Soundchoices: Paul Elwood

Endurance vs. Consistency

Once a habit of sitting down to your work is established each day, then the work isn't really a matter of endurance but of consistency of practice. When a creative practice becomes a habit, i.e., a decision that you don't have to make each day as to whether to do it or not, then it's not a matter of enduring the process, but of following your personal daily plan. 

Telling a Story - or Not

"Music is not made to express sentiments but to express music. It is not a vase where the composer distils his soul, drop by         drop, but a labyrinth where one never finishes entering and leaving, to discover new paths, where one never wears out the mystery." – Pierre Boulez at age 40 “Boulez Bouleverse La Musique,” Realites, April 1965.  

Many of my students often write compositions that tell a story. The younger ones sometimes want to describe the action of a potential video game; the more experienced seek to express something that plumbs deeper emotions. Among many examples of well-known composers, Richard Strauss wrote massive “tone-poems” that told stories of homelife, Nietzsche’s philosophy, or the pranks of a German folk hero. Stravinsky composed programmatic compositions, but even he confessed, after a detailed description of the images he was alluding to in his Symphony in Three Movements (1945), that “In spite of what I have admitted, the symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all.”

[For more on this read Joseph Horowitz’s blog post titled “Stravinsky, the New York Philharmonic, and Program Music.”  https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2010/03/stravinsky_the_new_york_philha.html]

I believe this. Music is about music is about music. But I think it helps creative directions if one has a narrative to follow or express. I am finishing a composition titled “Atmospheric Rivers” for pianist Kathleen Supové to be performed with electronics. Covid-willing there is a premiere slated for March 18, 2022 in Brooklyn.

The composition was inspired by a Nova documentary on how Saharan dust from the Bodele Depression in the Republic of Chad is swept by strong winds onto “atmospheric rivers” that flow over the Atlantic and bring nourishment to the Amazon Rain Forest. The dust supplies phosphates that are not plentiful in the forest. The dust itself comprises the remains of plankton that were deposited into the soil when the Bodele Depression was the bottom of a seabed millions of years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpFryXQbVEA

This story is a fascinating example of interactions in the environment which connect plankton, nourished by undersea rivers from Antarctica, eventually finding their way from Africa to the Amazon, and which then may end up swept back into the sea by the Amazon River, returning to the source of a journey that may take thousands or millions of years.

Will the listeners get this from the music? No, not unless I detail it for them in words. But the story gave me a structural framework from which to create the music. Ultimately, I want the listener to have what I hope will be an interesting listening experience, whether they connect it to a storyline or not.

Boulez was composer concerned with finding new paths through his composition without the aid of programmatic story telling. This is partly evidenced by his series of piano pieces titled “Notations.” That, after all, is what they are, notations representing sounds. Music about music about music . . .

Representational painters have the advantage of depicting story scenes if they wish; novelists, of course, tell a story. Playwrights and films tell stories. Music is an abstract collection of sounds that relies on its own internal logic including harmony, melodic phrasing, relations between intervals, or collections of sonic textures, among others. Opera tells a story, but is contingent on artforms outside of music including visual art for scenery, a libretto for the story, and acting. Music, as much as possible creates an atmosphere for the story.

As Boulez says, music is a never-ending path that, through turns and changes in time and style, and the contributions of generations of creative composers and musicians, always reveals new mysteries.

Ordered or Unordered Workspaces

So, everyone has different levels of comfort with the workspace that they inhabit. I gravitate towards mess, although I wish I was different in that regard. A number of visual artists that I know keep very ordered and clean spaces. That makes sense. Everything can be placed "ready-to-hand."  The tools are at your disposal and you have exerted control over your environment that enables your work. 

I degrade quickly into mess if I've taken the time to straighten. Lack of patience on my part dictates that I work first on my projects and clean later. Many times I've finished a months-long project and then cleaned my space. For your creative life, it's good to define your space—messy or immaculate. Of course, that may happen without much thought on your part as you intrinsically know what works for you. 

The painter Francis Bacon seemed to thrive in a messy space. Go to https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/studio to view his studio. 

Attached is a picture of my workspace - after straightening. 

Listening to the Sea

In Paulo Coelho's novel, The Alchemist, the Alchemist is in the desert with this protege. He picks up a conch shell and remarks that the desert had once been the bottom of a vast sea. He tells the student to hold the shell up to his ear and to describe what he hears. "...and he heard the sound of the sea. 'The sound of the sea is always in the shell,' says the Alchemist, 'because that is its Personal Legend. It will never leave it until the sea covers the desert again.'" 

