# Inspiration or hard work pt.1



## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

During the creation of a work of art, or even before, through the processes of planning and
sketching, the artist must, at some point, have become conscious of the subject matter with which he or she intends to deal. This is not to say that it is the first time the subject occupiesthe mind of the artist. He may have known of the subject for a long time but certain aspectsof it may have changed and, in turn, altered his perspective of it. He may have been dealing subconsciously with certain ideas which surface in the course his artistic pursuit. Or indeed he may be encountering the subject for the first time and find that it has such an effect on him that he is 'inspired' in that moment of discovery. 

So what is it that happens at that point when an artist discovers his inspiration?
How does the subject change the artist from latent to inspired? What is the process of 
sublimation which allows or forces the artist to create under the influence of such subject 
matter? 

Artists act upon a need to express their personal relationship
with certain other things such as people, objects, states of mind, emotions, politics, human
conditions, life, death, truth, the universe and any other subject matter which they find 
themselves unable to externalise through words or actions other than art. I can explain this with an example: Let's say that you experience a great shock like seeing someone being knocked down in a traffic accident. You talk about this to family and friends who support you as best they can but you cannot get a feeling of helplessness out of your system just by talking. If you are an artistically inclined person you may find that the only way to externalise this relationship with the pointless loss of life is to create something. You sublimate this emotion into creativity. As such, one would expect the work resulting from this sublimation to have some relationship too with the subject matter, but this not as clear a corresponence as one might think. The direct relationship between inspiration and artwork is a naive expectation. 

Ever since man tried to express himself in art he has never been satisfied with mere pictorial or 'factual' representation of the world about him; he has always added a 'perspective' either his own or the patron's or the viewer's or the subject's. The intervention or intercedence of the artist between viewer and subject always reflects his relationship with the subject matter, in fact with the whole discourse of subject-artist-artwork-viewer.

Here we are also interested in how the artist knows when his relationship with a certain subject is going to be fruitful as inspiration. When does he know that he is going to create something which he would like to be considered as art? Artists, in the majoritry, tend to 'doodle'. They leave sketches and plans of works which we can look at, if they allow us, and from these we can deduce a great deal about the point where they considered the subject matter ready for serious attention. Of course we can site the cases of artists who feel an inexorableurge to create something - to externalise inner urges we can and say that in these situations the processing begins with the inception of the idea. That is to say, there is no doodling, just the work.

It could be said that Beethoven has left us a huge legacy of how the composers mind works leading up to the final creation whereas Mozart has denied us this privilage by writing his scores in an almost completely finished version at once.


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## Guest (Dec 27, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> Artists act upon a need to express their personal relationship with certain other things such as people, objects, states of mind, emotions, politics, human conditions, life, death, truth, the universe and any other subject matter which they find themselves unable to externalise through words or actions other than art.


This may be true for some works of art, or for some artists, but I don't think this is universally so. That every human has relationships is certainly true, but that artists need to express those relationships, to externalize them in art, is questionable. At least, I'm questioning it now!

Indeed, the ancient notion of "inspiration" suggests that one is expressing (if even that is at all the right word) something quite other than one's self, one's personal anything. That one is a conduit as it were for something outside of one's self.

Otherwise, it's necessary to also recognize that our conception of "self" and "outside" are quite different from how they were in the past. In a way, our modern assumptions of self and outside and even relationship (in so far as it presumes otherness) are markedly alien to how people saw themselves even as recently as the middle ages. In short, I think you've opened a can of worms and thus will never get any sort of satisfactory answers to your questions. (Or, to put it another way, you may want to spend some time questioning all your assumptions behind your questions.)


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

I agree that self conciousness has developed since the middle ages and that artists are not limited to expressing things within themselves (this is a romantic idea). But my (well veiled) question has more to do with inspiration where ever that my derive it's source. 
And yes I deliberately got the can opener out for this one! I'm fed up with - 'Cheese! is it any GOOD??' threads! 
I even went for the can marked 'worms'!
FC


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> So what is it that happens at that point when an artist discovers his inspiration?
> How does the subject change the artist from latent to inspired? What is the process of
> sublimation which allows or forces the artist to create under the influence of such subject
> matter?


