Fatigue and a Firestorm of Activity
The past few days have been a firestorm of activity. After feeling burnt out and essentially giving in to the notion of taking a day off, a scene from a TV show lit a chain of invigorating ideas that has set me back to work with renewed fervor.
In this instance, the spark came from an episode of The Tunnel. (Look out for an upcoming post about being receptive to non-musical ideas.) The scene that set my imagination in motion was one that demonstrated how extreme trauma could cause a tempestuous kind of numbness, one where long stretches of detachment are punctuated by incidents of excessive emotion.
As soon as I saw it, I heard music in my mind. Seconds after the scene finished, I set to work trying to find the words* to describe what I was hearing. Considering that I tend to think out from an idea, I started in the middle of the page. In this case, I wrote "very frail and static." Then, I proceeded to describe the details of this texture, writing down tidbits about orchestration, pacing, placement (in the hall), and the thematic progression that unfolds over it. The results are below.
As you can see, it's a bit of a mess. Some ideas are linear; others are entirely random. Still others are just reminders to me about things that may or may not be directly related to what is on the page. It's not pretty, but it serves as a perfect catalyst for my creativity.
I'll keep you posted on how this develops. Until then, wish me luck (and sanity).
* This might be a good time for a quick aside: I rarely - if ever - sketch in traditional notation; most everything starts life as an emotional/philosophical idea that is accompanied by descriptions of musical material and processes.
My reason for doing this is twofold. Though I typically do hear distinct music in my mind, I avoid trying to notate it because, frankly, I can't. Most of the material that comes to me is dense and long. My memory, on the other hand, is shallow and short. Best case scenario, I have five minutes to capture a rapidly deteriorating idea. To make the best of this predicament, I have learned to write words that act as triggers that allow me to reconstruct the music again and again so that I can notate it later. The bonus of this workaround is that it forces ideas to stay abstract longer. While certainly uncomfortable, it prevents me from committing to particulars too early, allowing only the best ideas - ones that have stuck in my mind and avoided the pruning process time and time again - to make it into the final composition.
