Getting The Idea

 

Lots of good takeaways in the Geddy Lee Memoir, to wit, mid-80s when they were doing their Power Windows album and Geddy started to use keyboards and their whole approach changed. Alex Lifeson was feeling his ideas were being snubbed. It’s the classic band rift when someone starts to feel diminished and resentful. What I realize is that if you’re going to be a writer, you have to be a control freak to some degree. Composers were always autocratic—they had to be. It wasn’t that the orchestra was going to write their own parts because they thought of something different or they came up with a riff and then the composer was going to change the score. Music changed in the 1950s and 1960s when bands started to be more democratic and started to write as a band as opposed to somebody being the appointed songwriter. But before then people didn’t have a problem with that. It was okay for someone to be autocratic.

A couple days ago I watched a Waldemar documentary about Peter Paul Rubens. The huge paintings were done as a collaboration with artisans, who would do the backgrounds and the tedious things and Rubens would do the primary figures and sections. These days I don’t think anybody really wants to be an artisan; everybody wants to be an artist. I don’t think anybody can be an artist. You have to have the archetype. It has to be in your DNA. Artists are natural control freaks. I like doing everything myself and I wish I had a guitar player and a drummer to enhance the music with their sounds but it’s not something that I spend a lot of time on because I like working out the structure of the song—that’s where my focus is, or is on the words, or sometimes on the textures. I have a wide angle view of the piece, and I can decide when to change “cameras” and “lenses”, so it’s like photography in a way. The photographer can hire an assistant but they can’t direct. If anything, everyone should feel they add value, and perhaps have an overarching metaphor to wrap it all up, but then people will want to suggest their metaphors, just as much as they suggest riffs or song sections.

1/13/2024

[1/13/2025: I recently read Ennio Morricone’s Composing For Cinema. He said there has to be a certain cunning to effectively communicate new ideas to people first hearing them. The key is to get enough saturation where the door gets pried open so people start to get where it’s going. “My advice is to have the director listen to the theme being played very badly. If he accepts it that way, it will certainly be more attractive to him when you have orchestrated it. I play it badly for him, also, because I am not interested at all in playing it at the piano. If necessary, I sing it to him in my off-key voice. There is a certain director who after years and years confessed to me that he had not understood anything in my communications with him (though I had not suspected it). I had sung the theme to him badly. I had played it for him badly. So he had arrived in the recording studio thinking, “Finally . . .” One does not have the slightest idea about what the musical level of certain directors is. One of them, a dear friend, provoked me by saying, “Try that little piece again, there where the orchestra is tuning up.” But the orchestra was not tuning up: it was executing slightly abstract sounds that I had written for his film.”