One possible approach is to ask the artists themselves about this, but in the few instances where I've been able to do it myself (or at secondhand, via an interviewer, say), they often can't answer clearly. I recall an interview with Bob Dylan, where the suggestion was put that the songs came down to him from some kind of pipe from 'out there', and he looked incredulous at that, paused, and then said 'Man, I just write 'em'.

Sandra Blow used to say that when she started making abstract paintings in the late 1950s, she didn't know how to do it; she couldn't understand how to get the feeling into it. Then she decided just to concentrate on getting the architecture of the picture right, and hope that the feeling would come through of itself - and so began a lifetime of immensely successful abstract experimentation, producing pictures that seem flooded with meaning, yet which defy analysis of what that meaning might be.

Even in my own small way, I've experienced the mystery of it with my writing. I'll struggle for hours, days, lose any sense of whether what I'm writing is any good, piecing it together, brick by brick, like the palace in Johnson's _Rasselas_; then, later, I'll read it and be amazed: 'Did _I _write _that?_ Where did it come from? I can't remember writing it!'

You're a composer and musician, Fergus. Can you identify how it works, for you? Or do you, when all's said, look at it afterwards with no clear idea of where it came from?


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

I can feel a sort of process giong on and at some point of which I'm unconscious, my sketching gets the seal of aproval and ends up in the piece. Why this happens I'm not sure but for many artists and composers it happens without thinking. I have a lot of sketches for works and they total usually about 2 or 3 times as long as the finished piece. What drives my judgement of this switch from sketch to final choice is quite often something very mundane like deadlines or getting bored with doodling. Great composers throughout history have had different reasons for the 'switch', Haydn had the insaitable Esterhazy, Beethoven had his publisher breathing down his neck, Liszt had his concert schedule. I too have the game designers pushing for finished pistes! Are we conning the public about inspiration or is this really part of the process?


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> Are we conning the public about inspiration or is this really part of the process?


I don't think it's a con. The deadline is only a catalyst, not the agent that produces the art. I think the reason why such unsatisfactory answers are given by so many artists is that they genuinely don't know what happens during the critical creative moments. All the preparation, all the 'sketching' - they lay the groundwork, but at some stage something has to inject the life into the thing.

I had a friend - a wonderful potter, who lived and breathed for his art. And he used to say that he came to the point where he'd done as much as his lifetime's experience, and all the craftsmanship and technical skill he'd accumulated, could achieve; and at that point the pot went into the kiln, and what happened next depended entirely on what he called 'the gift of the fire'. It seemed to me that in his case this act of putting the pot into the kiln was both literal and symbolic. His kiln was like your deadline. He really was, literally, dependent on the fire's generosity at the end. But that 'gift of the fire' stands as a symbol for the essential inspirational ingredient that has to be present in every work of art if it's going to be great, and it can't be summoned at will. The artist prepares his ground, and hopes.


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## Guest (Dec 29, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> I even went for the can marked 'worms'!


Haha! That's what I like to see. Well, OK then!!


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## SPR (Nov 12, 2008)

The more I study art or the creation process, the more I come to believe that new and/or beautiful work (in a classical sense... I do not mean 'pretty') is the result of dedicated, dilligent - often single minded, relentless work. I think the concept of 'divine inspiration' is, by _*far*_, the smaller contributor. I think I said something similar in a different thread, but to me there is a tipping point where knowledge and familiarity with a subject matter and a medium.... eventually.... leads beyond mere craftsmanship and begins to express itself as genius. True, inspiration, that 'eureka!' lightning bolt to the brain stem can be an unforgettable moment leading to new expressions and pathways - but I believe sudden insight is more often the product of hard work leading to new perspectives, and less often the other way around.

