While I write on this blog,  Music Mutations, is to primarily share my little revelations on music and its connections between other art forms, I find on the Eve of Thanksgiving, I feel a need to share a video I found that describes the process of living happily while pursuing a career in a chosen art form.

I have been blessed to have a mentor living right in my very own home. My husband,  has found this remarkable manner to connect the everyday process of doing what you love, and creating something wonderful. This process morphs into a process that one can not longer call what one does "work". The very definition of work ceases to be a applicable definition, and what he does as a freelancer becomes something else, something amorphous that truly those who appreciate beauty want more.

He risks much when he ceases to work, but create. he risks others thinking he is immature or not responsible, because he creates instead or works. I find these  people to be the losers and simply jealous of the process because they too want to create, and have chosen to work instead.
He risks failure, chasing an identity, and subsequent loss of focus to find the fine line between being responsible to his art and to himself. However, creating good art is a remarkable God -thing and must not be ignored by anyone who comes to understand he or she has the ability to make beautiful connections between creating good art and NOT doing work. I believe God wants us to create, not work.
No matter which art one chooses in life to create be it a novel, a well organized event, a strong economic plan, a beautiful symphonic work, we are all here to MAKE GOOD ART. My husband has learned to make great art in the most benign situations. He can take a simple party and turn it into a photo worthy of a art gallery.He can find a way to make art in his photography, his creation of food, his creation of a new plan. He has learned to make great art.

His life mimics the the freelancer writer and comic creator Neil Gaiman's advice conveyed in his commencement speech. Mike, my husband, has been truly an inspiration. He has kept working just as Neil Gaiman describes.

So, I include the commencement speech below because so many of the truism he speaks are true - but not because he says them, but because he illuminates what I observe in my own home. Thanksgiving is then given right in front of us, and I blessed to have him right in front of me. I love you Mike.

What To Do 

If  I Am Not The Mood......... 

To Create That Is

“A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.” Tchaikovsky

What do  Tchaikovsky, Jack White and Nick Cave all have in common? Each, at some moment in their creative history has spoken or written about the process of being creative, on inspiration, or the lack thereof, and the benefits of straight up hard work. What we  law people call "work ethic"

One of the beautiful opportunities studying and researching music, composers and artists provides is that it offers insight in the artist's mind, and allows one to learn from his or her creative process. Sometimes his creative process is so beyond what one conceive of the word "artist" is brought to life through the sheer demonstration of of what can not be attained by the simple or common man.

Other times, the artist offers a crosswalk between the genius of who she or he is and the common man that allow the audience to just barely touch or grasp the process of creation and it is that process that inspires the audience, it is his or her work ethic and what it has produced that is amazing.

All of this reminded me of a letter Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote to his the woman who made it possible for him to make music. He wrote Nadezhda von Meck, dated March 17th, 1878, and found in the 1905 volume The Life & Letters of Pete Ilich Tchaikovsky (public domain):

Do not believe those who try to persuade you that composition is only a cold exercise of the intellect. The only music capable of moving and touching us is that which flows from the depths of a composer’s soul when he is stirred by inspiration. There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination.
A few days ago I told you I was working every day without any real inspiration. Had I given way to my disinclination, undoubtedly I should have drifted into a long period of idleness. But my patience and faith did not fail me, and to-day I felt that inexplicable glow of inspiration of which I told you; thanks to which I know beforehand that whatever I write to-day will have power to make an impression, and to touch the hearts of those who hear it. I hope you will not think I am indulging in self-laudation, if I tell you that I very seldom suffer from this disinclination to work. I believe the reason for this is that I am naturally patient. I have learnt to master myself, and I am glad I have not followed in the steps of some of my Russian colleagues, who have no self-confidence and are so impatient that at the least difficulty they are ready to throw up the sponge. This is why, in spite of great gifts, they accomplish so little, and that in an amateur way.

Here is Jack White, echoing — unwittingly, no doubt — Tchaikovsky:

Inspiration and work ethic — they ride right next to each other…. Not every day you’re gonna wake up and the clouds are gonna part and rays from heaven are gonna come down and you’re gonna write a song from it. Sometimes, you just get in there and just force yourself to work, and maybe something good will come out.

