SPIRIT
and MUSIC
Letters to a Young Mormon
Composer
© 1979 by Brigham Young
University Publications
All rights reserved
Second edition 1979. First
printing.
Printed in the United States
of America
6-79 400
41507
SPIRIT AND MUSIC
(Revised Edition)
Letters to a Young Mormon Composer
by
Merrill Bradshaw
My Dear Friend,
This is a letter to you and others like you who a re
developing your skills as composers and your desire to serve the Kingdom. If
you will permit me, I would like to share some ideas that may help you to find
yourself in relation to your music, the Church, and your testimony.
There is a deep yearning for the expression of eternal
things that lies at the roots of great art. It seldom seems to find
satisfaction these days because so much of what has taken the place of art in
our lives is hostile to the things of eternal worth. Nevertheless, if we are to
commit ourselves to producing art, that yearning is the source of what we do
and moves our spirits toward the discipline, the energy, and the dedication
required.
Definitions of music come and go, varying with then new
insights of every age. But there are some things that are pretty well
understood and seem to have lasting value for our concept of music and our
activity as composers. First, music consists not so much of notes as of
movement in sound. The expressive values of music are not carried by the notes
themselves but rather by the movement between notes and the relationships
established by that movement. Movement in sound when it embodies the inner
gestures of the human spirit, is the substance of the musical art.
Second, there are many other human activities which may
embody those gestures: dance, sculpture, literature, prayer. Prayer especially
consists of the human spirit striving to express itself to God. Thus it is
described as "the motion of a hidden fire that trembles in the
breast." The "motion of a hidden fire" and "expressive
movement in sound," considered together make it easy to understand the
D&C description: "the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me."
There is a strong, parallel, essential relationship between prayer, music, and
the motions of the spirit.
Our task as composers is to find the "hidden fire"
or the expressive contours of our spiritual impulses and embody them in sound.
That is rather easy to put into words but much more demanding to put into
action. The process consists of relating your sensitivity for sound to your
sensitivity for the spirit. As a means of getting at this process, let me
mention some of the traps we must avoid.
The first is the temptation of the Academic Heresy. This is
the myth that says, "If we follow the rules we will write good
music." On the surface it is very convincing because we all recognize that
good things must be done correctly. The fallacy in the academic heresy is the
assumption that following the rules of harmony, counterpoint, etc., will
suffice to make a piece of music good. You must never believe that: it is far
too easy. What makes a piece of music good is if it embodies or expresses the
"hidden fire" so vividly that other people are made to feel it.
Anything less that this is a deception. You see, the rules are always made after
the fact to help students learn how this or that great master did it. But the
great master, no matter how great his technique, really did it by putting his
technique at the service of his spiritual impulses. Your spiritual impulses
music become strong enough to project their meaning through sound, not just
sufficient to follow someone's rules about how the great masters did it.
Another trap is the temptation of the Mass Audience Heresy:
"The piece that is accepted by the most people is the best piece." It
has a corollary: "The piece which produces the most income is the best
piece." Can you sense how far this is removed from the need to find the
eternal and express it well? I'm not against having people like my music, nor
do I despise income from the sale of my creations. These are both pleasant. But
when they become the basic motive for my creative efforts they degrade the
product of those efforts until they become incapable of satisfying my hunger to
express the things of eternity.
Equally damaging is the temptation of the Esoteric Heresy:
"The music that is the most complicated, unusual, and difficult is the
best music." This is frequently accompanied by its arrogant put-down of
the audience: "...only the truly intelligent can appreciate great art."
This is the rut on the other side of the road. Complexity is not an essential
ingredient of great art. In this you must take care, however, because there are
fine works of art with great spirit which inspire partly because they rely on a
certain profundity that can be achieved by intricacy. But it is not complexity
that makes them great: it is the intensity with which they bring us face to
face with the Spirit.
Then there is the Sanctimonious Heresy: "Music that is
serious, gloomy, or which frowns at the life of man must be great music."
This is, of course, no more true than its opposite. The hidden fire may, on
occasion, give solemn, even gloomy vibrations. But it may also produce peace,
smiles, ecstasy, or vigor. A long face has no relation to greatness. I must
say, however, that when you are dealing with the things of eternity and the
Spirit is stirring inside you, even the brighter moods fit into a framework
that is ultimately significant and hence, serious.
