Paul Schwartz | Essays

April 24, 2005 :: Onward

Sometimes there is a real tendency one has to write in a certain way for these little messages to the public. Almost like self-censorship. One imagines who the people are who come to the website, what they are expecting, and one tries to fulfill those expectations. It can get a little circular, and also a little dishonest.

Fact is, right now, I am engaged in a new project: a singer named Valerie McCarthy and I are working on something that could be described as an offshoot of ARIA. The difference is that all of the classical repetoire from which it is based consists of French art songs. So a little twist there.

But I am finding that this gets harder, not easier as time goes on. There is always the temptation to repeat the solutions one has used before. There is always the fear that what one is doing is trite, or violates what I like to think of as "musical morality". Sometimes I feel that I have lost that musical moral center. It's a constant gut check.

These last few days I've been adapting a song by FaurÈ. It's been a really confusing mixture of elation and despondency. I now have three completely distinct versions of it. Can't really decide what to do with any of them.

Hmmmmm

So there you have it. A less than fully self-confident epistle. This stuff is hard, and often I find that I don't believe in what I am doing. Little crises of confidence. There's always the voices inside me from my classical days that I hear either admonishing me or just plain sneering. Sometimes I inwardly cower, sometimes I think-tell them to go to hell. Depends on where I am in the process.