“Your piece was absorbing and I particularly enjoyed the way you got so much out of the orchestra in terms of coloration and mood.”

“We enjoyed the piece enormously - your chanting, too! We didn’t know about that facet of your musicianship.”

“Bravo! I wanted you to know how much I enjoyed ‘Orchard Dances.’ Lano and the orchestra did a remarkable job. Of course, it helped that your music was so exquisite and idiomatic. The players really like it when the composer makes them sound good!”

“Kudos on the concert last night! Your music sounded wonderful. I am so pleased that the ‘new music’ funding circuit is recognizing how innovative your work is. I appreciated the intertwining of the Indian themes. Evocative. I hope this concert leads to new commissions and a whole new public.”

“Be very happy with your accomplishment!”

“I thought the piece was wonderful; I loved all the different thematic elements, the colors, and your singing was quite stunning.”

“A terrific and evocative piece. Congratulations!”

“We have been talking about your concert…I still hear it in my
head…That piece was so powerful, gutsy and tender at the same time,
it hit right into my heart!”

From a musical standpoint, the piece convinces because of its structural integrity, but it also captivates because of its striking use of Native American rhythms, chanting by the orchestra musicians, solo singing, and Native American instruments. One instrument in particular, the corn husk rattle, caught my ear.

Read more and view photos at
http://www.debralewhardermusic.com/blog/

Two entries paraphrasing remarks on inspiration and the creative process, apropos of what I said and quoted in earlier posts.  The first from Ian Frazier, from an online reminiscence about his mentor, conductor William Appling.  The second from Johannes Brahms.

     Frazier:

To be an artist is hard. Unlike mastering a subject or a skill, being an artist partakes of mystery. In the arts, at the highest levels, technique engages with leap-of-faith, oblique transfer, E.S.P., and unknown elements.

Being a writer, or any kind of artist, involves something of magic; as an artist, you’re generally apart from most people, you’re not where any system or bureaucracy wants you to be, and what you’re doing combines things of the spirit with, basically, messing around. Art is artifice is a trick, definitely, but with endless, powerful consequences: a frail wand, but a profound spell.

[Again the outward appearance of the creative mode being mistaken for “messing around” reminds me of a reference in Emerson’s notebooks in which Ralph Waldo complains that he can’t sit in contemplation more than 5 minutes without someone in his company asking whether he has a headache – here the impression taken is that the person’s perceived lack of industry is due to illness rather than sloth. 

I wonder if Frazier’s notion of art as “trick” has any origin in e.e. cummings’ play “Him.”]

     Brahms:

There is no real creating without hard work.  An inspiration from above for which I am not responsible is a present, a gift, which I’ve made mine by dint of hard work.  And there doesn’t have to be any hurry about that…it germinates unconsciously.  Once I’ve found the first phrase I might shut the book there, go for a walk, do some other work, and maybe not think about it again for months.  Nothing, however, is lost.  If afterward I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape on its own, apart from myself.

[Biographer Jan Swafford views Brahms as presaging Freudian theories of the subconscious and its workings.]

A few more comments on the Diabelli Variations, following up on my post of April 1. 

Katherine, the musicologist/protagonist in Kaufman’s play, is more affected by the maestoso aspect than the martial.  For her the variation regally announces embarking on an odyssey that will demand courage.  Let us think of another situation in which Beethoven marks “maestoso,” the introduction of Op. 111.  There seems to be nothing regal about this, unless the scene means to depict the regent desperately embattled, perhaps with a deity hurling bolts of lightning.  Rather than majestic reassurance in the face of trepidation, Variation 1 in my mind embodies more of the rude juxtapositioning that Diane Walsh alludes to (see the recent issue of LISTEN, article by Linda Fowler, p. 30), and which Beethoven is so well known for.  A further confrontational interpretation comes from Dary John Mizelle, who explained the contrast in more nationalistic terms, that Beethoven’s first variation aimed to Germanicize the Italianate theme. 

And about that theme, once examined more fully, it shares much more musical DNA with themes of Beethoven beyond those already discussed.  For instance, the great c-minor sonata for piano and violin, Op. 30, No. 2, readily offers comparative examples.  Take the first four notes (plus initial grace note) of the Scherzo – same gesture as Diabelli’s motif.  We have just been discussing triple vs. duple meter.  The rhythmic argument of the Scherzo is founded upon this rivalry.  Then think of the opening motif of Beethoven’s first movement, and relate it to the eighth note bass figure of the Diabelli theme, measure 3 into 4.  This same grouping is then the principal subject of the 8th Symphony.

To further my attempt at discussing inspiration (blog entry August 1, 2008), I quote Peter Malone, who writes that “influence and inspiration make an uneasy pair.  Inspiration is the recognition of something perhaps already present in the deepest self, and in any case only knowable intimately.”  By contrast, “influence is a force that may spring from any point in the surrounding cultural environment.  The difference between them is that an artist can choose to respond to influence, while inspiration is felt on too deep a level for discourse.  An artist’s ability to accept or reject influence is often taken as a sign of growth and maturity.  But inspiration is not even perceptible until its transfer is complete.  Inspiration is private, idiosyncratic and easily relates to intuition, sensibility, and those properties we associate with feeling.  Influence on the other hand is public.  It transpires in a shared environment.  It can be located, mapped, imitated, absorbed or discarded.”  Malone sees power in inspiration, weakness in influence.  “Unlike influence, the purely instinctive nature of an artist’s inspiration is often difficult to convey in words.”  He quotes Arthur Koestler: “true creativity often starts where language ends.”