Confusion between the sanctimonious long face and the recognition
of eternal significance has caused some people to forget that the fruits of the
Spirit are joy, peace, love, and faith.
The temptation of the Sentimental Heresy is especially
difficult to deal with or resist. It is based on a distrust of honest emotion.
This distrust leads to a need to "fancy it up," so that others will
like it better. This in turn leads to a wide discrepancy between the nature of
the emotion and the elaborateness of its expression.
In this kind of situation technical inadequacies of the
composer become especially apparent. We
find in this sentimentality, therefore, either profound emotion which is
shattered by crudity of expression, or more frequently a kind of overkill in
which ideas of an essential simplicity are "dolled up" in excessively
fancy dress.
The desire for this "overkill" leads easily into a
dependence on cliché. Clichés are worn-out formulas which rob your expression
of its vitality. They represent the "easy way" out of the struggle
for vigorous, precise expression. They are the substance of the sentimentalist
music, both in composition and response to it.
And so with sentimentalist music we find sensitive people
uncomfortable with the falseness of the emotional overkill, offended by the
crudity of expression, bored by the clichés, and appalled by the poor taste
which uses elaborate language for trivial ideas. When you hear people respond
to one of these pieces you will find sentimentalists "loving" them
effusively. But sensitive people are either silent to avoid offense, or
vigorous in their denunciation of what has been to them a most embarrassing and
painful experience.
All these heresies are dangerous because they deter you from
your fundamental task: to find the Spirit of God and embody its expressive
movement in your music so that performers who have the Spirit may give it life
as they perform your music and listeners may be inspired with the love of
eternal things.
I need to say a word about the "deep yearning for the
expression of eternal things which is at the roots of all great art" as I
mentioned earlier. Very often, as we begin our growth in artistic things, other
interests sneak in and displace that hunger: a desire to "make it
big" in the world; a desire to impress the leaders to insure our ascent in
professional music circles; a desire to master the musical language, etc. I
suspect such digressions are a necessary part of our development. But they must
remain digressions. If any of them permanently occupy our attention, they will
sap our creative desire to express eternity, which alone has the fire to
inspire great music.
To accomplish your task there are several requirements.
First you must live so that you can feel the movement of the Spirit in your
heart. What you do in music will always betray what you are. You cannot escape
it! Consequently, you must become so attuned to the eternal that you live in,
for, and by the Spirit. It is not enough to be a nominal latter-day saint who
composes. Your "Mormonness" must become the fundamental impetus of
your creativity. (Mormonness means your Mormon view of eternal things.)
Second, you must become technically adequate to the task of
embodying the Spirit in your music. This demands much beyond the mere mastery
of harmony or orchestration, or form. It demands the absolute ability to make
the notes do your bidding so that the Spirit will not be restrained by your
inability to respond.
Third, you must always remember your audience. Nevertheless
it is not your task to do only what they want you to do--your task is to
inspire them with insights into eternal things. Audiences tend to like only
that which they know already. A composer has no prospects for success if that
tendency is not challenged. To challenge it successfully you must capture the
hidden fire so vividly that the lethargy of the audience is overcome and they
feel the motions of the Spirit in spite of themselves.
There is another view of the audience that should be kept in
your thinking. The ultimate audience for all that we do here on earth is God.
This means that no matter what the demands of other audiences, we must create
our music so that we please Him first. When we and our earthly audiences are
both seeking the Spirit and responding to it there is no problem. But when our
worldly objectives and prejudices color our judgment, or when the earthly
audience refuses because of ignorance, prejudice, or laziness to participate
with the Spirit, we have contentions that can only lead to paralysis of
creativity or a certain propagandistic pandering to the degenerating tastes of
those who are too lazy to think and feel.
There have been very few instances where people have been
inspired by a discourse in a language they didn't understand. This is also true
of music. The stylistic struggles of the '50's and '60's have made all of us
sensitive to the need for freshness of style. But choosing a style so foreign
that it gives your audience no way to relate is as ridiculous as speaking
Schwytzertutsch to the native in Oaxaca. It makes it exceedingly difficult to establish
contact with the Spirit. You should gain a command of many styles, but you
should speak Chinese only when there are Chinese to hear it.
