My most recent post indulged itself in a paean of praise about the Powell/Pressburger Black Narcissus, a 1947 British movie of rare enchantment, technique, and courageous creativity. In the midst of ooh-ing and aah-ing over the use of color, the striking screen compositions, the marvelous idea of a faux-religious gothic, I realized that part of my delight in Narcissus lay in my recently having sat/cringed through a movie that is Narcissus‘s polar opposite: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest widescreen thumpfest. Blatant, cynical, unimaginative, and uncreative, Apprentice rehashes every cliché in the summer-blockbuster playbook, adding fight scene upon car chase upon CGI monster upon slam bang soundtrack upon convoluted plot twist upon pointless love interest upon wan attempts at humor. When you get right down to it, Apprentice is emptiness trying to become somethingness. The only reason for its existence is to make money for all concerned; it undoubtedly will do so and thus we can count on more of such drivel showing up.
I wouldn’t have even bothered with it—Apprentice is not the sort of movie I ever attend voluntarily—but a friend of mine had decided to write it up for his column in a quasi-newspaper-blog that has just enough journalistic credibility to get him press passes to most entertainment events. He asked me to come along. I had said ‘no’ to several previous requests to attend junk I knew I would hate. So I went. And I cringed.
We live in a world in which inspiring flights of creative imagination exist side-by-side with routine flapdoodle and both find marketplace success. This is hardly a profound insight on my part. Every once in a long while posterity determines that the former flapdoodle is to be considered high art, or vice-versa, but such incidences are rare indeed. As a rule, junk is junk and no amount of commentarial filibustering will change that simple fact.
Regurgitation is easier than actual creativity, and safer as well. A former colleague of mine was always insisting "oh, let’s find out what the other conservatories are doing" any time we were contemplating a tweak to our departmental curriculum. That same colleague was forever saying "oh, let’s not reinvent the wheel here" and asking for everybody to share any materials they made for their classes. I certainly understand the rationale behind those statements. Nevertheless, they were dead wrong. As a department we can thrive only if we rely on our own imaginations, skill, experience, and musicianship. Our curriculum is already very similar to that of other conservatories—heck, the National Association of Schools of Music publishes guidelines that ensure that no accredited school colors too far outside the lines. There is little to be gained in basing our decisions on decisions made by other schools; that’s just an endless rehash, like those commentaries on the Buddhist sutras that comment on other commentaries that comment on other commentaries, generations of words piling up, more and more about less and less.
When uncreative people are corralled into a situation requiring honest-Injun creativity, they tend to react by retreating to the edges of two extremes. Either they burrow into the sand, like my colleague ever grasping at other peoples’ ideas and achievements, or they substitute freakishness in a desperate attempt to conjure up a masquerade of inspiration. Neither solution is worthwhile, although each is encountered often enough given the rarity of true creativity. No particular penalty attaches to head-in-the-sand safety, rehashing and recycling other people’s work—it may get the job done adequately. The freakier end of the spectrum is less often encountered given that it poses some distinct risks, the most glaring of which is that the charade will be recognized. The emperor is stark naked a lot more often than folks want to admit.
Consider those sad years of Western music, the 1950s. Great time to be a young couple on the way up the economic ladder. Lousy time to be a composer. Academics of all stripes had discovered safety in serialism; easy to copy and manipulate, it had acquired a recognizable international idiom that varied hardly a jot from Tennessee to Timbuktu. Small ensembles, vibraphones, pointillistic textures, short durations. Work up your rows and their manipulations, plop them down into notation, come up with some appropriately inscrutable title of Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit derivation, and there you are. Nobody seemed to care that there was nothing there. Your stream of cerebral blippity-bloops allowed you to continuing drawing down your genteel-poverty tenured salary.
Or you could go freaky. Run around the auditorium and spray shaving cream at the audience. Write a sonata for violin solo that consisted of the performer polishing the fiddle. Burn things, drop things in water, twirl things around your head. Lots of fun, and capable of generating almost endless philosophical discussion that put a spin of respectability on what less intellectually gifted folks just might call nonsense. A little tougher to pull off in a university environment, though.
In the meanwhile, Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, and their ilk—i.e., the real composers—kept on writing. Inspiration is never consistent and so of course they produced a varied output. But they’ve survived into repertory status while the shaving cream cans rust and the retrograde rows moulder.
Here is the best thing about honest creativity: it usually wins out in the long run. The rehashed and the freaky both fade away in time, but truly creative work persists. Furthermore, true creativity is typically recognizable from the get-go. I recall an instance from my early teens in which I picked up two LPs of music that was completely unknown to me, and pieces that both sounded like wild gibberish to my ears on first hearing. In the case of one work, Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, I began to replay the recording immediately, certain that repeated listenings would result in greater understanding, and I was right. In the case of the other, a Stockhausen job—Mikrophonie I—I stopped listening partway through the LP and never went back. It wasn’t worth the bother. For what it’s worth, Mikrophonie I seems to have sunk like a stone since its original 1965 outing, while the Bartók—well, it’s a repertory staple, recorded by the world’s greatest conductors and orchestras on numerous occasions. What, precisely, was I reacting to? Perhaps the Wikipedia article on Mikrophonie I may shed some light:
By comparison, from Wikipedia on the Bartók:
The second movement is quick, with a theme in 2/4 time which is transformed into 3/8 time towards the end. It is marked with loud syncopic piano and percussion accents in a whirling dance, evolving in an extended pizzicato section, with a piano concerto-like conclusion.
The third movement is slow, an example of what is often called Bartók’s "Night music", and features timpani glissandi which was an unusual technique at the time of the work’s composition, as well as a prominent part for the xylophone.
The last movement, which begins with notes on the timpani and strummed pizzicato chords on the strings, has the character of a lively folk dance.
Stockhausen: all about process. Bartók: all about music. Stockhausen: gimmick, restricted to a time and a venue. Bartók: musical composition, universal and universally fascinating.