Last Thursday, I gave a lecture supposedly about defining research to our postgraduates – academic, composing, performing and what all. I got my feet a bit tangled around the whole question of why a creative or performing artist should know about history, tradition, the music that has gone before (always a tricky issue, and one that raises hostility in some of the creative students). I said, I think – if I can remember just what came out of my mouth amid a welter of slightly conflicting intentions – that you wouldn't want to create work that had already been done (I didn't say the damning phrase "and perhaps better"). Aware that I was on thin ground, I moved on quickly....
Listening today to the Pop/Rock/Alt[ernative] genre tracks on my iTunes (they're bundled together because, well, for me it's rather hard to tell the difference – I tend to change my mind as to the distinctions from day to day; and the truth is they're only clearly different if you're a polemically aggressive journalist for Rolling Stone), I heard a song by Hungry Lucy called 'We Won't Go' (from Where's Neil When you Need Him?, a tribute album dedicated to Neil Gaiman and his works). A lovely, eerie song; associated with Gaiman's Wolves in the Walls, I think; and sung by the kind of little-known band that he loves (this is a bit like that chic-alternative cluster of science fiction writers from parts of the Midwest and Northwest who tend to bring alternative rock into their stories and novels).
Nice. But while listening to it, I kept thinking – ah that's lovely, sounds almost like... her voice is a lot like... the song recalls.... It must be maddening for any creative musician, but especially for the pop artist: the trap of history, the way anything they do sounds almost like something else. The endless avalanche of digital media, of preserved history, of remembered and discussed and loved and hated music, must make anyone trying to write a song feel as though they're mummified inside someone else's pyramid.
Not to mention our large gang of free improvisors – it is impossible not to notice the implied, sometimes desperate, background need to improvise your music, just so that you can't be accused of doing things that were done before. A predictable shift, as our Western/Teutonic aesthetic system of originality/individuality collapses under the weight of our own increasingly accumulated histories – until we become a culture that recalls the classical Chinese, or Egyptian, in their rigid, past-oriented hierarchies. (And maybe that's why there are so many right-wing powers these days – conservative governments abound, and the Vatican today decided to honor those who died in the Spanish Civil War – but only on the fascist side.)
Of course writers live out the same problems: wasn't it Dorothy Parker who used to say of Robert Benchley – her brilliant, funny colleague of whom they had such high expectations, who is now so competely forgotten – that he couldn't bear to be in libraries, in bookstores: the sheer mass of books, of people who had bled their lives out on the page, about whom nobody cared any more....
Perhaps I need to be a bit more careful in how I talk to our students. Or, at least, leave them a way out.
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