Meditation on the Creative Process
by Nicholas Politi
When I listen to music, I tend to think acutely about the music I’m listening to. I consider the musical devices that are present and try to make sense of them in my own way. But when I create music, musical devices aren’t much of a foundational consideration at all. Rather, I think of music-making as world-making. In this sense, my writing process always begins with musing on the nature of reality itself. Modern science teaches the idea that the universe began with the big bang. In my view, the big bang was only the activation of a process whose conditions were previously considered, refined and prepared for execution. It was the flick of a switch on an immensely sophisticated and powerful machine. In the same way, I try to create the conditions that will allow a work of music to flourish before I sit down and write it. The reason I compose is to feel more connected to reality, as if what I’m creating is an extension of something that was already there, waiting to be manifested. That something is everything: the everything-space that our world occupies. The ideas that occur to me in the compositional process are part of an infinite set of possibilities that are not my own, but which I distill into a linear, finite stream of musical consciousness. What is so beautiful about music (and all artistic media) is that these infinite possibilities are available to everyone in unique, profoundly personal ways.
My creative process begins with flicking a switch to activate some kind of musical world. Once this world’s mechanics become operational, I step out of the role of world-maker and into a role closer to that of a natural photographer. Instead of consciously manipulating the ways that the world operates, I distance myself from the world so I can take snapshots as it unfolds. The writing process isn’t about taking control over a world - it’s about creating the conditions to free oneself from the need to control a world. None of this philosophical (and indeed metaphysical) thinking is particularly musical. The process that allows the world to eventually live and breathe on its own is of more creative import to me than the music’s sonic design. Instead of explicitly repurposing musical devices that have appeared over the course of human history, I broadly accept that some degree of this history is already within me as a result of having actively listened to and studied music for most of my life. Canonical devices and past paradigms will appear regardless of my creative instincts at a given point in time.
One of the foundational conditions of my writing process is instrumentation - I’ll consider the instruments that will be making sound, and thus manifesting the world I’m trying to create. Within these instruments is an ocean of possibilities. Flicking the on-switch for a musical world initially involves visualizing those instruments and the people playing them, simulating a concert experience in real-time. Just as a natural photographer takes snapshots of a given space they intend to make visibly accessible, I record the details of the simulated musical world that I intend to make auditorily accessible. The everything-space can be thought of as a mysterious simulation - a vast, supremely complex machine whose true nature humans are not psychologically equipped to comprehend. But as world-makers, we can become more connected to the everything-space by asking ourselves the questions that go into creating anything at all. I’ve been fascinated for years with so-called “theories of everything”: unified models which explain how reality functions. What I’ve settled on is something akin to modern information theory, the idea that the most fundamental building blocks of the everything-space are bits of information. I consider the act of music-making to be highly spiritual. Religions are theories of everything, ways of connecting the dots so that the world makes sense to believers. I make music to get at precisely the same ends.
Everyone has different tastes in music. A musician’s artistic voice is the amalgamation of all the music they’ve ever heard filtered through their individual perspective. I have a hard time accepting that any music is truly original; music can be authentic, sincere and balanced without being original. Making music is not making something out of nothing, but rather making something out of something else. Recently, I’ve been exploring free improvisation in a more dedicated way than notated composition. There is some level of debate within the contemporary music community about the relative values of these two musical media, but I’m of the mindset that both improvisation and composition are equally valuable and very much intertwined. They are but two ways of approaching the manifestation of a musical world, of making auditorily accessible the infinite possibilities of music.
Many of these thoughts have originated from conversations about music with non-musicians. As a musician myself, I’ve been trained in certain ways of thinking about music. I’ve learned the “sport” of music; the technique of composing, of playing cello, and so on. But there are some things that one won’t learn solely through an academic study of music, such as why they make music. Instead, one learns how to make music and what they might want to make music about. I posit that a person’s answer to the why question precedes (and thus informs) questions of how and about-ness. When I think about form, I think not about musical forms but about experiential narratives. I reflect on experiences that I’ve had, on observing events unfold over a given interval of time. In the process of narrativizing those events, I’m making sense of them. All art is experience, and we artists channel our own experience into our artistic media. In making art, we become more connected not only to our own experience, but to the multitude of possible experiences that constitute the everything-space.