Our works are autobiographical. No matter what noise we choose to make in the world: painting, writing, acting, composing, business, study, etc., our Personal Legend, our past, our personality, informs and guides us in what we create. And that story will be expressed consciously or unconsciously in what we do. 

Building Endurance

When I was 30 I hadn’t been on a bicycle in years. My first ride around the block left me winded and exhausted. So, I vowed to ride a little every day, starting with that one block for a couple of days, then two blocks, then three, then a mile, etc. Endurance and shape built up quickly. Soon I was doing ten miles on a daily basis.

I find that, if I’ve taken a hiatus from composing for a while (I try not to, but do allow a little time between projects to catch a breath), that I may have to work my way back to longer writing sessions. The same thing is true with my practice. If I haven’t managed to maintain a regular practice habit, then my concentration levels - and my chops - need time to build back up.

With composing, if I start with 30 minutes or an hour a day for a while, concentration and focus begin to increase over time. Eventually I find that I’m working straight through two hours without thinking much about it, and then, eventually, beyond.

If you are uncertain about the difficulty of pushing the pencil or the brush, don’t be discouraged if the first half hour is hard. But try to commit to doing something for half an hour a day and see if it doesn’t build up to longer sessions over a few weeks.

Creative time is sacred

Composing time for me is sacred. A time that is devoted just to "putting dots on paper;" writing music, thinking and meditating on the structure and the nature of what it is I'm trying to express. Creating your own sacred space is personal. You can find your way to a work habit that will drive your creativity and further your goals of building something. 

It's not an easy task in the beginning. Creative time and space is something that needs to be built into your life. Over the past 35 years I've made it an intrinsic part of each day, such that, if I don't compose, the day seems incomplete. Habit is the key—even if you find yourself staring at the page, canvas, or staff paper. 

Push the pencil or the brush. Even if you believe the ideas are lousy, they may just take you the ideas that you are searching for. 

Sources for Stimulating the Creative Process

Finding sources for stimulating the creative process is not difficult. I’ve written music compositions based on poems, novels, dreams, paintings, photos, movies, folk tunes, and other pieces of music. A poem can provide imagery to express and a structure to follow. Folk music is where I come from, so using it in a foundational manner in my music is, in a sense, autobiographical.

You’ve probably heard ad infinitum to write about what you know. Well, what else is there? All ideas evolve out of what you know. The books you choose to read, the art and movies you like are all an expression of who you are and what you can in turn choose to express.

Finding a Theme to Express

To stand at the Post Mark’d West, and turn to face West, can be a trial for those sentimentally inclin’d, as well as for ev’ryone nearby. It is possible to feel the combin’d force, in perfect Enfilade, of ev’ry future second unelaps’d, ev’ry Chain yet to be stretch’d, every unknown Event to be undergone,— the unmodified Terror of keeping one’s Latitude.   Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon 

For three weeks I’ve been working on a composition for solo piano. At first I thought that I was writing an etude exploring polyrhythms with or tangential to the number 11, e.g., 11 beats against 4 beats, 11:5, 6:5, 8:3, etc. When writing these rhythms, I work also on playing them. It’s fun to figure them out, however the party-trick nature of just writing complex rhythms wore thin soon. 

Other thematic ideas began to emerge. Sometimes a title helps to give me ideas and push the pencil along. The phrase “in perfect enfilade,” that I read in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon, surfaced from my memory somehow. “Enfilade” refers to lines of sight in aiming artillery down a straight line from end to end. The phrase in Mason & Dixon also refers to the straight, famous line that Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon plotted between Pennsylvania and Maryland in 1763-64.

In the novel, the concept of line carries a role in the discussion of ley lines, time-lines (“every unknown event yet to be undergone”), and a fictional account of the duo continuing to plot the line to a surreal western America in sight of the Rocky Mountains before they stop.

It’s a massive novel, like many of Pynchon’s, including historical personages George Washington, a hipster Ben Franklin (playing a pub gig on his glass harmonica in rose-tinted half-moon glasses).  There are also references to 18th century composers WA Mozart (who composed for the Glass Harmonica, K. 617), Quantz, and Dittersdorf. So, all of this suggested moods, rhythms (beyond the mystic 11), musical quotations, etc.

