Editing Spontaneity

Sometimes it takes a long time to express what we mean. We get ideas for songs, essays, and so on, but they usually don't work right out of the box. I can dictate something, and it may or may not articulate what I really wanted to say, even though I'm just talking freely. If you dictate your writing, you usually have to heavily revise it to mean what you meant to say.

Sometimes rather than rewriting, I re-dictate, then edit again, and it comes closer to the original idea. Many of my ideas now come from audio and video diaries that I keep on my phone, and I have my dictation software transcribe them. This is so I can riff, and then edit later. This happens in music as well and is one of the areas in which music and language intersect.

The way language is written is very similar to the way that music is notated. When I improvise on one of my instruments, I'm not intending to say anything in particular, but there are things that emerge that need to be more accurately expressed. What follows is the (usually) slow process of expressing what I really mean to say, even if it's just an instrumental.

A recent piece took three drafts in order to reveal what I intended, or to resolve it so it would work with other songs on the current album. Sometimes a piece will start with a chord that catches my ear on guitar. I won't know exactly what it is, but will approximate it in notation. It may take weeks for me to realize what the chord actually is functionally. It works the same way in visual art, where we place the piece we're working on in the background, and the incubation process does the work.

This is one of the ways creativity has to be practiced, just as one would practice an instrument. Ideally, what you want is to never do more than one rewrite, if anyone ever does that anymore, because everything now is a form of riffing without really knowing what the intentions are.

Resolving ideas is also a form of realizing what you intended or mean to say.

(This is partly why I think music is becoming more of a "scoring for sound", as opposed to "scoring for orchestra". It cuts to the chase, saying what we really mean without too much rewriting--as a painting would not have to be "rewritten"--although I've heard Franz Kline "edited" the spontaneity of his abstract works).

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/490195