I’m back here sooner than I would have thought. I’m typing on my laptop now, because the keyboard I use on my big iMac suddenly stopped working! I ordered a new one, but until it arrives I will lack access to the desktop’s 27-in. screen. I really do need that to properly do the collating of my piece for strings (which I discuss in E5, and where I embedded a live performance should one care to listen) with the galleys the publisher sent me. Apologizing to him for my delay, I blamed it on the white-heat work I did on my spanking new guitar trio, which clearly did in the poor keyboard!
High among the perquisites to bloggery (as opposed to formal publishing) are the alibis inhering in the time/date stamp. You could have such temporal references in a book or magazine article, but someone would still be expected to take an overarching approach to the project and smooth out any inconsistencies in voice or facts among the various entries. On the contrary, no-one expects anyone to go back and tidy up a blog because it might contradict on Thursday what you typed on Tuesday! Each episode is self-contained and spontaneous and in this informal realm nobody keeps score!
I was rereading E4 when I realized that one could easily misread the first paragraph unless a comma was placed after the word “intervene.” Putting it in place after the blog date felt like cheating in a way. I am supposed to be chronicling in the moment, even if it be removed in time from what I am describing; these are supposed to be my thoughts at just that moment I find in which to type. If my desktop keyboard hadn’t chosen today to go south, the present moment whose memory I am pressing would not have been available! Such an arbitrary process, but arbitrary can have its appeals.
In E2 I imply that all-nighters are a thing of the past. Let me quote that most professional of composers, Britten.
“The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.”
— Benjamin Britten
But in E5 I admit to an all-nighter after all. (I retired at about 3 A.M., but that was after getting up the previous day at 5 A.M.!) It wasn’t so much about an idea’s being terrific as my being terrified of going to sleep without working out a compositional snag that was simply refusing to be resolved. Needless to say, I finally collapsed into sleep willy-nilly, and was able satisfactorily to handle the intricate creative task the next day when I was fresh! Sigh.
Here’s another inconsistency my internal editor noticed, but which again I am allowing to stand in the interest of authenticity. (Or laziness….) In E3 I aver that composing is never easy, but in point of fact it does often seem that way when the flow is having its way with you and you do not resist. If asked to give a percentage of time that sense obtains, I’d say about 30. Anyway, then in the very next blog, E4, I say that for me writing waltzes is “as easy as falling off a log,” which would be, I guess, a fringe benefit of playing all those ballet classes.
Shostakovich said that you have to write something every day. (But I have of course written nothing since finishing op. 83 three days ago, and I mentioned that that project was my first composition in six months.) Verdi coyly averred that divine inspiration met him at his writing desk each day at 8 A.M.! Tchaikovsky insisted that inspiration is a fickle visitor who will not linger long with the lazy. Mendelssohn, my favorite composer, also provides my favorite quote. If you write something intimate, they will rue the absence of large-scale gestures, but write something grand and they’ll miss the small-scale ones. So you should just write what you want.
Victor Frost's Online Chronicles 