The gift you have is quite fragile. Nearly all people who
are at all sensitive to music have it in some degree. If you are lucky as a
composer you have it to a very intense degree. It is this intensity which is so
fragile. It is easy for a careless word, a bad experience, or a bad conscience
to distract you to the extent that you cannot work in the vigor and excitement
of the Spirit but simply go through the motions without applying either your
own energy or the energy of the Spirit to your task. You must protect yourself
from the experiences and situations that may shatter your gift, and you must
nourish it and strengthen it constantly.
The Spirit always exacts its full price and you must be
willing to pay it. When the spirit you are seeking is especially profound or
needs to be sustained over a long period of time, the price in effort,
commitment, and sacrifice becomes frightening, even to the extent that you may
not have the courage to undertake the project requiring it. But take note: you
avoid the sacrifices and the commitment at great risk, for it then becomes even
more difficult to muster the courage for a large project and soon you are
unable to tackle anything but trivia.
A lot of this may seem easy to say, and thus easy to do. This is deceptive on
both counts. In the first place it is not easy to say until you have formulated
the thoughts in your mind clearly enough to say them. The ideas in these
letters have been many years growing to their present state. They have been
stated, revised, restated, discarded, revived, reversed, twisted, straightened,
and refined. And this was the easy part. It is even more difficult to do the
things required of a composer, difficult because they involve the Spirit in its
most personal, expansive, direct, intimate sense. Even when we comply sincerely
with all of the normal approaches to the Spirit, we do not command it; it commands
us. And thus we are subject to all the fluctuations of our own readiness, as
well as the purposes of the Spirit itself. In addition, there is nothing to
indicate that even when the Spirit operates most actively with us the work is
easy. It is not.
Writing good music is almost always agonizing--because music
expresses your most fundamental, personal, honest self. Expressing that self,
especially when some of the movements of the Spirit are in areas undefined by
previous clear experiences, requires self-reappraisal on an intense level. The
physical work of pushing a pencil over the score is nothing. The mental and
spiritual effort are enormous, agonizing, and exhausting on a level many people
in other professions, and many amateur composers never dream of. Composing is a
gift from heaven; but it is a gift of tools, not a gift of finished products,
and even use of the tools is not mastered in four years, or eight, or twenty.
If you work as hard as you can all your life, still, at the end, creating good
new music will be a challenge and a lot of hard work. And if it embodies the
Spirit, it will still be worth all you have learned and gained, worth your
life's last, and best, effort.
Now I would like to say a word about authority. We are part
of an authoritarian Church, at least in those things which have to do with the
governance of the Church. This is as it must and should be. I have observed a
tendency among many artists in and out of music to belittle the things the
brethren say about art. (I would venture that when we talk technical matter
they would be the last to claim expertise.) But we must remember that they have
a "perfect sense of what is real" and that when we are wrestling with
the basic issues of our art, their advice will often be helpful, even when
unpleasant to our swelling egos. We will do well to respond to their advice
without resentment, for resentment takes the Spirit away. When embodying the
Spirit is our objective we cannot reject the counsel of the servants of God
without estranging ourselves from the very thing that is at the root of our
art.
I hope this letter has not been too long. May some of the ideas prove helpful to you. There will be more to come.
Dear Friend,
You have asked why we must be concerned with eternal things
in all that we do. Why should we be sanctimonious when what we are trying to do
is write something that is pleasing to our audience? Why must we always be
seeking the spirit when we just want to have an exciting experience with music?
These important questions cannot be overlooked without missing one of the most
important facets of our role. You see, the usual view of what we mean when we
talk of "eternal things" or of "the spirit" gets tied up in
a very narrow view of what is eternal
or what the spirit can do; as if the spirit were only interested in our going
to Church on Sundays or chalking up so many welfare hours, or as if God's
children would cease to need spiritual refreshment when they join the Kingdom
or would never dare smile again or dance or laugh. Any good Mormon knows that
is not true.
