When songs are put together in a grouping, such as a set list, it's possible to see patterns emerge. Certain themes come up again and again. Particular chords are favoured. Melody lines are related. Sometimes songs seem to comment or refer to other songs. Recently the painter Robert Genn suggested in a letter that the same thing happens in painting. Artists are constantly "filling in the blanks" of a cohesive body of work or individual way of seeing the world.
I imagine this as if it's a jigsaw puzzle, but without the handy box-top that shows us the ultimate finished design. We don't know what the end is going to be. Is the puzzle going to be "solved", the picture "finished", the body of work complete by the time our life ends? Is the unfinishedness part of the picture? Are the gaps part of the answer to the puzzle?
One of the beautiful paradoxes of creative expression is that it helps to pay attention to both the "big picture" and the "little picture", and that it's difficult to do these two things simultaneously. As one spiritual teacher I know might say, "It takes practice".
When I'm thinking too much on the big intentions, lofty visions of my body of work and so on, I lose sight of the individual song or for that matter the individual note or chord. Only by paying close attention to them, by serving them in fact, can I lovingly coax a beautiful song into being.
On the other hand, when I take time to contemplate what the bigger picture on the boxtop might be--what is my concept of God, for instance, and what missing piece of the Universe may I be able to provide--the songs are stronger individually, they fit beautifully into cohesive set lists, and they are more useful in my life and the lives of others.
No comments:
Post a Comment