It’s the week after Thanksgiving, December 2019.
I’ve made the hasty and perhaps ill-conceived decision to restart an old blog and it remains to be seen whether I will find a way to add to it with any regularity. I’m doing this because I have lately felt an absence of a certain type of communication. I am a reasonably social person, and I am reasonably active online. I maintain a number of very close artistic and intellectual relationships, and I speak on the phone with people I respect several times each week. Furthermore, I am a university professor and have the opportunity to discuss subjects that are important to me with very bright students and colleagues on a weekly basis. But despite these different types of communication, I find that I very rarely discuss—or am required to clearly articulate—the ideas that motivate and inspire my current, ongoing creative work. And when I do, it is usually on someone else’s terms. Both the content and register of language are calibrated to a situation beyond my control. For instance:
I write a grant application and I speak in terms of contemporary themes, artistic outputs, professional outcomes. I speak to a panel of jurors, I have a sense of their value system, I search for bits of overlap between my own priorities and what I perceive to be their priorities. I cannot let sentences like the previous one—with its inelegant parallelism, haphazard comma usage, conversational tone—go unedited. I write, I stop, I edit, and I worry. The stakes are high, or at least they feel high.
I give a lecture or lead a seminar discussion, and I am responsible for addressing an array of topics which I choose because they are interesting to me, but also because they satisfy curricular requirements, or because I believe that they will prepare students to navigate the challenges of a professional field which I myself do not define or control. These topics often overlap with subjects that interest me, or have interested me at some point in the past. But they very rarely—if ever—overlap with the questions that are most urgent in my creative life on that day, in that week, in that month, the questions that I am asking through the work that I am doing in my own studio. The questions I ask my students are not the same questions that I ask myself each day. They are not necessarily any simpler or more complex than “my questions”, they are just different.
I speak with a singer, an instrumentalist, a conductor, an artistic director. These are colleagues whom I value intensely, and my friendships with performers are among my most treasured artistic relationships. My respect for them, their time, and their work obliges me to present ideas to them that are concise, coherent, and legible. I do not burden them with ideas-in-progress, works that are half-formed, pathways which might lead nowhere, free associations. I offer them finished products, and I hope they like them.
I speak with a senior mentor figure, or a distinguished composer. I am lucky to have several very important mentors, and my career would never have developed to the point it has without them. I cherish their time and their perspective. I call them when I approach an inflection point, when I face a difficult professional decision, or when I am in their part of the country and have the opportunity to buy them a drink or a meal. I do not phone them on a weeknight to bounce random ideas off them. I do not chat with them about the books that are open on my desk, or the piece I am in the midst of writing.
I speak to a faculty colleague. We discuss administrative issues, we discuss the successes and challenges of our students, the successes and challenges of our department, recent headline developments in our professional fields. We quickly share recent accomplishments, or invitations to upcoming events. Generally speaking, I do not trouble them with my own creative struggles (and nor would I wish to).
I speak with my wife, or my parents, or my sister. My family are intelligent, sensitive people whose opinions I value (I am extremely lucky in this regard). When I speak to them, I ask about their day, or their week, they ask what my two-year-old daughter did at preschool, or what she ate for dinner. They share their news, I share mine, condensing and synthesizing in a way that makes it possible to carry on a relationship from day to day. We love each other and we are immensely interested in one another’s lives. But my family do not join me on the bizarre internal journey that takes place in a full day of composing, writing, or research. To recap this journey at the end of each day or week would be as exhausting for me as it doubtless would be for them. It is impossible.
And so I speak, and I speak, and I speak.
As I review these relationships and the types of conversations they engender, I am reminded that every single one of them is important, and I value each of them intensely. I discuss appropriate subjects with the appropriate people at the appropriate times. But all of these forms of communication exist at the periphery of what, for me, is my central, ongoing, and primary conversation: my creative work itself and the ideas that fuel it. I rarely talk to anyone about the questions that plague me every morning, and during every day, and every night.
Do other artists have this experience, I wonder? Do they discuss the challenges they face in their creative work contemporaneously, as they are facing them? Ought they to do so? It is this a good or helpful thing?
This is my primary impulse for starting this blog. I want to write informally, frequently, and without any particular agenda or audience in mind, about the ideas which motivate my creative work on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. I do not presume that these will be consistently interesting, or consistently interesting to the same people. For this purpose, I am attracted to the format of the blog post. It is isolated, it sits quietly on a secondary page of my website which nobody is forced to visit. The full text is not served up to anyone in their news feed, although I will point to each new post via my Instagram account. There is no expectation of brevity or viral sharing. There is no like button, so I won’t feel tempted to define success according to engagement, but instead according to whether I’ve articulated something that is meaningful to me and, perhaps, to someone else.
I should also underscore the relatively mild nature of the problem I have articulated here, as well as the gentleness of the corrective measure that I propose. In a life rich with communication and outlets for thoughts and feelings, I have identified a small gap. By starting a blog in which to address subjects that are important to me but which fall outside the boundaries of my normal social life, I propose a small solution.