Listening vs conversation

What a serendipitous weekend. Since Thursday I’ve seen three very different but equally inspiring concerts (1, 2, 3) at some of New York’s best stages.  I’ve met some equally interesting and inspiring people. One of whom–an accomplished composer–asked me if I had been writing any music of own. In a kind of self-deprecating half-truth, I told him, no, I hadn’t. “But how can you NOT write?” he asked, visibly concerned.

To say I’ve been having a “musical crisis” would be melodramatic; in truth I’ve continued to write little modular riffs, progressions, beats, loops, all sorts of disconnected scraps. But then I try to stitch them together into something larger (by myself, in a vacuum on the computer) and am often disappointed with the results. It doesn’t feel like “writing music” anymore at least.

Listening to the aforementioned composer talk about his own (unlikely?) journey as a musician made me think of something one of my composition professors once told me, that great composers need to inhabit two contradictory personas: the analytical self-critic and the egomaniac. According to him, you need to be able to deeply examine and reflect on your work, but also need to be able to turn that critical voice off completely from time to time. In a Jekyll and Hyde transformation, you must become unabashedly self confident and have glimpses of what my professor called “momentary infallibility.” You are the artist, you have the vision, and you can do no wrong. To hell with the critics.

These past months I’ve been thinking a lot about music, about writing, and about thinking about writing and music far more than I’ve actually been writing or writing music. Generally speaking, I’ve spent the past few years out here in New York in “listening” mode…or at least listening far more than I have been speaking. Indeed, much of my work as a recordist requires that I be a “fly on the wall,” capturing other people’s thoughts but never dialoging with them. And in terms of my own music and writing, I thought I should absorb as much of the world around me as possible in order to make an informed, articulate statement of my own.

But this “listening in preparation for an intelligent response” approach (or whatever I’m going to call it) is like snail mail. More to the point, it’s nothing like having a real conversation. We communicate not despite of but through our interruptions, digressions, and (very often) instincts based on fragments of information. In order to sustain a conversation, we often speak regardless of whether or not our response is completely measured, accurate, or even articulate. Conversation is improvisational, forcing us to keep stringing along new ideas, to examine for brief moments, and to answer. Maybe this is alternating between self-critic and egomaniac at a faster or pace, but perhaps it’s just acting like a whole, balanced person.

As a producer, I’ve become pretty good at shaping and augmenting other people’s ideas, being critic or maniacal advocate on behalf of someone else’s material. So it would seem I should be capable of giving my own ideas the same treatment, right? Should I start having more conversations with myself? It seems I’m arriving at some of the same conclusions as in the past: I should probably keep a journal (offline, for myself), and I should start making a point of going out on a limb and sharing some of my ideas (musical and otherwise) with others.