Seeking Inspiration

Perhaps you can spark some inspiration of where to go next by doing some arrangement of old hymns? Could be favorites of yours, but maybe even choose ones that explicitly aren't your favorites. How would you restate them in your own voice? Would the hymn take on new meaning for you and perhaps lead you in a different direction in the process?

 

I feel your frustrations Paul but you mustn't give up! And don't fray because you've got at least one listener right here. But I definitely feel that uselessness when comparing to more successful composers who have a way bigger audience.

If I could redo anything in my life, one specifically would be to never go to college for Music but for business/promotion. The most successful composers today did not make it because they were talented but because they are a great businessman. My father always puts it to me as, "talent is not enough to survive, you need talent plus..." Meaning you need talent plus business skills.

But besides the business point, you shouldn't let it hinder your creativity. Especially when you have such great talent. Take any religious story and create an overture or symphony to the story! Any story that inspires you or that which holds great meaning to you or your family!

I also second on doing arrangements of great hymns or religious works. The great concertmasters always did arrangements of other composer's works, folk tunes, and/or religious melodies & songs.

Looking forward to your next piece! I also appreciate you sharing your frustrations, we all suffer from these frustrations and motivations. I hope you get past your roadblock and scratch that itch to compose an amazing piece.

Cheers!

 

I can relate. I think if I had grown up 20 years later I wouldn't have taken a creative job because one look at youtube, soundcloud and artstation makes me feel like there's no point in even trying.


But to offer a possible solution, if you really care about building an audience: go find a promising indie-game project that would love having the kind of music that you write, to be the soundtrack for your game, and compose for them and help them tell their story. Maybe ask Jason Graves if he has any recommendations on where/how to look for such projects. I think having music being attached to an experience will go a long way to make people care about the music (and vice versa).

 

You've written a symphony... you are 100% good enough, not even a doubt. And making games takes years, you're fast enough as well. If you don't want to have the stress of turning it into a job, I can understand that perfectly well. But it could be a mutually beneficial kind of collaboration because a game would give you plenty of input to use as inspiration. Just a thought, good luck either way!

 

Ok, I have the solution for you for expanding your audience and for some possible inspiration. Hire Khatia Buniatishvili to record (video) one of your pieces and post on youtube. This should get you some more views. It is the classical version of a Rihanna or Cardi B video. Classed that shit right up for the classical audience.

One percent inspiration, 99 percent something else....

Or you could follow some of the other suggestions listed in this thread... I mean, I guess they are ok.... but, I will point out that none of the others involve cleavage.

 

Dear Paul,

I've been lurking the forum for awhile, but for whatever reason this thread is what got me to start posting. It may well end up being the first and only time I have something of value to contribute to the discussion, rather than picking everyone else's brains to help me overcome my blindspots.

Take everything I offer with a grain of salt – if it resonates, take it to heart; if it doesn't, chuck it in the wastebasket. And keep in mind while reading that I'm only partially speaking to you; in many ways, this is me reminding myself things I already "know" but that are just too damn easy to lose sight of. Under the guise of encouraging Paul, I try also to encourage myself. (Keep this especially in mind when I sometimes say things less gently than they could've been said. Also, feel free to completely ignore me; you've written a symphony, I haven't. Even if you're not proud of your symphony, even if you think it sucks ... a crappy symphony is better than no symphony, every time.)

Yes. I've been there, you've been there, we've all been there. It happens to the best of us; it happens to all of us. I sometimes wonder if this is something that plagues modern man more than it did in the past, possibly due to overpopulation, but certainly throughout history it has hit artist-types harder than others. And no matter how often we escape from that mental/emotional prison, we are bound to return to it periodically. But I'd like to say to you, and I mean this quite sincerely, not being flippant:

Congratulations! Truly, congratulations. You are being called to adventure, and some part of you knows there's no answer to adventure other than "yes!" ... and some other part of you is resisting it because 1) calls to adventure are frequently accompanied by a world of pain (Luke Skywalker initially refused the call, and the next thing he knew his aunt and uncle had been burned to a crisp) and 2) some part of you is afraid to discover your inner power.

It hurts, it sucks, it feels like all is lost ... but it's a sign you're exactly where you need to be right now, to grow into who you will become tomorrow.

If you think that's all horseshit, then do me a favor and at least remind yourself "Just because I feel useless doesn't mean I am useless" and whatever variations thereof nurture your spirit.

That my friend, is the very definition of negative self-talk. Sounds like from others' posts that you already have an audience, but even if that doesn't impact you right now – you don't know this. You may doubt you'll ever have an audience, and that might be fairly psychologically mature given all the ins and outs of the world we live in, but you don't know this (unless you're secretly a time traveler who's posted this backward in time from the day of his death?)

