Begin Again, Keep Going

Having completed a large commission of songs for male chorus and piano, which occupied all of my attention for several months, and which produced a concert's worth of music, I have this past week been newly commissioned to do another, very different musical project. A CD I had made on commission almost a decade ago, a CD of trance music to be used as background for yoga classes, meditation, and similar situations, has led to a commission to make a sequel CD. Not a repetition, but the next level. I'm a better composer and musician now, or at least I hope I am, since time is meant to improve your art-making, not stagnate it.

This new CD I am recording now will be used for meditation, yoga, healing, massage, Reiki sessions, and so forth. Thus I'm writing it to sustain those purposes, not interrupt them. That calls for a particular kind of music. A particular tone and tempo very different from the dramatic, narrative songs I've been writing for most of this year. It will be completely non-verbal, instrumental music. It will use original recordings of Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist meditation bells, bells recorded from my own collection. It will use a fair bit of shakuhachi. No doubt there will be some synthesizers and keyboards in the mix, and Chapman Stick. It will have a variety of shapes and tones, but overall will hopefully take the listener deeper into meditative states of consciousness, the opposite of overstimulated, stressed-out, Type A caffeinated states of mind.

There's a lot of bland, boring New Age music out there. The best of that genre has always been music first, New Age music second. I think of musicians such as Paul Winter, Will Ackerman, and a few others, who pretty much invented the genre, but also transcended it. Contrast their vibrant, emotional music with the soulless boring pap of Stephen Halpern's random noodlings on electric piano. Contrast the powerful presence of the music in Stephan Micus recording against the flatlined neutral of most New Age music. Even ambient music, created in modern times by Brian Eno, inspired by Eric Satie's semi-joking idea for "furniture music" a century earlier, has more soul than most music you hear played in New Age bookstores, or most healing centers, massage offices, or new Age spiritual healing seminars. People often make the mistake of equating music meant to be unobtrusive and supportive with toneless, dull, bland, and spineless.

Yes, I do have strong opinions about New Age music.

That's because I was a participating witness to the development of this music from its start, back at its inception in the 1970s. Some roots of that style of music are ambient (Eno), folk, cool jazz, especially West Coast jazz, and the encounters of improvising musicians with the musics and spiritual values brought over from India, Japan, Tibet, and China in the 1960s. A lot of improvising musicians from the jazz and rock world contributed to growth of New Age music by introducing multicultural music into Western pop. The movement was strongly influenced both by world music, and by spiritual and moral ideas from the East.

If you want to blame someone, blame The Beatles: their introduction of Indian classical music into Britpop in the late 60s and early 70s, instigated by George Harrison's encounters with India, opened that door to a million and more people who otherwise would never have heard the music, or learned to meditate. The influence of popular culture icons, especially those as beloved, and as restless, as The Beatles, cannot be underestimated. George Harrison's post-Beatles solo albums have been part of the trend, seminal and central, even when basically pop music.

The music I tend to create, now, when asked to make healing music, or trance music, or meditation/yoga music, tends to be on the ambient side. Not static and unchanging, but not tonal or harmonic, not based on Western ideas of music theory, and essentially timeless. One of my influences is of course my years playing Indonesian gamelan music. Another strong influence is Buddhist music from Japan, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia, all of which I have listened to and studied for decades.

I am making it up as a I go along. It's an improvisation on a theme, a tone, an idea, a feeling. Most of my music is just so, whether notated or improvised. Art is improvised, life is improvised. It's all of a piece. So I keep going, making art, giving myself something to do that means something, a reason to go on, a purpose and a meaning, for my own life.

•

Music surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. —Pete Seeger

Hate, fear, all the corrosive forces of entropy, give way before music's power to make us all come together in harmony. So Mote It Be.

Inspiration Cards

A couple of months ago, when I was feeling particularly stuck in life—just after surgery, still blurry and mentally fogged from everything I was struggling through, not least the after-effects of surgical anaesthesia—a friend suggested that I already had the resources to get myself unstuck. I just needed a way to remind myself how to do that.



One obvious means, of course, was just to keep writing music—I was in the middle of the recent commission, then—and making art, etc. Being creative every day became a literally life-saving activity. To the point, now, when the commission is done, and I'm looking for new projects, that I'm having some anxiety about my future again, simply because I don't have a clear long-term project to do right now. I have to find one, or make one.