In view of what I have just said, I think you would be
making a big mistake if you did not conscientiously seek the spirit as a source
of musical guidance, no matter what type of music you were trying to write. But
I hope you can see that this does not put you in the position of being
sanctimonious about your music. On the contrary, it should make you seek in all
your music--pretty, catchy, jazzy, or whatever, to make it the prettiest,
catchiest, jazziest, etc. because those virtues will not cease to be a part of
our lives when we enter the joy of the Celestial Kingdom. Rather, each of the
virtues, magnified to a celestial level. is a righteous part of building the
Kingdome of God and is not incompatible with seeking the assistance of the
spirit in your work.
As a matter of fact, I think seeking those virtues when you
write is certainly closer to what we believe than simply praying and then
abandoning yourself to the arbitrariness of whatever might enter your mind.
Trying to write something that is as pretty as you can imagine so that others
might enjoy it comes very close in my thinking to paralleling "This is my
work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of
man" that we read in the scriptures. I think it is motivated by the spirit
just as much as if you had formally said "Lord bless me." The better
the song, the more eternal its nature. Thus my insistence on the spirit in your
work is not eliminating things you think are not spiritual but rather it is
extending the idea of the spiritual to include many things that are normally
not mentioned in those terms. I think our idea of eternal life is tied up with
joy, rejoicing, love, beauty, and excellence and all the other virtues.
The result of this line of reasoning (or feeling) is that I
believe you are partaking of the spiritual when you make a judgment about the
virtue of what you write. And when you perceive real virtue and reject the
defective, the shallow, the ineffective, you are being spiritual in your
composing in the highest sense of what spiritual can mean to any of us.
Therefore I do not believe that the spirit is limited to certain kinds of music
and impossible in certain other kinds. Jazz or Rock or Hymns for instance, can
be used for either good or bad. We need always to be perceptive when we are
influenced by music or art of any type, and we ought to be striving to find the
virtuous, lovely, praiseworthy things in all of our experiences. The danger of
bigotry is always with us and unless we are careful about how we relate eternal
things to our activities in this life, we may end up prisoners of our biases,
left behind by the demands of a world-wide multinational church and a society
that has no more room for petty prejudice.
I think what you have to do as a composer is uplift. Any
style or idiom you choose to write in should be the means of uplifting those
who listen to your music. I hope it is clear by now that I am not willing to
restrict "uplift" to mean only "preachy" things. If you
manage to help someone perceive beauty or joy or happiness or even fun (in a
righteous context) you are uplifting him.
Your response to my letter suggests a reluctance on your
part to be identified with a narrow concept of Mormonness. I share that
reluctance. It is not the narrow concept of Mormonism that should be the
fundamental impetus of your creativity but rather that world-encompassing,
mind-expanding spiritualization of experience in its most universal righteous
application which should be your "fire." The sum total of all your
character traits and ancestry, your convictions and attitudes, your aspirations
and feelings-for-the-meaning-of-the-universe are all a part of the way you express
that fire. Far from narrowing you down to a back-yard variety of Mormon
provincialism, I would have you expand your view to let your most exalted ideas
of Mormonism find expression so that all may be uplifted.
We must stop thinking of our religion as a limiting factor in our lives! It should be a liberating factor! It should inspire us with greater joy, insight, intelligence, and sensitivity here, and a vision of possibilities never seen by other mortals for beauty of expression, intensity of emotion, and sophistication of response to the arts. But we will never accomplish it if we do not insist on the responsibility of every Latter-day Saint to see the spirit in its true light.
Dear Friend,
In my first letter I harped quite heavily on "embodying
the Spirit in music." I don't think the point can be made too strongly. We
both know that's "where it is." People think about music in many
ways. Most of the ways will have something to offer us in one part of our
activity or another. What is necessary for us is to somehow fit the pieces
together to make a coherent system which will be a catalyst for our own
creativity. As I see it there are three levels or categories into which the various
kinds of thinking may be grouped. I call them Grammatical, Rhetorical, and
Spiritual.
The Grammatical is the "rule level" where the
nature of the elements of music is considered. The rules of harmony,
counterpoint, orchestration, and form belong here. Many people who compose
spend all their time and effort on grammatical considerations and seldom move
on to more meaningful activity. I hesitate to call this type of activity
"creative" because to do anything creative you have to transcend that
"building-stone mentality" which is so characteristic of this level.
