My resolution

I’m not always a very self-motivated person. I get powerfully interested in things, but lack the discipline to see them to completion.

That’s a preface to say that I’m disappointed that I haven’t written more music. Particularly, music that has a life beyond a degree portfolio and/or being listened to once (out of courtesy) by a handful of people. That’s not to say that I wish I was writing pop tunes for Billboard ‘artists’. It is to say that I’ve become completely dissatisfied with the idea of art as some kind of technical achievement of form; or even worse, the means of self-expression! I like what Tolstoy had to say (emphasis mine, apologies for the gender bias):

Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression. …

The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. … And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based. …

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art. …

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men. …

There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint on reading, hearing, or seeing another man’s work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art. And however poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that feeling (quite distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (those who are also infected by it). … The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s – as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist – not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.

Now, I’m bothered by the narrow focus on “feeling” and “emotion.” I think I would like to expand it to include attitudes, states of mind, even vaguer things that I can’t put into words. But the point which I am trying to internalise is that art is communication — but no, even that is too shallow, it’s not merely the transmission of something — art is communion.

I’m sick of art that is the voice of an isolated individual shouting to an unresponsive world from a mountaintop. I’ve been guilty of that, especially because I’ve embraced some unusual ideas and methods. That doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon those things. It means that I want to rethink their role in a relational context of a community of listeners and co-creators.

What community of listeners, you may ask (politely)? And what music am I writing? I’ll share some thoughts and sounds with you next time. For now, this is my resolution: to pursue music, communication, relationships, and communion.