I have come to accept that my muse Doris is a morning girl. She does her thing very well when the sun’s in the East, but once we hit the afternoon she’s ready to pack it in for the day. Ol’ Doris (she doesn’t mind my calling her old; she’s a muse, dammit, born about 800 BCE in Delphi or thereabouts) gave me dramatic proof of her rise-‘n’-shine-iness this morning as I was fashioning a short program note on the Overture to Franz Ignaz Beck’s ballet La mort d’Orphée, an action-packed hit from the 1780s.
Doris kept up a steady chatter in my head, coaching and correcting and suggesting and in general doing her muse-y best. We danced a merry quadrille and after about an hour I had those paragraphs in the can. 350 good words, all rolling along with a dandy rhythmic flow and conveying the information with a pleasing panache while remaining free of extraneous glop. I broke off at midday for a few appointments and a lunch date; when I returned I decided to see if I couldn’t recapture the morning’s sparkle with notes on a pasticcio Mozart horn concerto.
No go. Oh, I wrote the thing. But it’s ungainly, ugly, bumpy and frumpy and unworthy of being extruded from my Mac Pro onto a printed page. Its destruction is imminent. Doris will shred it to ribbons come tomorrow A.M., probably while spitting out foul-mouthed epithets in Aeolic Greek. In all likelihood I’ll have a decent pasticcio article by noon and Doris can settle back with her olives, her Ouzo, and her poetic Ladies of Lesbos.
I just don’t write well at night or even in the later afternoon. At some point in my life I transformed from being a vampiric Night Person into an up-with-the-chipmunks guy who is mentally and physically en pointe before noon and increasingly flatfooted thereafter. Thus my dear muse Doris reflects my mindstate, boinking into existence easily in the morning, but ever more reluctantly as the hours pass. By evening Doris has wafted off to Delos or Corfu or Samos or wherever it is she goes when she’s off duty, leaving me good mostly for passive pursuits; I can watch TV, read, or listen to music just fine. I’m excellent at having dinner and knocking off a few glasses of wine. I can lecture up a storm. But I just can’t write worth shit at night.
Once in a while I’ve been obliged to suck it in and Get On With It anyway. I’m very pleased with my liner notes to the Philharmonia Baroque’s recent CD of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s radiant 1995 performance of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Éte. (Want a copy? Go here.) But I must admit that sometimes I felt as though I were extracting those thousand-ish words with pliers. I had no choice in the matter; as usual the assignment arrived on rush-job status and I was in the midst of a ton o’ daytime work, so it was write at night or miss the deadline. And I don’t miss deadines. Ever. But I wrote that one mostly without Doris’ help—and I missed her dreadfully.
Over the past holiday break I was faced with the interesting (!) challenge of writing six full programs over the course of about two weeks. I did it. But I wasn’t teaching during the day, so Doris and I did most of the heavy lifting in the mornings. I reserved the afternoons for research. At night I would go into editing mode, scouring my printed pages and seeking out malefactors to be executed or marking passages that needed a rewrite. But the rewrite waited until morning, when my mind was fresh and Doris was tripping hither and yon.
Thus one sets one’s pace. Thirty years ago I would have been at my best past midnight, tippy-tapping away while the neighborhood slept. But not now. Maybe I’m just turning into an old fart. But compared to Doris I’m still a kid, not even a century old. That’s perspective. Doris has been a good and faithful companion for many years, just as adept at concocting on-the-spot harmonic progressions and dictation melodies as she is at fashioning sassy sentences about Salieri. She used to be pretty good at computer programming. She can cook. And occasionally she still comes up with intriguing notions about piano playing, bless her Hellenic little heart.
So sleep well, old girl, and we’ll meet again in the morning.