Sphinx

Final jazz composition class of the year, and, no, to be honest I didn’t really want to spend the first part of it discussing creative processes and the things that get in the way of writing. In musical terms, it’s a very interesting question, and I’ve made enormous progress this year; I had not realised quite how much I like being given homework on a weekly basis, but this is not just about having a structured task to complete but also learning the importance of setting parameters – rather than “go away and write something”, it’s a matter of e.g. “go away and write something featuring fourths”, immediately giving a focus for one’s efforts, and that then reinforces the need to set some other parameters for oneself, at least as a starting point. It works both as a learning experience (getting a really good understanding of fourths by exploring the different things you can do with them in the process of trying to produce something that sounds half decent) and as a structure for the process, and I’m going to see how to replicate this in some of next year’s teaching – tricky, since this is about developing skills more than learning content, whereas ancient history courses tend to be more the other way round, or at least the skills are developed in parallel over the course of the year rather than explored one by one, but not impossible…

No, the problem with thinking about creative processes is that I can’t help thinking about my academic writing as well, and that is much less fun. Why is it so much more painful and difficult? The answer is obvious: the music is entirely stake-free, as I’m doing it solely for my own private pleasure, and so while there is personal pride involved in trying to produce something that pleases me and doesn’t get too heavily criticised, it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit rubbish. It also helps that I can think of it as a technical exercise that doesn’t have to be perfect, just whatever I can manage to do in the week given these parameters – the moment I start thinking of a composition in terms of art, at least at the beginning, creativity evaporates in the face of the overwhelming range of possibilities and the vast number of examples of things that will always be so much better. So composition is above all playful, an end in itself, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus.

Academic writing is… not like this. It sometimes was in the past, when I was younger and had more energy and less fear, and the stakes felt lower – how much that is due to the fact that the job market was much less vicious and universities were less obsessive about progression criteria, and how due to my own naive obliviousness and general lack of seriousness, I’m not entirely sure. Now, it feels almost impossible that writing could ever feel like play – pleasure, sometimes, but a very serious grown-up sort of pleasure – at the very least, so long as it’s dominated by trying to catch up with the lengthy backlog of things I agreed to do ages ago. I can’t treat it as an end in itself (it’s always being written for something and/or someone else, and if I was completely free from such obligations I’m not sure I’d choose to do these particular things), I can’t think of it as a technical exercise or exploration of a key point or skill for my own benefit, it can’t just be ‘this is what I could get done in a week’ good enough, it is always going to be public rather than private.

What I have now that I didn’t have then is a lot more knowledge and experience; enough that I can feel quite confident that an idea is relatively original and worth pursuing, when I have one, and enough that I could, so to speak, simply improvise around that idea by drawing on a repertoire of familiar material. That works pretty well for talks and seminars – the live performance, if you will – and less well in writing where the audience generally expects a bit more polish and depth. And I don’t want to be the sort of performer who basically relies on the same old routines with minor variations (heckle from audience: Too late, Morley!); if an idea is actually decent, it ought to be developed properly, and explored in depth, not just used to embellish a familiar chord sequence…

Whether in jazz or academia, anyone who’s enjoyed a degree of success tends to become their own tribute act, or at least has to confront the expectations raised by their own past. My secret aspiration was always to be a historical/classical Miles Davis or Wayne Shorter or Anthony Braxton, experimenting and genre-hopping and confounding expectations to the end. Thinking that aloud is of course the royal road to crippling self-doubt. A better, more realistic model is offered by those composers and musicians who found their basic idiom quite early on, but were then able to make new and beautiful music within those parameters for the rest of their careers – McCoy Tyner, say. But what stands out there is the continuing joy and enthusiasm, never just going through the motions; playing familiar tunes because there is always something new to be done with them, not just because that’s what’s expected.

Unlike with my amateur efforts at composition, with academic writing the fear of failure is always going to be there (the closure of and threats to humanities departments in the UK and elsewhere, and the firing of an Exeter colleague for failing to get a book written don’t do anything to relieve this). The composition does, however, offer a reminder of what the creative process ought to be like, at least occasionally – and, more practically, a reminder of the fact that there can be different routes to the same goal. I am aware of a tendency to wait until I feel inspired and the conditions are perfect for writing – which of course provides ample grounds for procrastination, not making the attempt because things aren’t just right. One thing the jazz has shown me is that often inspiration can emerge from the more craft-like process of just organising material and trying out different things with a vague general goal and some basic parameters.

In other words, stop trying to write Blood Count by staring at a blank piece of manuscript paper, and start by tinkering with some of the chords in a 12-bar blues to see what happens…