Since Daniel brought up a question that may be a bit bigger than I'd like to put in the comments box, I thought I'd address it in its own entry. In response to the photos from the Great Mosque in Xi'an, Daniel "the Manipulator" Cassel wrote, ". . . do you ever get musically or filmically inspired by this place [China]?"
In short, filmically, occasionally; musically, rarely.
Truth be told, in my case, visuals mainly inspire poetry. Colors and shapes do attract me to things I want to paint or take pictures of, and there have been plenty of times that I've thought, there's no way to share this with anyone apart from an immersive film experience. But since that normally isn't an option (and film can't share smells), I find that poetry is the best way to communicate what I feel about what I see. That said, I haven't actually written any poetry about China. I think it takes me a while to sort through new experiences before they can work their way out in words. When I'm in Wisconsin, poetry flows pretty easily--just give me a couple of days walking through the countryside, and once the words start up, they'll keep going.
Recently, I've tended to be a pretty strict imagist (my own word) in my poetry: I aim to convey a picture through the words. The choice of words gives a twist or interpretation to the image, but the reader should be able to say, "you're looking at ice on a river" or "that's a duck" when they've finished reading, hopefully appreciating the image I've described. (Maybe "impressionist" would be a better word than "imagist" since the technique is conceptually similar to late 19th-century painting.) I'm not very good at putting in multiple levels of meaning into my words, so maybe being an imagist is something of a cop-out. But when I aim for emotional topics in poetry, I too often feel like I'm losing control of the text and have much more difficulty shaping it. It always ends up feeling jagged to me, yet smoothing the edges ends up dulling the character. It's kind of frustrating. Focusing on an image leaves me feeling more in control and is much easier to revise, though it may be a weaker form of poetry in the long run.
On to music. For me, music is very, very rarely a visual experience. I toyed with some visual ideas after visiting Xi'an, but I scrapped them pretty quickly. I do hear what I can only describe as lines (thank you, Heinrich Schenker, for confirming what I've been hearing all my life!), but they aren't lines in a visual sense. However, calling them "tonal patterns" is too vague, so "lines" will have to do.
I guess a good way to describe my view of music is as structured or organized emotion. In a sense it's like poetry in which you're describing something, interpretting it through your experience and abilities. But poetry can be much more specific than music simply because it's based on words. Music is what's behind the words in poetry, given interpersonal and temporal weight. Music takes what I'm feeling and lets me write it down in a more controlled form than I can in my poetry, though it does take me substantially longer to do so.
Unlike my poetry, my music almost always does have an extra message in it for those willing to listen carefully. Though most of what I've written is accompaniments to hymns, I use the music to reflect and often reinterpret the words--music as counterpoint to the text. I want to tell truth (as I know it) through the music, and truth isn't often what we want or expect to hear. I am picky about my texts because I don't like to write music that I don't believe. If I don't agree with the text, I end up having to make the music a parody or melodrama, even if most people don't hear it. Most of my music is about struggle, and if I can't fit or hear that struggling in the music, I normally end up disliking the piece, if I ever even finish it. There are occasional exceptions, but that's the general form.
I am the Opponent of Reposed Music. Life is not easy; therefore, reposed music is a lie.
And art must be honest.
Posted by at February 14, 2004 12:50 PM