On Composing

Composing music has given me one of the greatest pleasures I’ve known. Not the writing itself, but the listening to people playing it, or more specifically knowing that something I wrote has affected the listeners, I’ve found to be an intense and almost unseemly feeling of aggrandizement. Many people have had the fun moment of telling a joke to a room full of people and having them laugh heartily. Hearing one’s own music performed is like this but moreso. A composer can really put a lot of themselves into a piece of music, and ideally can tap into some realm of abstract beauty, and to have those depths dredged up from one’s own self to be recognized by others is a more serious thrill than any joke or funny story I can think of.

There are many different ways musicians like myself enjoy making music, and the the joy that I find in all of them seems related, but only distantly so. To play live, improvisational or quasi-improvizational music and watch people dance to it is great, but in some ways it feels more like telling a joke than writing a composition. You sort of toss your playing out into the universe, never to be repeated exactly the same way again. To play pre-written music as part of a group, whether chamber music or a rock band, is most essentially a fun thing to do with other people. It’s about the group energy, and the interplay of self-assertion and self-transcendence. Playing solo music written by others is a bit creative, and a bit passive like reading a book. Improvising by yourself can be fun but, to be frank, it has something in common with masturbation, in that it best serves as a temporary substitute.

I suppose being a composer is a way to creatively engage with others in which you are the sole active participant and they are totally passive. When you are sitting in a chair listening to people play your music and an audience listen to it, you get to rest on your laurels. Your work done, you watch yourself being put on display, and hopefully appreciated. The seriousness of the pleasure I’ve taken in that moment has been unexpected and confusing to me. It could be the simple validation of saying “look at me! look what I can do!” and seeing people actually pay attention. Less selfishly, though, it could also be that it’s nice to entertain people, to see them enjoying themselves on your account.

It is without question a very egoistic pleasure, an alarmingly intense jolt of self-confidence, to have someone you respect show sincere admiration for your musical creation. I think there is more to it as well. I can, in a small humble way, identify with Beethoven when he said about the finale of the Seventh Symphony: “Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for men and makes them drunk with the spirit.”  His idea of himself here is ridiculous, but there is more to it than “I am awesome.” He has a sense of an exalted mission. In his case, he has produced something important to people around the world for centuries, and we are grateful and indebted to him. If his over-the-top sense of purpose motivated him to take on greater creative challenges, then we welcome it. But for me as a composer to place myself on this same level, to make myself believe that I can make people drunk with musical revelation, to enable me to compose, seems like a delusion of grandeur. Is that what it takes to be a composer?

If I was devoted to writing music, I don't think I would be analyzing the experience like this. I might prefer my work to speak for itself, or I might be in too deep to describe it. Instead, having chosen to let this bright spark in my life die down, what remains is to find the words for why. What I was afraid of, as best as I can tell, was the blood, sweat and tears that would be the wages of my best work. Practicing such a solitary, free, infinite art seems to me to require going all in, being a composer before all else. I chose instead to be a human first, in the hope that those common and earthy pleasures of my fellow creatures might also sustain me. My relationship with composing stands among a couple of episodes of my life when I have stumbled upon something of uncommon power and significance, and then walked away from it. I'm either making mature choices or unforgivably lame ones. Time may or may not tell which is wiser.