 HAPPY 75TH BIRTHDAY PHILIP GLASS

As soon as one tries to peg Philip Glass as a minimalist an opera, a movie score, a concerto will whip around the corner and smack one on the back of the head, waving the score of yet another work requiring a listen. At 75, Philip Glass's  work has stretched beyond influential in its sheer volume, its masterful workmanship, and accessibility.

And so it goes with out much more explanation that the soon to be released REWORK_Philip Glass Remixed (October 23rd), in honor of his 75th birthday is a must hear, must listen work for any musician of contemporary music.

The link below is on of the first installments of a track from the soon to be released work. It is a revisionment of Glass's work NYC 73-78 remixed by the artist Beck. Beck himself has gone through many stylistic changes, but can be described as creating musical collages just a Philip Glass has often been described. 

I personally view both as musical colorist - artists who music moves in waves and takes the listener on journeys through synesthesis of movements of images, which is why I chose this track first to play. I hope you enjoy the listen. Click on the link below for exclusive first listen.

Beck's Remix of Glass's NYC 73-78

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Who knew that Walt Disney and Igor Stravinsky clashed over Fantasia? Read on to know more.

10 OCTOBER, 2012

Transformation as Authorship: From Igor Stravinsky to Philip Glass by Way of Disney and Beck

by Maria Popova

On incremental change and “unresisting imbecility.”

As a proponent of combinatorial creativity and remix as a tool of innovation, I am always fascinated by how famous creators think about inspiration, influence, and the origin of ideas, recognizing their combinatorial nature — and how bystander critics often dismiss these creative transmutations with terms as derisive as “recreativity.”

Catherine Opie for The New York Times

In a recent New York Times conversation about their forthcoming collaborative record celebrating the composer’s 75th birthday, Philip Glass and Beck explore the line between mere reworking and originality by way of transformation:

BECK: I love that story you told me, it was the first time we met, we were talking about the remix project. And someone had done a cello piece of yours, and then when you went to go see it, you didn’t recognize it.
GLASS: It was Arthur Russell. And he was a very good cellist. I was doing a theater piece for the Mabou Mines, it was some Beckett piece, and I wrote him a cello piece, and he liked the work and was playing it. And I came back about three months later, and I heard it and I said, ‘Arthur, that’s beautiful, but what happened to the piece?’ And he said, ‘No, no, that is what you wrote,’ and I said, ‘Arthur, it’s no longer what I wrote, it’s your piece now.’ And he thought I was being upset, he apologized and I said, ‘No, no, no, I think we should put you down as the composer.’ He had reached the point of transformation. The incremental changes had turned it into this other thing. I love the fact that he did that. And I love the fact that he didn’t know that he did it.

This notion of iteration and incremental change is, in fact, an essential piece of the history of innovation — and yet it’s much less glamorous and bombastic than the Eureka! myth of ideation, which can lead many to dismiss it entirely.

Glass’s remarks reminded me of something I recently read in Hello Goodbye Hello, the wonderful daisy chain of famous encounters, which recounts a very different reaction another iconic composer, Igor Stravinsky, had to his music being transformed beyond recognition — by none other than Walt Disney.

In 1939, at the height of Disney’s success, Walt met Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, at a dinner party. The two became enchanted with each other’s work and the potential each of their mediums of mastery had for amplifying that of the other, and began collaborating on a version of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, starring Mickey Mouse — an idea Disney had been toying with for some time. That’s when Stravinsky steps in:

Disney wants a sequence showing the creation of the world, full of volcanoes and dinosaurs. But what music to use? His researchers can only come up with Haydn’s Creation, but Disney thinks it doesn’t carry quite enough oomph. At this point, Stokowski alerts him to Le Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky. Disney listens to it, and is immediately gripped. He offers Stravinsky $ 5,000 for the rights, though Stravinsky will remember it as $ 10,000. According to Stravinsky, Disney hints that if permission is withheld he will use the music anyway: pre-Revolutionary Russian copyrights are no longer valid.
Stravinsky accepts; Disney steams ahead. Before long the human inhabitants of the Burbank studio find themselves working alongside animals in cages, including iguanas and baby alligators, with skilled animators studying their movements close-up. ‘It should look as though the studio has sent an expedition back to the earth six million years ago,’ enthuses Disney. He is so excited that he starts free-associating to the music: ‘Something like that last WHAHUMMPH I feel is a volcano – yet it’s on land. I get that UGHHWAHUMMPH! on land, but we can look out on the water before this and see water spouts.’ As he listens to the music, he gets so worked up that he suddenly blurts, ‘Stravinsky will say: “Jesus, I didn’t know I wrote that music!”’
Which, as it turns out, is roughly what Stravinsky does say. In December 1939, he drops into the Burbank studio for a private screening of Fantasia. The experience leaves him with the most awful memories. ‘I remember someone offering me a score, and when I said I had my own, that someone saying, “But it is all changed.” It was indeed. The instrumentation had been improved by such stunts as having the horns play their glissandi an octave higher in the Danse de la terre. The order of pieces had been shuffled, too, and the most difficult of them eliminated, though this did not save the musical performance, which was execrable.’

