Paul Schwartz | Essays

January 5, 2005 :: further thoughts on creativity

This Twyla questionaire has really got me thinking.

One of the things that I remember from very early in my life is that I was always attracted to the graphic impulse in composition. By which I mean that there is something aesthetically pleasing about the way scores look on the page, and the impulse to make graphic objects was very much a part of how I came to write music.

I clearly remember when I was around 4 or 5 making a page of music. I didn't read music at that point, but I had seen it around because of my father. I remember making a key signature that had two sharps, though not the right two sharps to actually make D major. (How does one remember these things?) I wrote notes on the page in a way that I found pleasing to the eye. It was my "composition". That was my first conscious act that reinforced the idea that music was not just aural.

Later, my first real composition teacher: a formidable old English woman named Elizabeth Lutyens, very forcefully made the point that my scores had to be immaculate. Anything less was unprofessional. (another aside here: in all my musical schooling in London in the mid 70s, professionalism was stressed above almost anything else. Being on time, making your scores virtually print quality, rehearsal ettiquette......these were all taught as indispensible. I don't get that impression with 17 - 20 year olds in the US today)

By the time I came to write Virgin Forest, a ballet score from 1987, I spent hours configuring the music on the page. I remember getting up on New Years Day, 1987, VERY hungover, and sitting down to orchestrate and notate 16 bars of music that I had sketched the day before. It was graphically complicated: lots of notes, that had to be spread around the orchestra to make a shimmer. When I finished, I looked up, and 14 hours had gone by. Like nothing. I hadn't eaten all day. I was completely absorbed in the pages.

Now, of course, the computer takes care of layout for you. Which is great on one level: I mean, I could never do it as well. However I do miss the pencil and ruler, and the sense that proper order and design on the page would help me have the discipline to bring order and design to the aural phenomena too.