The opposite of a SHINYPERFECT
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if you’re not familiar with the Lichtenbergian concept of the shinyperfect, click here.
You’re familiar of course with the Lichtenbergian concept of the SHINYPERFECT: that beautiful — dare we say… perfect — idea for a painting or a song or a story or whatever it is that your brain just gave itself a high-five for thinking of, which it then hands off to you and expects you to actually create this perfect thing that is so far from perfect that you begin to suspect that your brain is screwing around with you.
(Which it is, but that’s for the neuroscientists to work on as they pursue their research in creativitronics.)
So what if I told you there was a creative state that is the opposite of the SHINYPERFECT?
Sounds promising, right? Rather than give you a fake SHINYPERFECT that you have to hammer into shape, the brain simply says, “This next little waltz needs to be rather Viennese, rather bumptious.” In other words, it just gives you a concept of an empty structure, a goal, but without the slightest bit of shiny.
Wait, where are you going? This is not a weird idea. This is how composers/lyricists of stage musicals work all the time: “This scene needs a love duet” — “On it.” And lo! there is a Tonight, tonight, won’t be just any night… where there wasn’t one before.
Likewise, back in the days of the symphonies that constitute our standard repertoire, a composer had to have some idea of what each movement needed to sound like, either to reflect or contrast with the movement before it. This “what the world needs now” feeling is what shifted us from Mozart’s minuet to Beethoven’s scherzo, and so on.
Which brings us to one of the two Little Waltzes I wrote this weekend. I made the conscious decision that at least two of the remaining three slots needed to be “rather Viennese, rather bumptious,” and so for one of them I imagined the shape of the opening phrase: an upward-bounding arpeggio with some kind of trill or ornament at the end.
I also decided I wanted a tumbling cascade of eighth notes as a phrase ender, which I went ahead and wrote first and stuck it a dozen measures away from the opening, where it stayed until the rest of the piece caught up with it.
But before I share this piece with you, we need to to decide what to call this antiSHINYPERFECT thing. It needs to be short and punchy, with the sense of a void with a lit staircase (?), a frame of a framework, a concept of a plan (to coin a phrase), a “what the world needs now” je ne sais quoi.
FRAMEPLAN
NEWFRAME
DARKPLAN
PLANFORWORLDDOMINATION
More work is required, as we say in the Lichtenbergian Society.
Anyway, here’s Little Waltz #8: Vivace | score [pdf]
And mp3:
Oooh, how about PRE-GESTALT? ANTEGESTALT? Ick.
