2014/05/06

Where do ideas come from?

You'd be really lucky if the whole of any idea arrived in a dream - and plainly, unless you’re a total eejit, you filter it throu your consciousness. You have to, how else would it get into communicable form? But the main thing I get from working in a respectful relationship with the subconscious is a kind of authenticity that rarely comes in any other way.

    The big change I underwent during my 20 years in the wilderness was allowing my mind to evolve (/be remade) so that now instead of my conscious mind pummelling my subconscious for things to sell I now use my conscious mind as the servant or secretary of my subconscious. Thus I depend on ideas emerging (whether in dream or otherhow) with a clear feeling tone, which I can then extract & extend by such craft as I have acquired.

    It means that I'm not beholden to other people’s opinions for what I do - FBOW. My principal concern is to ensure that what I produce has an internal integrity & logic in relation to the unique feeling world of each idea. That way I feel I have ‘acquitted my soul’, as George Fox was won't to say when he was being particularly rambunctious with the Restoration authorities.

    Thus it's no accident that most of what I feel led to compose is sacred /visionary music. To date this is of no interest to anyone. This has led me to think deeply about what the nature of ‘virtu’ or inner energy is in works of art, and to study the way in which structure & craftsmanship are valuable aids to providing others with entry points to the heart of a work of art when its ‘moral content’ (by which I mean intentionality) is not necessarily evident, possibly due to the differing perspective of creator & a potential interpreter.

    The (inarticulate) thing which I feel I'm ‘given’, which in fact I voluntarily entered the wilderness to learn how to express, reflects a personal perspective on, & evolved relationship with, the otherness which inhabits each human consciousness. Each person will cognise this otherness (or not) in their own terms seeing it either as ’that of God within’ or simply as the ultimate extension of the human mind. I'm easy with either.

    But expressing my sense of this otherness (without necessarily even fully comprehending it) is what I feel my principal creative task is. All the rest is (often very pleasurable) froth. What gives me quiet confidence that the music nobody knows about does in fact have merit and will in the long run be heard - tho very possibly not in my lifetime - is that I'm content that it authentically (re)presents my sense of this otherness. And I believe that it thus has the capacity to touch certain experiential archetypes in the way that Byrd or Vittoria do, or in the operatic case Janacek or Tchaikovsky. If I'm right, good: if I'm wrong, good. It’s not an indictable offence and no animals died in the process!