Actually, a couple of smaller projects, after a large project, are not a bad change of pace. Yet I'm stirred up, emotionally, these days. I feel a little lost at sea, and that creates anxiety. I find myself needing something to focus on, so that the voices of fear for the future don't hover so close.

I've begun to write some other songs, but with no clear deadline it's too easy to set them aside for days at a time, and neglect to work on them. It's too easy to feel rudderless. And because my creative work is what's mostly giving me a reason to live right now, being rudderless is scary.



So my friend and I came up with the idea of making myself a set of customized Inspiration Cards.

There are small cards in a bowl that you pull out at random. They contain ideas. They contain suggestions about things to do. They contain commentary on keeping life in perspective—attitude adjustments, if you will. They are reminiscent of, and indirectly inspired by, the Oblique Strategies cards co-created by Brian Eno. Eno's ideas have often inspired me, shaken me loose, and got me moving again; they are a breath of fresh air. My Inspiration Cards are a sort of personalized version of cards that get you unstuck, full of phrases and words that I need to say to myself, to get myself ground and moving again.



I haven't been counting how many cards I've made. I keep adding to the bowl when new things to write down come to mind. The Inspiration Cards currently live in one of the papier-maché art bowls I made earlier this year; my plan is to make a larger customized bowl for the cards, where they will live more permanently. Something hand-made seems appropriate. Maybe I'll write other messages to myself on the bowl. At least very least, it will be something to inspire me, too.



Here's what a few of the cards say, in random order as pulled from the bowl:

Weaving

Why are you resistant to grace?

Zen monk
sweeping
fallen leaves

Infrared

Naked Pleasure

Darshan

Make a movie

Scrabble art

Frogs

Be outrageously sexy

All is forgiven, move on

Laugh or cry (laughing is better)

Flow

Camera walk

Esoteric clues

The piano has been lonely

So, we have a mix of practical suggestions of activities to do, spiritual advice, reminders of things you already knew but have overlooked in the midst of your mind-drama, and permissions given to stretch outside of the usual limits and boundaries.

I see several ways to use the Cards that I haven't tried yet, too. Some Cards contain familiar wisdom, restated in my own words, but nothing new. Others are meant to shake me into thinking about life from a new direction, a viewpoint outside the usual. I could use the Cards for guidance in situations that are in flux (when are they not?), as one uses the I Ching. I could use the Cards for assembling a daily practice of mindfulness. And so forth.

The field is open-ended.

I could see each person making their own customized set of Inspiration Cards for themselves, attuned to their own situations and needs. if you were to make a set of Inspiration Cards, what would you put in the bowl? I think there are many possibilities. The only guidance I would render is to make sure to include a few Cards designed to stretch you, to invite you to do things outside your comfort zone and usual habits and patterns. Breaking out of whatever box you usually find yourself in is itself a major source of inspiration and renewal.

Pulsar

In the past few weeks I've been feeling the powerful urge to record music. I've been thinking about revisiting ambient music, techno, spacemusic, and quieter styles along these lines. I am often drawn to the subtleties of ambient music, as expressed by Brian Eno, the founder of modern ambient music, who once defined it as music which can be either "actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored, depending on the choice of the listener." Since Eno's seminal work in this genre in the 1970s, an entire musical subculture and group of styles of music have grown up. I find a great deal of creativity in this still largely underground musical subculture, as opposed to the lack of creativity in contemporary over-produced, manufactured, market-driven pop music.

I've also been listening to some older pop music which demonstrated a great deal of creativity in bygone decades, which seems largely missing now. (Perhaps because the music industry has come to care more about money than creativity.) In the 1980s, there was a lot of bad, cheesy pop, made using cheesy synthesizer patches. The 80s was the era in which both the sampler and the synthesizer first became commercially affordable to many average musicians. There was a ferment of experimentation. A lot of fairly bad music was made, following the "Gee whiz!" factor: the period of discovery early in the history of any new creative technology, in which a wave of enthusiasts get carried away by the cool new toys, but sometimes forget to make art with them. But there were also some great songs made, that used synth patches in clever, creative ways. I've been going back lately and filling in the gaps of my 80s song collection, being very picky, acquiring only what I feel was good enough to endure. Listening again to Peter Gabriel's original recorded version of "San Jacinto," followed a few years later by the Genesis minor hit song, "Tonight Tonight Tonight," you hear both songs are full of the new synthesizer sounds. But they're used brilliantly, originally, and so indelible are they to the song's style and context that you cannot imagine the songs without those sounds underpinning them.

