What motivates you to write music?

In The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett motivation is divided into two categories, external (extrinsic) and internal (intrinsic). Many composers will be aware of problems arising from extrinsic difficulties as the main external motivator is receiving payment for your product. Some of the problems arising may include

Not having sympathy with the project or task set.

Having to spend time developing new skills to achieve the task, hence additional effort required.

Mismatch of personalities involved in the project, lack of appreciation, unwarranted interference, and inappropriate criticism.

Meeting deadlines.

Many of these problems involve the musician in degrees of compromise, and for some the problems are part of the enjoyment as the clash of personalities satisfies the flight or fight element which Dean Burnett makes great play of in his book.

Intrinsic motivation may arise from apparently more noble desires, a love of philosophy or humanity expressed through music. What are the ingredients for intrinsic motivation? Burnett offers three controlling factors.  The first is autonomy, the control of circumstances around the creative process, the second, competency, which in the case of music can fluctuate depending matters such as style or harmonic language, and finally relatedness, relating to our sense of recognition and identity. The image of the composer in isolation having Titanic struggles to produce a score which reaches out to the world is common enough in the public mind and incorporates the controlling factors in a neat package.

In all art forms there are many people with considerable competence who shun the main extrinsic motivation, they are amateurs, a word which carries more negative than positive associations.  These are the terms offered by the Word Thesaurus:

Unprofessional, sloppy, slapdash, substandard, incompetent, inexpert, shoddy, slipshod, clumsy, crude and inept.

The most positive term is recreational. In case you feel insulted by this description the matter can be balanced by Chambers Dictionary of Etymology which states

Amateur n. 1784, lover of (some activity or thing), borrowed from French or Old French amateur, learned borrowing from Latin amatorem (nominative amator) lover, from amare to love, of uncertain origin.

In terms of the self there is justification for intrinsic work with art, and this is true from an early age. When we experience positive outcomes from our creative endeavours without external pressures to deliver the product we attribute greater value to the outcome. This is in part a response to the sensation of being in control.

On a personal level there is a great deal of enjoyment to be had in the interaction with a DAW or Digital Audio Workstation, so much so that I can think of it as a motivator towards musical fulfilment. It provides a number of musical sounds, synthetic, sampled, recorded, it assists my play of the sounds in terms of rhythm and articulation and may cope with problems that humans may carp at or find impossible.  It isn’t critical of my choices. Unless I extend the work done this way and bring it to the messy world of human interaction it is in danger of being a very sterile environment no matter how flattering to my ego.

Whether one is an egotistical composer (Wagner-like) enjoying (apparently) full control over the product or non-egotistical (Cage-like), there is a common anticipation of some type of reward and that is primarily an appreciation or response from an audience. Negative responses are nothing new to composers and often have long term positive outcomes, Stravinsky’s Rite has to be the best modern example of this. The audience may be large or small and the response may be immediate or felt over a long period of time. This brings us to preservation or the extension of ourselves through art and music. Death is inevitable and the fear of it does wonders for stimulating the ego, so it is natural to find many witty and moving quotations about art and death:

“The day will come
When my body no longer exists
But in the lines of this poem
I will never let you be alone

The day will come
When my voice is no longer heard
But within the words of this poem
I will continue to watch over you

The day will come
When my dreams are no longer known
But in the spaces found in the letters of this poem
I will never tire of looking for you”

― Sapardi Djoko Damono

And

“I'm wishing he could see that music lives. Forever. That it's stronger than death. Stronger than time. And that its strength holds you together when nothing else can.”

 
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

Of course the way music is appreciated alters over a period a time, values change not always for the better.

 Let us come back to the present and consider another motivating factor, completeness. It is obviously related to the expectations of others (extrinsic considerations), unfinished operas are not altogether popular despite modern day use of open ended storylines. However it is the temporary open-ended nature of soap operas that make them work well, our desire for completion drives us to the hope of fulfilment. The road to completion for the intrinsic minded composer is full of potholes, the form needs adjustment, there is too much / too little repetition, the melody has a weakness, the rhythm is too relaxed and so on. There are times when the audience responds to the challenge presented by the composer’s intentions, Sibelius 5 comes to mind, it is as if we are invited to hear and share the anxieties of the music as it is being formed, and finally hammered into shape.

For many composers completion is involved with audience response, even on the level of submitting a piece to a virtual audience on a site like Contemporary Music on G+. There is a level of concern for many as they post and ask for a response, negative responses may shape the way a composer develops his music, and no responses at all may be actually painful. That is an issue we remain constantly aware of on this blogsite, and we work at making our bias towards being supportive in our criticism.

Postscript:
Nurtan sent me an e-mail commenting on the post this morning (10.04.2016). With his permission I add it to the blog:

Yesterday I started to think about the motivation blog, why one would compose music or paint a painting or cook gourmet meal? Why create something, good or bad. Is it the essence of the aesthetic karma of being human?

Is there a need for creation even if you only have rudimentary skills? Is the drive to composer or share universal?  Some small voice in our minds says to us that  this might be our footprint on earth and it is permanent.

Yet we know that has an unlikely permanence, I thought of my grandfather’s lost poetry. He meticulously copied his memoires and poetry to10 volumes of notebooks which were lost sometime during the twenty-five years after his death. He could have had published most or a least some of the poems. But he did not – he found the satisfaction in writing.

In 2012 I saw a wonderful production of King Lear at the Royal Shakespearean theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Almost immediately I started a tone poem/Symphony based on that experience. The completed first draft is still in a drawer waiting to be edited. The completion of the first draft ( on and off took about two years) was the work or the desire or the drive to accomplish the task. Nobody is going to even consider playing a 50 minute piece by an unknown composer. In that sense it is complete. I thought for some time about why people would compose on a voluntary basis. This could be as an amateur or professional (since only a rare composer can make a decent living solely by his/her trade without supplemental income). It became apparent to me that there is something very human, something very special in some people who successfully or unsuccessfully engage in what we call an artistic endeavour or trade or a skilled hobby/profession. I tried to find reasons why people might do this or choose not to do it – that was to no avail. This morning I decided that I can only answer that question for myself and that may not be easy or even be possible to generalise.

If I don't do something related to music each and every day I consider the day lost. That is a feeling one can afford only when one is young and healthy, in those years the time passes slowly and one's life is endless. Therefore, if your head is full of sounds, if you are skilled enough to produce a passable piece of music and if you know that the satisfaction of hearing your creation is an indescribably wonderful feeling; for that best or worst reason, you sit down and write music. After the fact, if someone else plays or likes your creation, or if you get paid expressing your feelings through your music or if you become a famous composer, it is well and good. They are icing on the cake.  I write music because if I don't I will wither away and turn to dust. But, I don't think that the satisfaction it produces is any different than making music through playing an instrument or producing a painting or growing tomatoes in your garden or knitting a pair of socks or reading a good book. Now I wonder how common is this feeling…