promoters, sound producers, fund raisers, each dealing with a separate aspect of delivering musical sound products to the consumer.   This complex of loosely managed assembly line workers has been preserved until the present day, and is, perhaps, largely responsible for the notion that the musical work of art itself is somehow physically distinct from any individual sound rendering of it, much as a photograph is only a poor copy of a painting.   Different performances are consequently regarded as though they represent different translations of the same work of literature originally written in a foreign language, except that in music the original language, although represented by notation for all to see, is somehow inaccessible, aurally, accept through the dark glass of performance translation.  Thus, our system of music production lends credence to Beethoven's assertion that the composer is a creator of ideas.  The result has been, for our essentially musically illiterate society, the notion that the composer works in some profound and inaccessible realm of conceptualization.

    This strange view of music distorts the art and leads to innumerable popular misconceptions about art, appreciation, culture, and the social function of art in human society.  In our culture, the art consumer is busily searching for values and inner meanings, and imagines that the true appreciation of art objects provides membership in an ageless social club, a mystical kinship of the aesthetic elite.  This is not to say that art must never be viewed as having a conceptual component, but, aside from those sheerly technical aspects of craftsmanship that can be observed in any deliberate act of construction, the ideas embodied in a work of art are not different in kind from any set of ideas that arise when human beings consciously process the stimulae of their physical environment.  The art connoisseur's conscious mulling of stimulae processing may, indeed, constitute a great source of pleasure, even aesthetic pleasure of a kind; but this type of appreciation relates to the actual apprehension of the art object itself obiquely.  In all fairness, however, this detached, voyeuristic approach is not only endemic to art, but actually seems to characterize a generally pervasive journalistic attitude toward human experience.

    Electronic music presents different problem, because the composer and sound producer are in most cases the same individual and one can no longer truthfully assert that the work is actually distinct from its realization.  True, electronic work may still be viewed abstractly in terms of technical features of craftsmanship or it may be regarded as symbolic in the same sense that one can view any perceived object as representing something else.   However, an electronically realized composition is no longer a map for physical action in the same sense that a play or a notated composition is. It seems to exclude the notion of interaction and participation in the recreative experience.  Instead it represents a completed action that is time and place specific.   A notated work, on the other hand, creates the illusion that it is eternal in the sense that Plato's realm of real ideas is eternal; a performance of such a work can be regarded as analogous to the play of shadows cast by real ideas upon the wall of the cave whereby we mortals can indirectly perceive these shadows of reality with our senses.  An electronic work can never be real in this sense; it can only be a shadow.

    This analogy with Platonic Idealism is partly facetious, because, if one continues to push the analogy, a musical score must also be regarded as merely a shadow reflecting the actual idea assumed present in the composer's mind.  However, the analogy does serve as an illustration of the many philosophical assumptions that do underlie and distort (or perhaps even prevent) a simple experiential approach to art and objects of art. Unconsciously our approach to experiencing everything, not only art, is clouded by these unconscious lens of many shades of dark color.  Like eye glasses and contact lens these things do not help us to see better, but rather help us to see in accordance with some culturally determined norm for good vision.  Nevertheless the work of art, the moment of truth, the perception of beauty, are ironically always there, always with us, fully revealed, in no manner hidden.  The barriers to comprehension, the hidden meanings and our laborious efforts to surmount them are all of our own devising, entertaining though they may be.

    Certainly there are levels of apprehension and awareness, but these cannot be acquired,  they, like everything else, are a gift.   We cannot be or perceive any differently in the present moment than we in fact are being or are perceiving.  When we look back at what we did or what we perceived, we do indeed change it: as time carries us forward, we must reconstruct the past so that it conforms to the new situations in which we find ourselves.   This is the way we experience life and music.

    As we become more and more absorbed in our own play at redesigning remembered stimulae, a thirst or hunger for something real arises.  (We may think of it as something transcendent if we incline toward ascribing reality to our own thoughts.)  At that moment we open ourselves, be it ever so slightly or apprehensively, to the beauty or truth of the experience.  This experience is overwhelming, and, for only an instant perhaps, we  are aware: we do not question, or decide, or defend, or evaluate; instead we know.

 "...There's something else I wanted to say about Cezanne: that no one  before him ever demonstrated so clearly the extent to which painting is something that takes place among the colors, and how one has to  leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves.  Their intercourse: this is the whole painting.  Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit,  his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already clouding  their activity."1
 

1.   Letters on Ce`zanne  by Rainer Maria Rilke, edited by Clara Rilke, translated by Joel Agee, Fromm International Publishing Corporation, New York, 1985, p. 75.
 
 

Catalog of Compositions

Thoughts on Creativity