I don't share exactly the same religious views as you do, but I'm a spiritual kind of guy and I hope you won't mind if I respond using your terms instead of trying to replace them with ones that resonate with me.

You are putting a lot of pressure on yourself right here!

Tune into your feelings, not your mind which can lie to you right and left –

Dontcha think, if you shared these concerns with The Composer Upstairs, s/he would tell you not to be so hard on yourself, that you've done plenty in this regard? That the point isn't the result, but the doing of it, the striving toward it? "Make a joyful noise" doesn't mean "make sounds other people think are pretty" ... it just means be joyful while you're making whatever noises you can.

I've been lurking for awhile, but the only things I remember for sure about you are that you're a brass player and suffer from a bit of hearing damage (I can relate to the latter). I don't remember offhand if you're a father or a husband. BUT – isn't there someone in your life that you love more than yourself, more than life itself? I'm talking real Love, not desire or possession or codependence or any of the other fucked up things that people too often mistake for love and mistakenly call 'love.' Isn't there someone in your life who you love simply because of who they are and because you're just so happy that they exist? Someone who always has your support, who you never impose any demands or expectations upon them other than that they have the opportunity to be who they are and grow into whoever they were born to be? Someone you would instantly, without a second thought or even a first thought, without an instant of hesitation, give your live for them if that were required? Not for thought of reputation or reward or heroism, and not out of fear, but simply because your love for them is selfless and true?

There, my friend – there is your service; that is how you honor god.

I'm willing to bet that you do have such a person, and every moment spent loving them in a way that builds them up, allows them to be themselves and doesn't smother them with your own baggage – even the moments when that love is "merely" in your heart and not expressed directly to that person (for whatever reason) – is you honoring god.

(And if you're stuck on having your music honor god, and there's no other way that'll satisfy you, just take a page out of Bach or Herb Spencer's playbooks: when you reach a double barline, write "soli deo gloria" or "fine laus deo" in the margin )

[attacca:]

 

Cart before the horse, brother! That's some quicksand we all fall into.

Inspiration isn't the beginning of the process, it's something that kicks in shortly after we've begun. Outside of a truly devastating personal event like the loss of a loved one, it's guaranteed that every time you sit down and start creating, inspiration will follow, like a puppy nipping at your heels, ready to play. The muses are pretty much powerless to help you until after you initiate action. But as soon as you dive in and keep swimming long enough to reach that still point where you lose all track of yourself, completely absorbed in what you're doing, unaware of what time it is, or which wars are being fought in another corner of the world, which bills are unpaid or which chores are long overdue, etc. – right at that moment, inspiration is guaranteed to show up. It never fails!

Go watch Mike's "Live Composing When You Don't Feel Like It" series again; that's one I've returned to more than once. Sometimes we need to hear, over and over, the things we already "know", until such time as we know them in our bones and they are inseparably woven into who we are.

So, just start. So simple, but it really is the heart of the matter.

But yeah, I know, easier said than done. So here's a few things that sometimes help me. These are all just variations of the same thing and they're just a series of "for instances" that'll hopefully trigger you to think of your own personal variations which resonate most with you.

This can be done on any instrument. Keyboards have a slight edge because they're polyphonic, so I'll use that in my example. But pick any instrument that calls you.

1) Sit at the instrument. Close your eyes, put your hands in your lap, breathe deep and get calm.
2) Gently reach out, and without trying to "do" anything specific (don't shape your fingers into any kind of chord, etc.), just gently let your hands sink into the keys and ...
3) Listen to whatever sound emerges until ...
4) you start to hear it as music, or proto-music; you start to hear possibilities in that material, variations upon it that are being sounded in your mind and heart rather than just hearing the literal vibrations that are hitting the air.

And bam! You're off to the races. Needless to say, step 5 is right that shit down, and step 6 is revise it until it's good.

(Credit where due: a lot of the above are variations on ideas I first encountered in the writings of Kenny Werner.)

The beauty of this is that it can work no matter where your hands go, because the human brain will pull patterns out of anything, even when they're not actually there ("that cloud looks like a bunny rabbit"). You might "discover" a cool harmony or chord voicing you never would've thought to consider ... and you'll probably know right away whether it's something to start the composition with to set a mood or tone, or whether it's something that needs to occur later in the piece, but you know it's pregnant with possibilities and there's a way to lead up to it and justify it ... or maybe it's need to be arpeggiated rather than a block chord, whatever.

It doesn't have to be a harmony either: Even if you woke up each morning, sat down and played a C natural and listened to it until it died out, you'd hear it differently every time. One day it might be the tonic of something bright and major-ish. Another day you might hear it darker, perhaps as the fifth wanting to resolve to F minor. Wait long enough, and your brain will always start turning it into music, every time.

