My failure: a true confession
/I have a confession and a revelation.
As you may know, I completely failed in my Lichtenbergian Proposed Effort for 2019 to compose “Ten Little Waltzes.” I failed to compose anything, actually. This has bothered me, even though I have tried to rationalize it with the comforting thought that since no one ever actually plays my music, how can I fairly claim to be failing?
At any rate, recently I was browsing some of my old posts over on my personal blog, dalelyles.com, and I came across a report from the Lichtenbergian Retreat of 2016. At that point, I was working on the ABORTIVE ATTEMPT of SUN TRUE FIRE, a putative orchestral/choral setting of an amazing piece of spam text that attempted to land in my inbox one day.
There were three mp3s linked in that post. One was an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT on the opening, one for the closing, and then a silly little two-part waltz that was quirky and actually perfect. (I may claim it for “Ten Little Waltzes.”)
It was the opening and closing files that gave me pause.
Here, listen:
They’re both good, but the second one, the closing piece, rattled me especially. This is good. I mean, really good. And all I could think was, “Who wrote this??” How could I have written anything this good, not done anything with it, and now three years later I can’t produce even one silly piano waltz in twelve months, much less ten?
Full confession: I don’t whine on this blog, but I have been at a loss to explain my inability to compose a single real note last year. Am I done? Like Charles Ives, who one day came downstairs and tearfully told his wife that “nothing sounds right”? Or is it just fear or laziness stopping me? It’s been a dark night of the soul, for sure.
Last night I spent some time by the fire meditating (inside, thank you—it’s freezing out there), but also had the chance to go out to the back yard and walk the labyrinth to give some thought to this issue.
Here’s what I wrote in my journal (slightly edited):
Walked the labyrinth a couple of times—this last time, in answer to the question, “Who wrote this music??”—I did. The fact that this music exists at all is because I BLUNDERED AND FUPPED MY WAY THROUGH EVERY. FUPPING. NOTE.
I can blunder and fupp my way through the next note.
I have written some really beautiful and some really powerful music in my time, but here’s the deal: I am in no way a trained composer. I’ve STOLEN FROM THE BEST to learn what I’m doing, but I do not know what I’m doing. (If I did, I would have composed a lot more music that I have done by now.)
So yeah, for whatever reason I let myself fail at composing this past year—Failure is always an option, after all—but the reason is not that I can’t do it. I can do it—I just have to decide to embrace the failure and scrape out the next piece.*
Almost as if I had written a book on this very topic. Heh.
* The next piece is going to be incidental music for As You Like It.