So heated was the disagreement and so violent Stravinsky’s outrage, indeed, that when Disney tried to assuage him by pointing out what a great number of people would hear his music, the composer famously grunted:

The numbers of people who consume music … is of no interest to me. The mass adds nothing to art.

Some twenty years later, Stravinsky was still indignant when he and Disney clashed on the pages of The New York Times about the incident, where the composer called Disney’s transformation of his “Rite of Spring” an “unresisting imbecility.”
Granted, as was likely the case with Disney, not every transformation improves upon the original or has creative merit. But modern copyright law — not to mention an unfortunate portion of today’s cultural critique — continues to err on the side of Stravinsky in an era ripe for the Glass mindset. To criticize and criminalize transformative creation and remix is, at best, itself an “unresisting imbecility” and, at worst, an enormous hindrance to creative innovation.

TIMBRE!

Color me Red, Blue, Yellow, Purple

What color, what tone are you?

Listen to the work "Color for Trombone", visualize the color it inspires. What does your imagination conjure? Synesthesia is  seeing color when hearing music. I have wondered throughout this fall season of music, and the thematic version of this year's show, if there is not a connection to synesthesia.

The trombone work is especially visual. It written especially for the Belgian trombonist Ben Haemhouts and was created on Dec. 29, 1998 in Ravels. "Colors for trombone" is a virtuous composition based on four colors, "Yellow", "Red", "Blue" and "Green". Each Color characterizes a typical musical quality. This masterpiece of Bert Appermont is undoubtedly a superb addition to the trombone repertoire!

When I am inspired, as I often am, it is difficult to say if I adhere to the concept that I am not really "creative, and creativity is just a myth as David Bryne suggests in his book, How Music and Creativity Work.
 

It’s usually assumed that much Western medieval music was harmonically ‘simple’ (having few kew changes) because composers hadn’t yet evolved the use of complex harmonies. In this context there would be no need or desire to include complex harmonies, as they would have sounded horrible in such spaces. Creatively they did exactly the right thing. Presuming that there is such a thing as ‘progress’ when it comes to music, and that music is ‘better’ now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn’t ‘improve.’

How Music and Creativity Work  David Byrne 2012

However - I am not sure I believe my inspiration is something fixed like a kernel of corn either, like seed corn such as Brahms suggests. David Bryne's work agrees with E. M. Harding's seminal work The Anatomy of Inspiration, though each approach the idea of creativity and inspiration from opposite positions. While Byrne seems to suggest that creativity is a myth and has no way of improving what music has existed, Harding suggests that the artist is only a shaper, a pruner of the original idea. Both seem to suggest that the artist, himself or herself, is not the creator of an original idea.

The true novelist, poet, musician, or artist is really a discoverer. Ideas — the theme of a plot, a poem, a picture, a theme of music — come to him as a gift. The idea, ‘the seed-corn’ as Brahms called it, he allows to develop naturally. There may come a point where it branches in one or many directions; he is free at this point to follow one or other. And it is here and here only that the judgment or choice of the true artist may legitimately be exercised. In fact the artist is in much the same position as a gardener growing prize rose trees, who in order to produce beautiful roses lops off unwanted shoots and suckers.

The Anatomy Inspiration E. M. Harding 1942
Today, and yes tomorrow I might change my mind, but for today, I believe that inspiration comes either from the artist or from God. While we humans might be vehicles for art, I do think through free will we make decisions that 'create' the art; create beyond the point of shaping a phrase of music or dance. I have listened and witnessed to many performances of the same exact work and something is missing that makes it magically art. The performer has to bring something more than the shape of foot, the notes music, the turn of a phrase. It artist brings an intangible that is yes created for a moment, fleeting as it might be. Watch the video below and maybe it might convey what I am attempting to say.