For myself, wanting to make some new sounds, and revisiting the creativity philosophy of Because I can / Because I want to / Because I feel like it, I pulled some of my vintage analog gear out of the studio and set up to record with my laptop in the writing desk/art desk area of the house. (The studio has been feeling stale. Sometimes a change of venue is all it takes to rekindle the creative fires.) I have a fondness for old analog music gear, including my small collection of vintage analog synthesizers and processors. As pristine and powerful as softsynths (software-based synthesizer instruments) have become in recent years, there's a charm about the old clunky analog gear, and a pleasure in working completely retro. Some of those old sounds you just don't hear anymore, coming from any softsynth.

With the current unlimited software synthesis and sound-editing softwares that are available, it's possible to feel creatively paralyzed because you don't know where to begin: there are too many possibilities. One of the advantages of vintage gear is that you are forced to work within its limits, which can lead to creative accidents and solutions you might otherwise never stumble across.

So I plugged a cheesy old Casio "electronic music instrument," the Casiotone 202 keyboard, into three of my favorite analog/digital effects processors, in order: my spare BOSS SE-50 (I have two or three of these units); BOSS VF-1; and my Roland DEP-5. The DEP-5 is still one of the best analog/digital reverb/delay units ever made; its versatility and range of spatial effects has only recently been matched in the purely digital computer-music realm.

I hooked this rig up to my laptop via a Griffin iMic USB sound input/output. This is one of three USB sound devices that I use in various configurations. This one is the most portable, and usually lives in my laptop's travel case, along with some other basic audio gear, so that I can record anytime, anywhere, if the spirit moves me.

In about two hours this afternoon I laid down several stereo tracks. This evening, in about an hour, I mixed the raw materials and processed sounds into a finished track. I did this in Amadeus, a marvelous Mac-based audio recording and mastering software that I've used on the laptop for some years now. I also tweaked a few elements in Amadeus, now that the sounds had made it into the purely digital realm, before making a final mix.

Pulsar    

On the Casiotone I laid down a bed of a chord progression, with later tracks floating over the top in a soloistic manner. The basic chord progression is one I've used versions of before, I realize in retrospect; I suppose it's somewhat typical of my thinking when I work in the ambient genre. (In this sense, I didn't stretch my own compositional envelope much. Whether that makes or breaks this as a piece of music is not for me to determine.) The basic progression begins with a I-V drone, then adds the vi chord: I-V drone plus vi. Eventually the vi expands outward to become a full IV-7 chord, making with the drone: I-V drone plus IV-7 chord. The solo notes are pulled from this sequence in various ways. This was an instance of a chord progression that seemed wholly self-evolving, wholly natural in execution. I didn't plan it out in advance, nor was it pre-conceived. I only use music theory here to describe it after-the-fact. Really, it was an improvisation that took on its own form, and expanded into a piece. (Making poems often works in a parallel way, for me.)

So, in about three hours this afternoon and evening, I made a new ambient track. This could be the start of a new group of purely ambient pieces. All the sounds for this track were generated by the Casiotone 202, and heavily processed. I plan in the near future to connect my Stick to the same basic rig, find some new processor settings, and make another ambient track purely using the Stick. I'll share that track, as well, when it's done.

I never know what I'm going to do next. Sometimes you just have to do what feels right, in the moment. In the past few weeks, I've also begun writing a series of new poems, after a long hiatus (except for the usual haiku). Creativity feeds on itself. Stimulation in one creative zone usually rhizomatously spreads to the other zones. Meanwhile, this track was loads of fun to make. More of the way soon, no doubt of it.

Writing About Music

I've written before about the blind spots that writers often have about music—specifically, poets who have an apparent inability to understand how music is its own force, not merely a support for song lyrics. I have also considered before about how audio performance, for example radiobroadcast, might be a genuine enhancement for much contemporary poetry; but I suspect that the poets' blind spots will keep this from happening, too, as most poets of my acquaintance seem to believe that print presentation trumps any other form, and should. No wonder there are floating accusations of hermeticism and irrelevance circling much poetry criticism nowadays.

