Creativity As a Compromise

Madame Bijou--Brassai

Art is always a process of squaring what we wanted to do and when we eventually did.

The piece I'm working on now for Music For Places V is a "period piece" set in Paris in 1932 in which there are only photographic stills for possible scenes in a movie--"scouted" photos if you will.

One of the scenes is in a cafe in Paris. Possible scoring for this kind of scene is almost cliche: jazz, piano, a horn section, perhaps a Stephane Grappelli-ish violin, concertina or accordion, and so on.

Ironically, there can't be any electronic instruments. But we all work digitally these days, and the options are so seductive. Use of anachronism is an option, but has to be done correctly so it doesn't seem like an error in continuity.

Say you have an idea for a conceptual work and you're using oil on canvas. How will the ideas be expressed on a continuum so that the work satisfies the "mission statement"? You have to move forward constantly by putting paint on the canvas, but then you have to look at it and say "how does that square with what I was thinking? And usually at the end, it's not what you were thinking. It wants to be, or has be something else. It is fairly rare that anybody that is creating any kind of art form that it turns out exactly the way it was envisioned.

Take classical music for instance. Everyone has seen a composer's sketches--all the indecipherable scratch and scribble. Eventually what had to happen was the manufacturing of the music by the publisher (or even the composer's) copyist(s). Copyists are instrumental in getting it into a form that can get printed to individual parts that can be played by all the individual instruments, then performed and recorded as an interpretation. There's a whole sequence of things that has to happen before there's an audience to hear it. Then it goes back to square one in the manufacturing process, with prototypes and so on.

Early prototypes, like concept cars, are always totally different from the production model (although that seems to be changing).

The gap between the original ideas and what eventually happened is always totally different. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens with my Paris 1932 period piece given that it is essentially in a digital milieu, which didn't exist then. Typically what I like to do is reduce things to standard notation, so the music can be played regardless of period.