A Fugue a Day Keeps a Composer at Bay

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I reflect on simpler days when the plans I set for myself carried themselves with little weight, and stuck together in an organized manner. Time was allotted a specific allowance in order to move on, however slow or fast the gait. But as the plans I once had form a tight mold around each and every possible direction, the only way I can seem to make sense of the scenery is to manifest structure according to the most basic of principles. Life will only move in the direction you want if you guide it yourself.

It’s very easy to get lost; in fact I don’t know one person who hasn’t been lost at one point or another. Occasionally the act of getting lost will help us find a new direction, or help re-find who we are. But when it comes to following a path, it sure helps to have the will, motivation, and stamina to step on, step off, step back and move forward along that path with an open mind. Knowing what you want is not always easy, but keeping your head on straight is usually the best way to re-discover what is probably already there.

Humans are amazing. We can trick our minds into believing that we have a sense of purpose. That sounds bad, but I mean it in a good way. We create our own purpose and should embrace that fact. Our days are exactly what we let them become, or force them to become, and that should be reason enough to want to do it all over again the next day. So how to accomplish the day in our 21st century modernized America? We prioritize, sure, but we also structure ourselves within boundaries that help to keep us focused, like habits. After all, schedules are what get us through the day.

Decomposing: Centrifugue
Bach hard at work.

Something we often forget is how to turn our hobbies and our passions into habit. The first step in having any sort of meaningful relationship with what you’re passionate about is forming daily habits. I once had an assignment for class where I was required to write a fugue everyday – following in the mind-foot-steps of many great composers. This was to instill habit-forming practices for our craft. I conjured up images of Bach dragging himself out of his bed and sitting at the kitchen table with a pen in one hand, manuscript in the other, and a bowl of cheerios in front of him, writing a canon as if it was the step before brushing his teeth. Yes cheerios, why can’t Bach like them too – he might’ve should’ve wanted to have kept his cholesterol down too. He did have time to write prolifically I suppose, as it was part of his job description. This was also a time period in which composers and musicians didn’t have to supplement their craft with a second or third profession just to pay the bills in order to allow them what they needed to keep writing and playing. Times are different, but the process of perfecting your craft has not changed – so make time for it as best you can.

I didn’t think I had the patience inside me to write a fugue everyday – I thought it to be an impossible task considering everything else I had in my schedule – but it taught me a valuable lesson about time management. As long as there is something you want to do, all you really need to do is make time for it. Stretch your schedule and cut time off other tasks. There is really no excuse for not doing something other than doubting that it will be accomplished. It was important to me, so I followed through.

I wrote a fugue a day for about 4 months. That’s about 3.5 months longer than the assignment called for, but I liked how it fed my dedication to develop. Most of the 7am eyes-half-open pieces were just subjects and expositions, as I only wrote full pieces around the ideas I liked best (even then, I developed those more than a year later). But the point remained to initiate ideas and keep my creative juices flowing.

Maintaining creativity in your daily routine works your brain in wonderful ways. It heightens critical thinking and boosts your overall mood. I recommend it to anyone. It helps you grow, plain and simple. It’s often hard to keep up the challenge simply because the fun often has a tendency to turn to chore – a tedious scientific-like trial-and-error procedure. Not to mention all the stuff that’s on TV these days.

Each day that I wrote a new fugue it became easier, but it ultimately forced more terrible music out of my brain than good. But as I pretend to always have said, “you have to wade through 95% of bad ideas to get to the 5% of good ideas”. It’s more a matter of practicing and perfecting your craft in order to decrease that ratio. Constant writing helped my music become better and my ideas more interesting, and I definitely became faster at writing bad music. But, to use a real quote from a totally real person: In order to write good music, you have to write bad music too.

Don’t Just Find Inspiration, Abuse Inspiration

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I wake up to many sounds in the morning.  If it’s not the sirens calling the Morlocks in the distance, it’s something else.  Honestly, I really can’t imagine that the city needs to test their emergency doomsday siren every day.  How will we be able to tell when we are really in danger?  I still have yet to find the meaning behind this noise, as well as the location.  But the Morlocks never do come, so I don’t know – not very much inspiration there.

Morlocks, Bryn Mawr PA?

The geese are usually the ones to wake me up in the morning.  I don’t know if it’s mating season or what, but they are very adamant about doing their vocalise exercises in the early hours of the day.  Some mornings they peck at the sliding glass door.  The residents before us must have fed them or something, they seem to have the “I want something from you” look in their dark, dark eyes.  Geese.  Not too much inspiration there either.

Most of the geese flock away eventually, and I can calm myself to the wind blowing through the trees.  It really is beautiful here in Bryn Mawr, PA.  The scenery is very green, and it’s always on the verge of raining – very soothing.  Until the kids start screaming… We do live in a very family-friendly area, so the kids are outside playing everyday.  They look sweet and all, but hey – get a job, punks.  Come back when you can provide me with some inspiration.  Annoying kids, no inspiration here.

