Seven Ways Your Craft is Like Music
April 1, 2012
I'm a creativity book whore. I love reading about how people come up with great ideas. There's one called What a Great Idea which opens with an interview with Yoshiro NakaMats, one of the most prolific inventors of our time. He described his process of spending a good deal of time holding his breath underwater while writing his ideas down on a special plexiglas tablet.
There are many other such books ranging from the fun "Whack on the Side of the Head" to Howard Gardner's case studies of early twentieth century creative revolutionaries "Creating Minds".
But right now I'm creeping through Jonah Lehrer's latest book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works", and it's got me thinking a lot about how we work together across our various disciplines in the media world.
Lehrer starts off detailing how Bob Dylan completely quit writing songs and retreated from the music scene only to have "Like a Rolling Stone" come gushing uncontrollably out of him. Then he goes on to describe the institutional creative process at 3M that gives rise to a myriad of products including Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes.
They make their engineers switch divisions every few years, alot time during the workday for creative play, and have events devoted to cross discipline sharing.
And they do this to facilitate connections between the disciplines because they know that breakthrough innovation happens when the brain makes unexpected connections, when people see surprising ways that their domain is like an otherwise unrelated one.
Since I work alone in a collaborative field, I yearn to find these electric connections with my colleagues.
So this is what I muse on when I'm scoring a documentary: How are the different elements in the show like each other? How do they balance each other out? How is the writer's process like the editor's process and how is that like the DP's process, etc. How is my process like that of the researcher's?
My music is always at the service of the story, and I strive to keep it (as Brian Eno so aptly put it) "as ignorable as it is interesting". It's the knife edge I live on, and it's never easy.
So here are some connections. They are more formal than metaphorical; They are not poetic or inspiring. Instead, they aim to broadly span many of the "time arts" (You are a choreographer, video editor, producer, teacher, lover, writer, storyteller, director, author, software developer, instrumentalist, animator, sound designer.)
1. Time: This is the underlying dimension shared by all time arts (duh), and though it's an obvious truism, bearing this in mind helps to conceptualize many disparate elements along a common timeline.
2. Structure (being that the parts are subdivided down from a whole): When I was teaching in the public schools, I became aware that planning a lesson involved as much attention to structure as did composing a piece of music. I found myself asking questions that I continue to ask today as I compose: Are transitions clear? Where should elements be repeated, whether musical themes or concepts? What ideas need to be repeated in order to be understood?
3. Teleology: That all the elements give the audience a sense of heading TOWARD something, whether it is a moment, a climax, a conclusion. You name it. How does what I am doing support how the other domains are developing an emerging sense of inevitability?
4. Information: every time art carries some level of information. I wish there was a way to measure and compare how much information a narration is presenting compared to the visuals on the screen, and then put that up against the sound content of both the score and the nat sound. Early drafts of my cues often start with too much; they're too busy. But then with careful weeding, the important elements reveal themselves until only the essential ingredients remain.
5. Energy: how your work sends out energy to the user or audience. In some way, though perhaps only metaphorically, your product generates an energy field. With music, it's an actual field of vibrating molecules in the air. Colorists are charged with making sure the light energy is the right intensity, hue, and so on to convey the tone of the show. What about ideas? Do they have energy? As a voice over or man-on-the-street adds their thoughts to the narrative, how is the energy coming out of that glowing box changed?
7. Affect: Our work is going to affect someone else, and this is always paramount to the way we think. Even though we sit in darkened rooms through the deep hours of the night, under pressure, under intense scrutiny, the ultimate receiver of our pitch is the audience: will they get the idea? Will this or that nuance be noticed consciously or will it add humbly to the rich texture of what the audience receives? Can we imagine the end result as we slog through myriad details?
Well, that's enough of this rant for now. I'd love to hear your thoughts. How much did I leave out? How little did this make sense? Are you out there planning or creating something that relates in any way to this way of thinking? What do you think?
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August 3, 2011
I have my theories regarding music that people of various abilities can play together. In fact, I think that is something sorely lacking in our culture: if a beginner (or a complete newbie) wants to join in with experienced musicians, there is often no path for that person to take. There is not an "easy" part to Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train", or even "Just Dance". There are easy arrangements, but nothing that invites a beginner to play right along with an advanced musician.
Aside from playing simple rhythm instruments that remind one of kindergarten music class (ahem), there is no way to say, "hey, join in!" to a novice in the midst of a jam session. This is a problem, because more people deserve the smiles of spontaneous, uninhibited music making. Don't they? Don't YOU?
This brings be back to Hoagy Carmichael/Frank Loesser 1930 hit song. How did that song, not unlike many songs of that era, make it's way into the American avocational piano repertoire along with the black-notes-by-knuckles-song? Here's the original recording from 1930: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8CSjDC18b0
And if you go to 2:00 of this clip, you'll get to see Tori Amos playing it with someone else's fingers.
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