Inspiration
Something came to me. I was in a Doctors office. I scribbled the following down on a blank prescription:
To create is a human need. To create often is a human achievement and difficult. To create high quality things often harder still. The hardest? To create high quality things often without resorting to pretension, obscurity or arrogance.
Now, since 'high quality' is extremely subjective, does it deserve to be a part of this equation? Also, is obscurity a negative thing necessarily? Maybe in the extreme it is tiresome. 'To create' is pretty loose - I guess I'm talking about creation not in the sense of creating a life, or living creatively as much as producing things to share with other human beings.
Maybe talking about all of this is pretentious...
Comments
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nah, that's not pretentious.
re: obscurity. i'm all for it. how else do we progress?
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Yah, I guess maybe another word would be a better fit.
I often feel like people create for many reasons. Some of those reasons include connecting to other human beings, self-expression, exploration, learning, etc. I don't mean to devalue creation due to its source, but I think that there is hard for others to absorb value or 'get' a creation from someone when the creation is obscure or off the wall.
I think there is a big difference between innovation (doing something new) and obscurity (doing something random or without meaning). Innovation leads to progress, and it does so by tying old with new. Obscurity just sits there, irrelevant and unhelpful except perhaps to the creator themselves.
I believe in exploring the outside depths of music (or any other medium) and think that it is something very important to do. But I believe for others to benefit, to learn, and to share in the creator's experience, they must be placed into a semi-familiar context. Out of context, those explorations will sound like noise - In fact, I would describe noise as exactly that: context-less sound.
What is interesting to me is that a lot of 'art-music' gets away with being listenable - why? Because the composer provides context in the liner notes, or because of the very nature of the sounds themselves. Like David Dunn asking you to listen to these insects as music. Or John Cage, asking you to take what comes and consider it music. A small percentage of people get something from that - alert and aware and interested musicians perhaps.
Personally, I don't think that the outside limits need to be pushed further out. They are pushed. Lots of people do obscure stuff and make a good living. Honestly, I'm more interested in connecting the outside with the 'inside' - the other 99.8% of western music listeners who would poo-poo a chainsaw as being worth listening to. That is where I see the opportunity. Outside of intellectual art circles, we've been listening to the same Beatles track for 50 years. Not a bad thing. ABA, baby. But, what's new?