The architect concerned only about bricks could never conceive the arch.
The Rhetorical level has to do with larger scale structure.
The word "rhetoric" refers to the structure of the argument and has
been used for centuries to refer to
that part of the study of language which has to do with putting the
grammatical elements together to make meaning clear and convincing. This is the
level at which the architect thinks not so much about bricks as about walls,
arches, and windows. This is where concerns about structure and form begin to
become creative. Notes grow together to become melodies, chords to become
progressions, phrases to become songs, movements to become symphonies. The
interrelation of the parts, their effect upon the totality of the piece, upon
climax, cadence, and energy are all rhetorical considerations. In its highest
applications the rhetorical consideration is concerned with how convincing the
gestures are, how they fit together, how they relate to each other on a broader
scale.
That spiritual level relates to the fundamental questions of
the piece as a work of art. What is it trying to say? How does the artist
relate to his God? To his audience? What is he trying to do for them? What kind
of respect does he have for them? What is he getting out of the relationship?
What are they getting? Many people believe that the spiritual is a realm that
can be dealt with only after the rhetorical is mastered, which in turn must
wait for the mastery of the grammatical. The result is that most people
seldom advance beyond the grammatical
if they even master that. In reality, the grammatical, rhetorical, and
spiritual must be working together in your considerations from the first
conception of a piece. Rhetoric without Spirit, grammar without rhetorical
structure, and Spirit without technique are all equally indefensible. The
artist must be master of all three.
You and I both know people whose spirit is at least a
positive feature of their makeup, but they have no understanding of the grammar
and thus write bad music. We know people whose grammar is impeccable but who
have not learned to put together a convincing climax. And unfortunately we also
know people who have excellent control of grammar and rhetoric, but who never
create genuine art because they have no spiritual substance to work with.
We must acquire absolute mastery of grammar, complete understanding of rhetoric, and thorough spirituality before we can accomplish the great tasks that lie before us as composers in the Kingdom. The task is far beyond the "quickie course" as you know by now. It is a life's work which can be only begun in your youth. Its ultimate destiny will be realized only in the celestial kingdom.
Dear Friend,
I have talked about music being the embodiment of gesture in
sound. I think you may want some clarification of the idea.
First let's talk a bit more about the nature of gesture.
Gesture is expressive movement. It is alive, vital, dynamic. It exists in time,
of course, but the important part is that it lives. There are many people who
make music clinical, mathematical, or sterile by concentrating upon the
physical properties of sound, the interesting numerological relationships of
sounds, or artificial rules, principles, or methods used to organize the mind
in relation to music. But it must be remembered, especially by composers, that
even if these properties of sound, these relationships, these methods are
important to understand so that the mind may be at rest, they are not the
substance of music. There is a spirit that lives in music, a spirit that gives
it life. Without it, music is as dead as the body without its spirit. If you
want to feel that spirit you must not only allow it to find a way into your
being, but you must take hold of it and pull with it, sensing its contours in
all their subtleties, not only giving yourself to its experience, but providing
the energy that make it live in you. This is true whether you participate as a
composer, a performer or a listener.
Now, as a composer, how do you embody that gesture in sound?
Let me point out first that the sound
image of the gesture is not a simple picture transmitted by pitch
contours alone. It is rather a composite of several parameters interacting with
each other to give the most precise shape to the most subtle nuances of the
gesture. These parameters are encompassed by the standard four dimensions of
sound: pitch, volume, duration, and timbre. However, in the infinite
combinations and variations of these there are many more that emerge: density,
dissonance level, the pace of change, tonal tensions, register, range, energy
level, thematic structure, silence, and so on. It is important to recognize
that even though one or more parameters may be highlighted at any given moment
of a piece all parameters cooperate simultaneously in every moment of music to
give it its shape and bring the gesture to life. In composing a piece you have
control over all of them and must be sure that each of them is contributing its portion exactly to embody
the gesture you are working with. This assumes that you are sensitive to the
subtleties of all of these parameters, not only in the technical sense of knowing
and mastering their features, but in the spiritual feel of their
"aliveness" in your own responses to them. This seems to be a
complicated thing, and it would be next to impossible if you were dependent
upon intellectual mastery alone. Intellectual mastery is helpful and grow
throughout your life gradually maturing as you continue your work. But there is
also a natural intuitive grasp of the substance of these parameters which is,
by itself, more sure for most of us than the intellectual mastery of the
materials, this intuitive grasp is critical in our responses to the relation of
the given parameter to the shape of the gesture as a whole. This is significant
not only to the composer who may intellectually discover that he has created
new relationships only after he has finished a piece, but also for the
performers and listeners who intuitively grasp the spiritual significance of
music far beyond their intellectual penetration.
