Doubting my Originality

I am questioning my musical originality these days. Perhaps I am a thief of sorts or maybe all of us are thieves of one kind or another. Or, even more shocking, maybe it is okay to be a thief in the arts. After all, we study, learn, absorb, and embrace the arts on a daily, sometimes an hourly, basis. Music is all around us in one form or another and I cannot seem to get enough of it. As a writer learns from the literary masters and is frequently reading in order to hone his craft as a writer, a musician is frequently listening which in turn hones his craft and his art as a composer. This is true regardless of the selected genre.

An artist receives inspiration from many sources among which are nature, people, events, and visual imagery that surrounds us on all fronts. He benefits from other artists, as well as the events and sights encompassing his experience, including the myriad of emotions driving his greater need for visual expression. What artist has not visited an art museum only then to draw from the success of others in creating his own language? It could be as simple as a combination of paint choices, or shadows, or another way to present a theme. Even as I study today's Picasso on this blog, I realize that while unique and original to an extent, Picasso, with tremendous skill and creativity, also borrows from previously existing sources.

In music, there are 12 different notes that were established many years ago and expected rhythm patterns that can match those notes. Add expression markings, staff lines, and an infinite number of instrumental and vocal combinations not to mention text, there is plenty of material to keep a composer busy for a lifetime. But let's look at this another way: what if in fact musicians have simply been borrowing ideas for years and putting those ideas together in different ways? After all, when a composer writes a series of eighth notes, he did not invent the notes. They exist as the tools available. One cannot invent a hammer for it already exists. Perhaps a tool maker can improve on a hammer or change its shape or color or materials, but truthfully the hammer is still the hammer. Eighth notes are still eighth notes. They might be fast or slow or loud or be done by different instruments, or there might be two of them or hundreds of them, but nevertheless they are still eighth notes. I might use them in a creative way, but I have still borrowed the tool, the idea, at least to an extent.

Listening to hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces, songs, musical works each year ranging from popular music to art music to film music, including sacred, secular, folk, children's and educational music, there is no doubt in my mind that we composers are borrowing and therefore benefiting from previous invention of Western music as currently notated. Sure we add, change, alter, even create sounds, but are they really "created" from nothing, purely from the imagination? or are they drawn from the myriad sounds that encompass our world, enter our thoughts, and expressed through music on the page?

It is not possible to divorce the world around us and operate completely in a creative vacuum devoid of all external influence. Not only that, it really is not desirable to do so. All artists in all genres gain from the historical, and certainly vast, human experience developed through the expression of hundreds of thousands of years of individual creativity. On the negative side, this could mean that there is little being produced that is entirely original, but on the positive side, there seems to be room for personal expression, application of emotions, and a way to put "me" into the world.

In most ways, I am comforted to know that I can still create music and that people enjoy hearing my creation (unfortunately, there are many exceptions to this!). Yet I am also aware that my own music and the music I hear is not really entirely original but in truth is an amalgamation and manifestation of history and current culture. Perhaps I should thank the early masters, the ones who struggled with how to organize music in the way we have it now, the ones who gave me the tools I now use. Acknowledging their work does not inhibit further personal creation, instead it actually sparks in me greater possibilities for expression. Onward I go!