PostMin... you mentioned _It could be said that Beethoven has left us a huge legacy of how the composers mind works leading up to the final creation whereas Mozart has denied us this privilage by writing his scores in an almost completely finished version at once. _

I sort of resist the temptation of believing that 'understand(ing) how the composers mind works' can lead to any important revelations on the creative process to each of us as individuals, though that may not be at all what you meant. Even if we had complete 'blueprints', that does not, cannot make one understand art and creation fully. I can read a basketfull of books on medicine and not be very good doctor when I am done. From the outside looking in at the development of Dickens writing, Davincis paintings, The Wright brothers design revisions, Beethovens compositions - as well as Mozarts through his letters and correspondence can be intensely fascinating to get a glimpse of the thought and revision process that came to bear such fruit. Though there may not be as much evidence remaining in Mozarts work to help illustrate the process for us, Mozart himself admits to the hard work leading up to (for example) his quartets dedicated to Haydn... where he states in the dedication... _"...They are, indeed, the fruit of a long and laborious study...." _

Sorry - I am babling at this point. I think the point I am trying to make is that creation and inspiration seem to me to be more a product of study and work. Its to me a bit amusing when someone asks, for example, a writer... to explain, illustrate or define the 'creative process' as if having some recipe would be in some way helpful. I would argue that it is not. Interesting - certainly.. undoubtedly. Helpful for us perhaps to be better creators - to help is find out own inspiration in whatever we do - I say not a chance. You want inspiration? _*get to work.*_


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

SPR said:


> I think the point I am trying to make is that creation and inspiration seem to me to be more a product of study and work.


I absolutely agree! I start with a commission, say, for a theme tume for a radio show and the only way to face this situation is by applying technique, not inspiration. After a few hours of smaking my technique about something happens and a melody or a chord sequence or a rhythm sticks out and that gets worked on until there is enough of the idea showing 'above the surface' to see if it's worth finishing off (again with pure technique). What has intrigued me for along time and is the crux of this thread is not so much the proportions of work/inspiration but the blending boundaries between them.
Did the inspiration come out of the hard work? 100% you bet! But what was the catalyst and what was it that made me recognize the difference?
I have poured over composers sketches from Beethoven to Janacek and there never seems to be a point where they draw a red ring around a few notes and write beside it: 'This is the one!'. My own notebooks are abit like this too but I;m must say vainly that this is more a result of not wanting to ditch material in case I can use it later on. It may be a romantic notion but I can't see Beethoven consiously not scratching out some sketch in case he can use it in another piece later. Film composers are almost forced by circumstance to do this with almost everything they write and if you look at consecutive scores of most film composers you can almost always hear a kind of leftover course being served somewhere! Computers have also made storing all your sketches easier but it has also made it easier to discard. (I have fallen foul of storage systems over the years.) 
Time to post as I too have rambled bit!


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> My own notebooks are abit like this too but I;m must say vainly that this is more a result of not wanting to ditch material in case I can use it later on. It may be a romantic notion but I can't see Beethoven consiously not scratching out some sketch in case he can use it in another piece later.


Hanging onto sketches in this way isn't at all unusual in the visual arts. Turner continually went back to early material and reworked it as his experience developed. The famous _Norham Castle, Sunrise_ was the final statement of a series of pictures all based on a single sketch he made decades earlier. Most of Constable's masterpieces are based on a small number of sketches he made in a couple of sketchbooks around 1814.

Of course all this emphasises the 'hard work' element. They needed that backlog of work. But the moment of realisation that led to them recognising another vital use for the old sketch remains as mysterious as ever.


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## Herzeleide (Feb 25, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> Artists act upon a need to express their personal relationship with certain other things such as people, objects, states of mind, emotions, politics, human conditions, life, death, truth, the universe and any other subject matter which they find themselves unable to externalise through words or actions other than art.


