Soundchoices: Paul Elwood

Turning Off

I’ve taken to turning off my iPhone, iPad and computer WiFi when composing in the morning. I was starting to get into the addictive habit of checking email, Facebook, the weather forecast, and Instagram anytime I hit minor snags in the creative process. (“I wonder if anyone has ‘Liked’ my photo upload on Instagram? . . . I really need to message that person about lunch next week.  Maybe I should update my Facebook profile picture.”) The simple act of turning the phone completely off makes the act of turning it on seem complicated. It’s just more time consuming to check email if I have to hold the switch down for five seconds, wait while the login screen brightens the room, put in my pass code, and then go to my email accounts where nine-times-out-of-ten I find more spam than anything, since people seem to be using instant messaging more.

Disconnecting boosts my focus. Sometimes out of habit in frustration with the creative process I grab the darn iPhone and then remember it’s off. That actually stops me from going further. And nothing will be missed. If someone calls and wants to reach you, they’ll leave a message.  Text messaging is wonderful because you can wait a while to respond. No one expects and instantaneous response, tho’ the dopamine rush of an instant response can be addictive. But in turning off the phone I choose to forgo the possibility of that rush in favor of getting a few more notes on paper. 

The isolation at first can seem debilitating and then it feels liberating.

Frustration and Its Role in Developing a Work of Art

Frustration can be a great catalyst in driving the pencil. I’ve written some of what I consider to be my best music in the wreckage of some disastrous bad-hair-day, broken-nail incident.

Years ago, I was devastated by some relationship that just didn’t come to pass. I sat up late nights writing a long composition for chamber ensemble, a commission from a group in the Midwest. Fortunately, I lived in a remote North Carolina mountain holler and was able to bang out ideas on the piano at 1 a.m., blast Mahler’s Sixth symphony during minor lulls in the writing, and smoke late night cigars (a quasi-habit in those days). It was an awful and exhilarating time; I ended up with one of the better pieces I’ve composed in the past 20 years.[1]

Frustration with my technical limitations spiced with personal intrigue, conflict-at-work, etc . . . this sort of mental anguish is fabulous fertiliser for making work grow.

If I knew more about neuroscience or general psychology I might be able to explain it. But I don’t and can’t. All I know is that these states of mind seem to heighten focus and enable a creator to delve deeper into the psyche for an expression that gives form to the undercurrent of the normal diurnal creative process of the “up and at ‘em” approach I normally ascribe to and proselytize freely. Maybe it's just a quasi-therapeutic focus on something other than what I'm finding currently frustrating. 

Or the process of working draws past thoughts into our crania like unwanted houseguests that leave their towels on the floor and who don't flush the toilet. An artist in France told me she can't work anymore because the process of painting brings past painful emotions, memories of relationships, and thoughts of roads not taken to the fore in her mind. 

And, again, I can't explain why this is, but it happens to me. I choose to go with these thoughts as I believe—hope—that there is a cathartic payoff to wrestling with these demons.

No matter the psychological frame of mind I'm in, the quotidian approach is best for me; get up every day and compose no matter how anguishing it seems or how much my head may hurt figuratively and otherwise. When one does this then, during periods of emotional intensity, habit enables the use of highs and lows to produce . . . something.

[1]Oddly, that person and I ended up as good friends and roommates in later years­­­; I set her up with a guy with whom she had a long-term relationship. Life is interesting.

 

Is_Is_Nothing

I just finished a composition for cajón (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajón) and electronics.  When asked to compose this piece by percussionist Patti Cudd of the renown Zeitgeist ensemble, I didn’t demure . . . but I didn’t know what I was going to do. Since the composition involves electronic samples triggered via the computer, the piece evolved into an abstract statement on Artificial Intelligence and about the concept of nothing as something, influenced by philosopher Martin Heidegger. That is, if a computer can eventually be made to perform tasks on deeper and deeper levels of complication, will consciousness (somewhere in the dim future) develop or will there always be nothing there?

"IS is nothing. If there is a word for nothing, then nothing is something." 

And the composition was difficult to write. The creative process is often that of drawing on techniques we possess, developing those we may not, and then banging our heads against the limitations of our creativity and technique.  There were passages that I was trying to make interactive between computer and player, where sounds produced and improvised by the player were transformed and manipulated by the program. Each of those attempts were filled with bugs. Late last night, after a 10-hour session, I had to accept my own limitations in making these elements work and settled for a solution that involved just playing back the sounds I wanted, rather than generating them in real time.

I thought about artificial intelligence; part of the piece involves a text-to-speech program that yields an indifferent robotic voice speaking various phrases. She (the voice is feminine) almost sounds eerily cognizant of what she says. 

Is_Is_Nothing

The performer triggers a number of samples including texts by Heidegger and René Descartes, artist Henri Matisse, a NASA space mission, and me (based on Heidegger). At one point a voice from NASA proclaims that “There is [sic] now four computers that have control of primary critical functions.” There, the program takes over and the performer must conform to the synthetic sinewave, triangle wave, and white noise sounds the computer makes.

Heidegger

Throughout, a Wurlitzer organ cheerfully appears, emblematic of the cartoonish effort that we often make in philosophy, study, and politics to make sense of the world we live in.

MontanaMoon