RIP Stephen Sondheim

 

It's interesting to watch all the interviews about the passing of Stephen Sondheim back-to-back with watching Get Back and thinking about and observing the creative process in general.

A lot of what goes into songwriting is "reading" it or otherwise sussing it out in terms of key, tempo, and so on, or how it's "channeled". In this interview, the interviewer likens it to frottage, a rubbing of paper against a surface (usually stone) to lift off an image. Personally I like "scoring" photographs, or listening to some other music while working on some form of visual art while the other piece is in the oven, and it solves the bottlenecks, not unlike my "Starbucks" or coffee shop technique: Sometimes music would be playing in the background that would meld with the earworm I had from working on a piece of music earlier and would resolve the impasse. I'm "lifting" those audio cues and applying the ghosted image of it.

Starting with words doesn't mean they have to be lyrics. It can be any form of writing. In the interview, Sondheim talked about working from a monologue or placing it in context. You can do this yourself by writing a fake screenplay or dialogue, then having the music you are writing be the "soundtrack" for it.

There are many access points into a song. The "doors" are always open, but you'll have to walk through only one, which will lead to other rooms with many doors, again choosing one door. Envisioning a final form is nice to have at the beginning, but the "tour" is going to be on a random trajectory anyway. Most of the time where you start and where you end are at odds with each other.

This was the issue towards the end of January 1969 in the Get Back film. The initial idea of writing songs for performance on a TV show turned out to be writing songs in a studio in a live fashion with no overdubbing and releasing them as a live album which turned out to be more ingenious than to be on the initial predictable narrow path.

Very often the beginnings of a piece of music will get lost as you continue to work on it, and you always wind up having to surrender some of your original ideas. Personally, I don't think group collaboration is the best way to write a song, but using the recording studio as an instrument, as we have since the 1960s, has obviously resulted in a lot of good songs. But the ultimate, at least for me, is to be able to experience the final result resembling the initial stages, and knowing where the initial access point was. Sondheim certainly didn't follow the trends through the generations, and continued on writing exclusively on paper. Perhaps that's a good takeaway: you know technology is going to mow everything down, but holding firm with how you work tends to last longer. You remember how you started and you use that as an anchor.

Sondheim is at the tail end of the Silent Generation artists. The longer people live, the longer we can revisit the previous ways of working. If Picasso was immortal at age 50, he would still be creating work, but begs the question whether he would have cared about anything after the 1980s, say. He certainly wouldn't care about NFTs. But when you compare the past with current trends, sometimes nostalgia doesn't look like nostalgia. I can't imagine some of the 1950s through the end of the century not having an accessible relevance in terms of the creative process.