Geeta Dayal has written a book about Brian Eno and the making of his 1975 album Another Green World, both a history of an influential album that lies at the root of much contemporary electronic pop music, but also an examination of the creative process. (The book is published by Continuum, and can be found here.) An interesting aspect of this book about a classic album is that both of the creators used the Oblique Strategies deck of cards (developed by Eno and Peter Schmidt), which is designed to help an artist break through blocks, mental ruts, and other impediments. Eno used the Obllique Strategies cards throughout the making of his album; and Dayal used the cards to help her write her book about the album. (I love the Oblique Strategies, and have been known to use them myself from time to time.)

Author Geeta Dayal was recently interviewed on PRI's weekly arts & humanities program To the Best of Our Knowledge. (Their podcast, which I highly recommend, can be found here.) Listening to this interview was a real treat for me, because it pointed out many ways in which the arts can interface, and that creativity is a way of life, not a hobby. (Seriously, this entire program is well worth a listen. You can listen or download this program here.)

Dayal said some interesting things during this interview, but one particular set of comments really struck home with me, and clarified my thinking about writers' blind spots about the other arts, and why so many writers so often fail at conveying the experience of being involved with music, of being immersed in the process of musical creation and performance. (Rock criticism, generally speaking, is even more full of clichéd rhetoric than poetry criticism.)

In Another Green World, only 5 out of 14 songs use lyrics, sung and/or spoken. Eno has been quoted as saying that the most important thing for him was to use the texture of the voice as a musical instrument; that the words don't mean that much to him, that the lyrics aren't even that important. The song's lyrics do add up to sentences, rather than random words, and they do mean something in themselves; but they're oblique, not foregrounded the way lyrics are in most songwriting: most of which tends to be about the music supporting or enhancing the meaning of the words. This is completely the opposite of that.

Dayal comments during the interview:

[Eno] was tired of this kind of hierarchy, of the voice being in the front. You have the singer in the front of the stage, the drummer in the back, you have a guitar player and a bass player. He wasn't into that any more. What he wanted was to sort of compress everything together, have everything be on the same level, have these sorts of layers.

I definitely think that one of the reasons why Eno is a particularly challenging person for rock critics to write about is simply because rock criticism really grew out of literary criticism, and poetry, in a lot of ways. There's a reason why so many people write about Bob Dylan: Dylan is somebody where you can really analyze the lyrics, and that's a comfortable place for a lot of writers to be.

Interviewer: And you don't have to write about the music.

Dayal: Writers, being writers, love talking about words. It makes sense. And so they love people like Bob Dylan, and you see Greil Marcus has written book after book after book about Bob Dylan! There's a reason why these really gifted writers go back to people like Dylan, or the Stones, or the Beatles, or whatever. When you have somebody who's like Brian Eno, who is saying "I really don't think the vocals are that important, I really don't think I'm that interested in the lyrics," it really stumps them. [laughter] Because they're like, then what do we write about? How are we going to say anything about this?

Now, for me, I spent many years just writing about pure electronic music. And so, I love writing about the sonics, about the sounds themselves. I got it, I understood. I actually prefer writing about someone like Eno, rather than breaking down and analyzing symbolism and meaning in rock lyrics.

I completely agree with this. I think Dayal has put her finger on a fundamental weakness of much music criticism, particularly about pop music genres. Writers, being writers, love talking about words. Fair enough, because that's both the drink and the essence of what writers do. But also, it creates this blind spot I'm talking about, in which writers are often stumped when trying to write about something that is not, or cannot be, contained in words; or is not made up of words.

Music criticism about symphonic literature is often metaphorical, even poetic, if you go back and read the classical music criticism of past centuries; yet the best of it discusses what the music evokes in the listener, and is more than mere descriptions or detailed historical notes. A lot of good rock criticism (Greil Marcus included) is about the history of the music itself: its roots, its origins, its lineage and results; it makes you understand the context of what you're listening to, as good criticism ought to do, deepening your experience of the art by surrounding your experience with complementary knowledge. But the best rock criticism (one thinks of Lester Bangs at times like this) re-creates the experience and power of the music in the reader—the way a poem needs to re-create the experience in the reader. In other ways, it's somatic, not merely cerebral: gutsy, not just intellectual.

There have been some great poems written about hearing the blues, to be sure—but that's an artist writing about art, not a critic writing about art.