This is another way of saying that it often helps to react to something rather than have to come up with it. Remember Mike's quote about "it's always easier to sculpt than create."

Maybe it'll be better to use a non-musical example. For some reason the image of Joan Miro in his studio comes to me right now, so let's run with that: A painter sits staring at a blank canvas which towers over him, twice his height. Some days, this is just fine; a painting emerges in the mind, and the painter's hand reaches for the brush. My guess is, this is about one day out of every 100.

But if you stare at that blank canvas and 10 minutes go by and you've still got no ideas, then now it's time to open a bucket of paint and throw it at the canvas without looking. Now, react to that blob of random color. Maybe you like it; maybe that "Rorschach blot" ends up being a key part of the finished work. Or maybe it ends up getting completely painted over during the process, but it put you in motion.

**********

Okay, maybe none of that resonated. Maybe it's all too wishy-washy and fairy tales & unicorns to appeal to you right now.

Maybe right now, it's not enough for you to write a piece that began as a random blob of paint on a canvas. Maybe you're burning to do something that isn't "just" about the music, because you've temporarily lost touch with the pure joy of music that is merely itself, without extramusical associations.

Maybe you're feeling that right now it's time to aim even higher than that; you want to compose (in Aaron Copland's words) "because you want to summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today."

Great, then you're gonna need a deadline or something, some outside impetus so you're not forced to summon all the creative energy internally.

So, I want to hire you to do a short composition for me. The catch is, I can't afford to pay you for it – but don't let that stop you!

Here's what I want:

Write a short poem about how it feels to be Paul right now. It should start with the line:

I stand before you tired, useless, frustrated ––
I have not done enough to honor God.

Spin that out into maybe three or four stanzas or so? By the end of the poem, the narrator should be in a different emotional place than in the beginning. I'd like one of the lines you come up with to extend the above, to be repeated (possibly with minor variations) a few times in the course of the piece, subtly, in different metrical positions.

These will then serve as the lyrics of an art song you compose, for tenor (or possibly bass if not overly profundo) and a small chamber ensemble. I'll leave the instrumentation up to you – or if you're digging being handed constraints to compose under, I'll be happy to specify the entire instrumentation.

I'm hearing that first line as being spoken, before any singing begins. I'm hearing the first part of the line as the start of the piece, the thing that pierces the initial silence, and right where the dash is, I'm vaguely hearing something enter in the background, quietly but with some bite to it –– cello maybe, or possibly muted trombone, perhaps followed by something a bit spiky on piano (still pp or ppp, of course). The instruments continue unobtrusively in the background as the rest of the line is spoken, gradually building tension, then coalesce into some sort of mild temporary cadence that provides a "bed" for the sung lyrics to enter upon.

Somewhere in the middle of the piece, maybe a brief contrasting section at a faster tempo, which starts to build and then suddenly loses energy and returns to the mood you set at the beginning.

End it on whatever mood emerges naturally for the ending, during the writing of the poem/lyrics.

Do you hate the vocal style heard in most classical music? That's cool; I'm on that end of the spectrum, with notable exceptions (Britten). If you don't want to write for tenor, pick a solo instrument to do it as a song without words – but still have the solo part be "reciting" the poem, i.e. the rhythms match the words, the musical moods complement and contrast the lyrics at that moment of the poem, etc.

Today is June 23rd; let's pretend the first rehearsal is slated for July 14th.

(If this feels like a kick in the butt ... well, I got the (possibly mistaken) impression that's what you were secretly asking for. Sooner rather than later, I'll be in desperate need of a kick in the butt and I hope you'll be kind enough to return the "favor" (even if you hate me right now).)

**********

I went out on a limb here, took a risk that you needed to hear what I need to hear when I'm in the kind of funk you described. It probably would've been smarter not to do anything like this, until after a rapport had been well-established.

But I've certainly never claimed to be smart. I hope I haven't offended you, but if I have, please accept my sincere apologies. Mea culpa.

Your post caused me to dig out an old journal and a Joseph Campbell book with a lot of quotes I've returned to over the years, at times when I needed encouragement and help returning to the real me. Thank you for that. I had planned to leave some of those quotes with you at the end of this post, but the damned thing is already too long. If you're interested in reading them, send a PM.

Happy composing,
Sam

 

Very glad to hear you’re back in the saddle, Paul.

And by the way, good on you for seeking help/support when you needed it — many of us (humans) still struggle with that, even when we “know” that it’s shooting ourselves in the foot.

 

Writing music seems like a pretty great way to honor God, to me.

It even has biblical backing https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/EPH.5.19

(I have no idea if the bible is part of your faith or not, I just came across that passage somehow and “make melodies with your heart to the lord” has stuck with me ever since)