For months, I haven’t been able to write much of any music, and the inner world has been emotionally silent. If there was a straightforward cause, I don’t know it. This has been changing recently, and I also can’t tell you exactly why. But one of the things that I know seems to have moved things along is bringing the focus to the present moment. It’s a pretty concept, like meditation or detachment or whatever folks are nodding and “mmm”-ing to these days, but what does it look like in the context of making music?
With the savings almost gone and the catalog of recordings/pieces essentially where it was three months ago, it’s easy for me to get wrapped up in what kinds of projects I “should” be working on. I “should” finish setting up the space in my house for recording performance videos, I “should” write a few jazz tunes, I “should” do lots of things. But there’s a gap here, a familiar one, between the “should” and the “what is here.” When I listen, what I actually want to be writing right now are sad folk tunes for my friend to sing, to play and study some jazz standards, to walk quietly in the mornings. That will change quickly, but it is what is here.
The gap is easy to fall into, though. Things like artist identity, what people I collaborate with are excited about, the imaginary simulation of how enthralling a certain project or outcome would be— these may overlap with what is here now, but they are fundamentally not the same.
I heard my friend say the other day, when someone asked him about how to get better at composing music: “first, you have to know what your life sounds like.” He recommended taking lots of voice memos of the environments where you spend your time, and letting the art you make emerge from the awareness of how you exist. I mean, maybe that’s always what’s happening anyway, but it’s been a useful practice for me.
This also reminded me of another exercise I started doing years ago, but that I keep forgetting to come back to. I came to it as medicine against the whole Beethoven fantasy, that my music had to come to me in this psychic-lightning-bolt-from-the-gods kind of way, which also entailed (somewhat paradoxically) that it had to be potently original. The exercise starts with listening to wherever I am (whenever I remember to listen). Right now, I’m writing this in a coffee shop in Albuquerque, and I see/hear:
- An man speaking in broken Spanish about how he reads the bible en español for practice
- A densely populated bulletin board that includes a flier for a country show that already happened and at least three life coaches’ advertisements
- Someone joining their table of friends; pulling out the metal chair makes a certain rhythm; he says “I saw Jessie here on Sunday”
Jessie happens to be the childhood name of someone I know and have been thinking about this week in particular, the chair’s rhythm was totally musically usable, the idea of a life coach makes me think of societal collapse, anything about the bible reminds me of the conservative Protestant town in California I grew up in— a place where, despite my parents speaking Spanish at home, I almost lost my fluency in it. The more I pay attention like this, the more often my inner experience finds itself mirrored in the outer world (I think Jung called this kind of thing a “synchronicity”), but I have to confess that I am only mildly interested in how arbitrarily or non-arbitrarily the universe is constructed.
I just like seeing how experiences cause things to bounce around in my brain, and sometimes what people call “art” comes out. If this sounds more like a game than a “serious” method for making an artwork, that’s because it is. There’s a poem that comes to mind (below); feel free to replace the word “mystics” with “artists,” and “God” with whatever you think runs this show (or doesn’t):
Mystics are experts in laziness. They rely on it,
— from one of the translations of Rumi’s The Night Air
because they continuously see God working all around them.
The harvest keeps coming in, yet they
never even did the plowing!
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