As a composer I act upon a need to express my personal relationship exclusively with music. I'm wholly and exclusively concerned with the music and the technique of putting it together. This is what I consider to be the role of the composer.

I agree with Robin Holloway (Professor of Composition at Cambridge):

'Music is about notes, whether the upshot is Tristan's delirium, Tchaikovsky's floods of passion, cardiac convulsions in Mahler or Berg, or any sonata, trio, quartet, symphony by Haydn. If it's not good composing, neither is it good expression of emotion, or depiction of a character, or evocation of sunlight playing on the waves and all the rest. If 'words not ideas, make a poem', how much more true for the relatively unconnotational art of music. Not passions, neuroses, concepts, pictures or any other extraneous intentions make a piece of music, but pitches, rhythms, durations, timbres, in all their infinite potential for organized combination.'

This 'upshot' I find is at total odds with the act of composition. I also agree with Oliver Knussen:

'We return to Knussen's Takemitsu piece unexpectedly when I ask him about a comment he once made - "You don't plumb your depths to write a terribly self-expressive piece"; so does he agree with Stravinsky that music could not express anything?

"Ooh no," he says, most emphatically. "No, that's quite precise. He said 'Music by its very nature is not capable of expressing anything'. Now, listen to one bar of The Rake's Progress, or The Fairy's Kiss or the Requiem Canticles, and you realise that it's either a major smokescreen or he meant something else. But what I think he meant was 'not capable of expressing anything concrete'. Now I don't think a composer who is actually writing a piece of music should be conscious of self-expression. I hate the idea of somebody sitting down and thinking 'Alright, I feel sad' or 'My cat's just died. I'm going to write a Requiem Mass for the cat'.

"On the other hand if somebody wants to remember something - for example look at what I did with the Prayer Bell sketch, the piano piece in memory of Takemitsu: he was a person I cared a lot about as a friend - I was devastated when he died. I took a chord that he used in virtually every one of his pieces in the '80s and I took a title that he hadn't used - because he was going to write a piece called Prayer Bell at some point - and I took various little objects that reminded me of him in that way, and I then fashioned a little piece from that; it was like taking his chord for a walk around various objects that I associated with him, or various ways of thinking. But you have to invent technical procedures to do that.

"I'll give you another example: the little piece Songs without Voices [1991-2], which is in memory of Panufnik. Now various people have said to me that's very 'touching' or very 'sad'. Actually I sat down and I thought, 'Why do I find Panufnik's music interesting - I find it interesting because the way he uses and manipulates cells [very short musical ideas]. Now what would happen if I manipulated cells?' So that's what I did, and it was like a little counterpoint exercise of a certain kind. Now, the fact that one was feeling something at the time it seems to me affects what at that moment seems to you to be right notes or the wrong notes, and that certain things will fit into a certain mood or atmosphere - that I have no problem with at all. If the piece turns out to be 'touching' as a memorial, then the composer has done his job well. If the composer sat down and says 'I going to write a touching piece; I don't want a dry eye in the house', I think that's disgusting. It's manipulative, and I'm not interested in manipulating except obviously you have to if you're writing dramatic music."'


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

Herzeleide said:


> I'll give you another example: the little piece Songs without Voices [1991-2], which is in memory of Panufnik. Now various people have said to me that's very 'touching' or very 'sad'. Actually I sat down and I thought, 'Why do I find Panufnik's music interesting - I find it interesting because the way he uses and manipulates cells [very short musical ideas]. Now what would happen if I manipulated cells?' So that's what I did, and it was like a little counterpoint exercise of a certain kind.


That seems a pretty close parallel to the example of Sandra Blow I mentioned in #4. You don't set out to express feeling, as such; you set out to contruct the architecture of the piece. And then the 'something' that's experienced by the listener comes through that.

There is another kind of creative process though, that may work differently - the one used by Ted Hughes when writing poetry. I've written about it already somewhere here. I'll see if i can find it and report back.


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