Outside Our Apartment in Bryn Mawr PA

I took a graduate seminar my last year of college with a professor who liked to tell stories more than lecture.  He would spend days teaching us how to find inspiration when we were stuck with writer’s block.  “You can’t always wait for inspiration to find you, because often times it won’t go looking” is a quote I just made up that I will call his words, simply to make my point more interesting.  The basic principle he wanted to instill in us is the motivation to seek out inspiration for those moments when we young composers are stuck facing a blank manuscript.

Remember, bold words are key points.  Take notes.

My professor wasn’t a cranky old man who ran out of inspiration, he was trying to prepare us for a successful lifestyle as composers.  I say lifestyle because whether you want to make something like composition your money-making career or not, you still need to stay close to core practices if you want any sort of satisfaction from your craft.

I enjoyed my professor’s examples of how he would sometimes find inspiration.  He had, among other domestic animals, a love for fish.  He would stare for hours at his fish tank, which sat atop his living room counter.  He loved coming home after a long day and watching the fish swim up, down, and all around.  Don’t worry, he went through the names of the fish with us every time he told the story, but I will spare you the typical classical-music fanatic choice-names for his pets.  You should know, however, that the names lean more towards post-war avant-garde composers rather than the classics.  For example, Xenakis would be on the top ten list of names he would be going though with his wife.  Who knows why.  Maybe he found a calming comfort in set theory, the application of mathematical models in electronics, or stochastic processes – enough so as to have it represented by his relaxing fish-friends.  Or perhaps it is because he was my professor of Algorithmic and Computer-Assisted Composition.

Whatever the case may be, he would stare at the fish tank because he found something more in there beyond the Platys and the Guppies – he found inspiration.  He drew music staves with a sharpie on the outside of the fish tank, and would watch the fish swim up, down, and around the lines.  The fish were his notation.  He would write down on his manuscript that he held in his lap the path that the different fish would take throughout his new score.  Not exactly the Glass-inspiration most people get, but still a minimalistic approach in it’s own right.

I will note music jokes in italics.

John Cage's 4'33"?

The point was not to have the fish actually produce pleasing music (they’re fish, come on), but to form a foundation for your own musical findings and thematic development.  Look at what the fish helped you to start, and find something good within it.  In a world of randomly-generated music, inspiration should work the same way.  Sometimes all you need is a start, an idea, an initial push in any direction, and the rest can flow out with ease after it clicks in your brain.

My professor described a similar method of staring at inspiration through his office window, where he would notate the birds that landed on the telephone wires.  I always encourage people to come up with their own version of an inspiration trap.  I remember going home one day after lecture and setting up staves on the pavement with chalk, then tossing rocks on top to see where they landed.  If it did anything, it got me more involved in a new way with my writing process.  Beyond the new approach, it brought some of the fun back to what I was starting to consider a chore.  It became an investigation when I would look at my paper full of rock-inspired notes.  Something to descipher.  A mystery.  There was something in there, something interesting – and I had to find it.  I’ve always enjoyed puzzles, so this seemed a natural advancement in my compositional methods.

Richard Wagner's Die Walküre?

You have to look though, hard.  It takes just as much effort to find a needle in a haystack as it does to create the haystack and strategically place the needle so that no one can find it.  That makes little sense, but you do need to start somewhere, no matter what the approach is.

I never really had a problem with finding inspiration for my music.  Sometimes ideas would flow out of me faster than I could keep up – and that was my problem.  Maybe I will get to a point of writer’s block, but for now I think my imagination can grab on subconsciously to idea of “seeking out inspiration” in the world around me.  I will get a stream of ideas, and when I’m in the position to do so (and I’m not too tired from working and running around all day), I will record or write some of them down.  And there they stay as short ideas for something that could one day be.  My voice recorder must be filled with close to a hundred “new ideas” that I’ve had since I bought it.  I might consider the process of filtering through them to locate the good ideas somewhat daunting, and I probably think too far in advance that they are all sub-par.  But I think inspiration is about having enough of the inspiration to keep going with it.  I think of writing music as too big an obstacle at times.  Details bog me down very quickly sometimes when I have no sense of global picture even.  I might jump in too quickly and overwhelm myself with whatever tasks I consider are “important” to the creation of a piece of music.  I need to remember that music shouldn’t be like that.  It should be moving and enjoyable (not the detail part maybe, but at least the drive to start the process).  I don’t know if I hold too high of expectations of myself since I studied music in college, but music should never lose the feeling that brought you to it in the first place.  For me that feeling was a sense of adventure, excitement, and fun.  Remind me to remind myself of that.

Seek out inspiration. Find it, use it, cherish it, and enjoy the entire process.  If something inspires you, the result will always be pleasing – so accept it. Life is too short for excuses.

OK.  Yes.  Fine.  I found inspiration here.