The complexity and mystery of the inward process by which inspiration ultimately manifests itself in a finished externalized work are difficult to unravel. A case in point for Malone is Barnett Newman, who “wrote eloquently of an inspirational visit to ancient Native American burial mounds; yet “finding a visual correlation to burial mounds in Newman’s work is at best a challenge.” (from Inspiration, Influence and Choice: The Education of Ying Li, exhibition brochure March 2009, KCC Gallery/Bklyn/CUNY) 

Sylvano Arieti spoke of true creativity as a “magic synthesis,” an interconnected process involving disciplined and directed thought, deceptively “inactive” outward behaviors, dreams and visions, and sudden illumination.  He noted that the mind itself, once supplied with the crucial stimuli, seemed to work things out on its own.  James Gleich remarked also about the gestation phase of the process as often giving a mistaken impression of indolence or lack of industry.  Stravinsky was concerned about what a composer does in his non-composing time, hoping that it lend itself to the unconscious working out of creative problems, rather than constrict the flow toward solutions (for instance, by having to correct counterpoint assignments!).  Apropos of all this is a passage from a study on sleep apnea, published a while back in Harvard Magazine.  The researcher used as a simile that process which allows the pianist, who finds one day a figure almost impossible to get into the fingers no matter how long he practices it, but after a restorative night’s sleep, wakes up the next day suddenly able to play it with ease.

In Malone’s essay on Ying Li, one discovers that the experience of an almost insignificant image can trigger a dynamic response on canvas and even point the direction for a painter’s stylistic evolution.  The Diabelli Variations are attracting much attention these days as a result of the new Kaufman play.  Over the course of 33 variations,  Diabelli’s trivial waltz theme is ultimately transformed by Beethoven into a monument that rivals Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  (I say ‘ultimately’ because at the outset, Beethoven’s strategy is to summarily obliterate Diabelli’s waltz by making his first variation an aggressive march.  Violent!  Hilarious!  Necessary.  ’Must reduce example into heap of its parts, then rake through wreckage for salient materials overlooked by author…’ What did Beethoven think of the theme – it was a “cobbler’s patch”?  Further hilarity in the choice of metaphor – an old shoe heel or snippet of sole that finally fell off after dancing too many bad waltzes!  It is only after the vehement repudiation of the ¾ theme accomplished by the march that we are permitted again to utilize triple meter – immediately after the march, we have 7 variations in a row in three; eventually 21 of the variations will assume either simple or compound triple meter.) 

What is it about the theme that offers genuine catalyst?  Maybe the use of the raised tonic pitch in the pickup to bar 5 (Beethoven loves this coloration).  Possibly the melodic motif in the sequential phrase that starts with the pickup to bar 9 (compare this to the opening theme of the last movement of Op. 10, No. 3).  Perhaps the B-flat to A and C to B-natural component of the bass line at that point, not so much as a “B-A-C-H” quotation, but for the chromatic potency it holds for Beethoven.  It becomes the countersubject of the Var. XXXII fugue in a slightly re-ordered – actually retrograde — form (E to F and D to E-flat). And with the transposition, we realize that it is that same four note nugget that the composer develops in the Eroica Symphony and the Eroica Variations, having formulated it in the incidental music for Prometheus from an otherwise negligible contradance he had written even earlier on (so plain is the contradance version that the octave leap in the bass has not yet been made – the B-flats of m. 2 & 3 of the theme remain in the same register). The absence of the pitch E-flat in Diabelli’s theme might also have intrigued Beethoven.  What a miracle that from these minute elements such a complex organism has arisen.  It’s tantamount to creating human beings from clumps of raw earth.  Of course the old proverb reminds us that “great oaks from little acorns grow.” 

How does the inspiration/influence distinction obtain in this Beethoven example?  The ingredients that I identified, which fascinated Beethoven in various contexts, are the acorns, the inspiration.  Among the external forces that fuel or “influence” the project complementary to inspiration are the inferiority of the variation theme and its originator (Diabelli), and the indisputably superior standard set by Bach in his Goldberg Variations. The first impetus arouses dynamic self-assertion, the second invites emulation and offers challenge.

One might suggest that complementarity is required for the creative process to be complete, that successful artistic outcomes depend upon both internal motivators (inspiration) and external motivators (influence), and that both must be present in some combination.  An example of an external motivating factor that in my own mature experience has always served constructively the externalization of inspired forms: the deadline.  Can seem ominous and fateful at first, but almost always turns out to be a blessing…

Kudos to soprano Jessica Cain and cellist Stephen Marotto of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and pianist Nathaniel Baker of the Hartt School, for their impassioned performance of my piece “Wolf” last Wednesday afternoon in Hartford.  It not only showed a high degree of preparation and conviction, but offered encouragement to other young musicians to take the risk and venture into contemporary repertoire.  Thanks guys!