This is all to say that having a story to tell or express can help to motivate your muse and push the pencil in perfect enfilade to your goal.

Benjamin Franklin's Glass Harmonica

Finding a way to a structure

Sometimes in composing I find myself groping toward a statement that I can call a 'composition.' That is, a collection of sounds organised into an intelligible expression. An intelligible expression is one that, of course, makes sense. In music that sense can be defined by repetitions of a melodic or rhythmic idea along with transformations of that idea in a manner such that the listener can make sense of the logic at play in the composition. "Organised sound" is the simplest definition of music that I know of — it's the organisation of sounds into what we might call music as opposed to random sounds heard on the street. It could be possible to think of the jack hammer and the passing motorcycle as music, but they are not [usually] organised intentionally with one another. And this is a good topic for another day. 

For the last two and a half weeks I've been writing a solo piano piece, slowly-creating a variety of ideas, good and bad, some related to one another and some not. This happens at the beginning of a project: ideas mount up, pages of scrawls collect on my table, and out of that mass, forms begin to emerge. One can do a lot of planning if one wants and can know where a "story" is going. Or not. There's no right or wrong way to do this, but it's a mistake for me to think that a piece can be unstructured and satisfying. It's the structure of a piece of music, a painting (figurative or abstract), a building, or a poem that give an artwork a direction that carries the viewer/listener/reader someplace else. 

It's important to find your own mode of structure in your work that you yourself will find ultimately satisfying. 

Working With Limitations

If perception is any indication, we determine ourselves, our perceptions of ourselves, our work and our success. We need to maintain a healthy perspective on our limitations and our subsequent strengths.

One of my early weaknesses as a composer (perhaps still one) was a development of formal structure in my music. Formal structure in music is, like physical structure, necessary to hold a composition together and render a certain amount of intelligibility to a composition through repetition of ideas, development of recognizable motives, migrating tonal structures (moving a composition around tonally so that it doesn’t stay centered on one tone), etc. Folk music relies on simple structures where a melodic line, or phrase, is repeated with a contrasting phrase following for contrast. One phrase might be devoted to a repeated chorus with repeated words and the other with words that aren’t repeated. This structure helps the listener to retain the main material of the composition in their ears.

There will always be deficiencies. There are technical deficiencies that I have now at the age of 61 that I may or may not be able to rectify.  Some of these center on my work in electronic music - there are some things that I want to do that I don’t know how to do.  I’ve even hired students to help me with these skills.  It’s important to maintain a sense of humility in your work and to realize that there may be others, sometimes your own students, who know things you don’t.

The thing is, if, in your work, you are banging your head against your limitations, you’re doing your job.  Admittedly, I sometimes hit a technical wall and back off.  Historically, electronic music was created on tape and, if a live musician was involved, the musician was required to play along with the tape, the tape being an inflexible medium. Now, computer programs are created to be triggered by the musician in real time; they can record and play back what the musician is doing immediately in a manipulated form (backwards, two octaves higher, slowed down, etc.). The medium is no longer inflexible.

I wrote a few semi-successful compositions in this medium, but even then, found myself in the position most every composer finds themselves in where, in live performance, something goes wrong and the hapless composer must run up on stage and try to fix the problem in front of an audience that one can easily imagine is impatient, sniggering, and rolling their eyes.  I flew to Australia in 2007 and brought my gear with me - an expensive foot pedal set up, a small mixing board, and blew $200 on a gun case modified to carry this stuff.  For a performance run-through I plugged everything in and immediately blew the equipment.  I thought I’d compensated the change in voltage but had not. We were able to salvage the performance by substituting a young student for the foot pedal and there were mixers there attenuated to the Australian voltage.

At another festival in the U.S., I set up all of my gear and . . .  nothing.  Nothing, for whatever reason, worked. And there was an audience waiting.  Finally, with the concert delayed already by 15 minutes, I pulled out a CD with a fixed version of the interactive music I would have done, asked the sound engineer to play it back and played the piece in the classic, “fixed media” manner - “fixed” because it was fixed on the disc and couldn’t be triggered or mixed by the performer. No one knew the difference. All my equipment was still in place and, even without pretending to trigger anything, it seemed as if I was playing interactively and the piece received a nice review referencing its interactive nature.

I don’t write interactive pieces anymore. It was too much of a pain in the ass. At some point, it’s okay to decide whether or not you’re going to challenge those technical deficiencies or not. The important thing is to try and then, barring success, to move on.