My own background echoes Dayal's, as a writer: science-trained, involved with experimental music, non-verbal music, and avant-garde music, in whatever genre, including rock, from the beginning. I feel like I've finally encountered a rock critic who gets it, who understands my own viewpoint, because she seems to share it. (David Toop being one of the few others who gets it, and he himself being an avant-garde composer who's worked with Eno et al.) Most rock criticism, in my opinion and experience, is definitely word-fixated, I think largely for the reasons Dayal points out.

So writers tend to focus on the song lyrics—on the words—and don't have as much to say about the music. (I can analyze the music pretty readily—but I went to music school, where they shoved a lot more music theory down our throats than you could ever imagine, or desire to know about. Trust me on that one.) This leads directly to that blind spot writers have: in which they forget that songwriting is not writing, it is not a poetic form, it consists rather of the synergy of words-and-music together. Neither one complete without the other. The best songwriters raise the synergistic combination that is the song to much higher levels than either the song's melody or the song's words could attain alone, on their own. It's the synergy that matters. And that's why calling even great songwriters Poets, and building cults around their song lyrics as Poems, is absurd. You cannot analyze the words of a song, and ignore the music, and successfully comprehend the finished effect. They cannot be broken apart.

This goes a long way towards explaining the Cult of Bob Dylan, and the Cult of Leonard Cohen, in which both of these actually very good singer-songwriters are deifed into Poets—which they are not. Again and again it must be said, you can't really analyze a song lyric, purely as poetry, apart from the context of the music, which is the other part of the song. This is why many song lyrics, when presented as poems on the printed page, simply fall flat—or seem quaint and antiquated, with endless metrical end-rhymes. Those things pass by in the context of being sung, in the context of the music, but as words alone they can be trite. (Of course, saying any of this around members of the Cult of Dylan is unpopular, but it is nonetheless true. What Dayal says about those who write about Dylan is exactly correct.)

One way around writer's block

I typically don't get "writer's block." There are times when I don't write any poetry, or essays, or haibun, or creative nonfiction—my usual writerly modes. And there are other times when all I write seems like crap. But I am never not being creative. On a daily basis, I usually produce something, because for me creativity swtiches channels readily. If I am not doing poetry, I'm doing music, or visual art, or photography, or on-site land art sculpture, or weaving. Even when I'm feeling depressed, and the bleak winter weather has me down, I can still usually manage a haiku or a decent photo, or weave a dreamcatcher while watching some movie on DVD.

My experience, and practice, has long been based on a simple principle: creativity, by its very nature, is a matter of abundance rather than lack. There is no time when one is not exercising creativity. (Some of the mystical traditions would add, we are partaking in the Divine whenever we are being creative, because we are co-creating our lives, in partnership/unity with the Creator, the Godhead, the Divine Demiurge, whatever we want to call it.) Like mindfulness, creativity is something you can practice. Having access to one's creative Self is a birthright; it's always present, always available. Practice with it makes it more readily accessible to you, as a mode and tool.

Lest this sound too new-agey—which it's not, it's a very old idea in fact—here's an analogy that I find personally useful: the creative force of the universe is like an underground river of cold, black water, that one can dip into, or sink a well through rock into, to tap, and taste the clear, cold waters of life, creativity, and power. The river's always there, always flowing, underground; sometimes, in our peregrinations, we might wander into an area where the bedrock is thicker and harder, and the water's harder to get at—but the river's always there, and always will be.

So, beyond the simple fact that creativity is a mindset, a worldview, a way of meeting the world as an equal and partner in co-creation, there are also strategies for enhancing one's creativity, and tactics and strategies for getting unstuck.

One of my favorites is the Oblique Strategies, by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Originally published as a deck of cards, but now available online and in a freeware version you can run on your computer, to kick yourself in the astral, as necessary, thanks to my friend Gregory Taylor's site.

Here's the original preface by Eno and Schmidt: These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.

They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case,the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

Some sample Oblique Strategies:

Honor thy error as a hidden intention

Do something boring

Abandon normal instruments

Remember those quiet evenings

What are the sections sectons of? Imagine a caterpillar moving

From nothing to more than nothing

There are over a hundred cards now. The idea is to draw one, and let it guide you, almost like an oracle. There's nothing mystical about this: it's a way to tap into intuition, hidden intentions, and let the unconscious mind (those deep black waters) feed you.