The composer who mistrusts his intuition tends to write intellectual exercises in which there is little live gesture. On the other hand, the composer who doesn't know the substance of his art intellectually tends to be hamstrung, not being able to find the ways to shape his ideas precisely. You must be able to both think what you feel and feel what you think.
Dear Friend,
The question of style is one of the most difficult for it
involves clear thinking in an area where all the heresies about the arts entice
you away from your basic position. The problem seems to come into clearest
focus when you deal with so-called "modern music." Since at least as
long ago as ancient Egypt people have been assigning new music to the
inspiration of the devil. Those styles currently in vogue were, a couple of
decades ago or a couple of centuries ago, considered irreverent, rebellious, or
crude. It seems always to have been so.
But there is one knife that cuts through this dense jungle:
your task as a composer is to find the hidden fire, fathom its contours, and
embody them in sound so that they may be communicated to your audience. Somehow
when a man's soul is in contact with that fire he doesn't worry much about
style.
The complicating factor is your relationship with your audience,
and the questions here are on the spiritual level. What do you think of your
audience? Are they smart or "dumb?" Do they desire edification or
entertainment? Are you willing to operate on their level of expression? What
will that do to your own sense of what is good? Are they open or closed? What
are the requirements of your message? Can you say what you have to say in a
style that they will understand?
The easy, snobbish answer to these and similar questions is
to "do your own thing" and let the chips fall where they may. But
remember you are trying to embody the Spirit so that it will be communicated to
others. A style, picked up from some extraneous source and grafted on to your
embodiment of the Spirit, will not make your music any better. It will probably
result in stilted, artificial expression which may communicate something only
to the devotees of that style.
What I am really saying is if you are primarily concerned
with the exquisite expression of the Spirit to your fellow man, style will grow
out of it with an intensity and conviction that is captivating to all who hear.
Anything more or less than this seems to me to be artificial and bound to fail.
But I have also a word for your listener. (You can tell them
for me.) If the listener is striving together with you to gain the experience
of the Spirit, you won't fail. If he is contending with you about style, you
can only succeed by capitulating (which is no success at all). Somehow we must
get out of the situation where "they" are on one side and
"we" are on the other. We both want (or should want) the same thing:
vital spiritual experience.
Now what have I said? Be true to the Spirit. Let it dictate
both style and content. Seek it when you listen.
You see! Style isn't so difficult after all!
Dear Friend,
My previous letter on style may have seemed to side-step
some of the issues. But I think what I have to say in this on will fill in some
of the gaps. I'd like to talk about "Mormon music."
In your lifetime and mine we have seen somewhat of a
polarization of people into several musical camps. Each has a type of music it
loves, people who supply the music they need, and a great suspicion of the
other camps. I refuse to take sides in this fracas. I say, "a blessing on
all of their righteous effort." But as I intimated in my last letter, I
don't consider a refusal to listen to each other to be righteous. Therefore,
the question is this: How can we build bridges between the various cultural
groups in the kingdom so they can listen to each other.
Let me give a quick philosophical-theological foundation for
my position. Mormonism is different from the rest of Christianity in a very
important way: we believe that there have been repeated, valid revelations of
God's plan from heaven throughout the history of mankind. We believe that not
all of those revelations are contained in the Bible nor in the modern
scriptures, nor limited to the two or three principle locations with which existing
scriptures are identified. There emerges, rather, a picture with many different
cultures, locations, and eras, each part of a great master plan in the heavens
for the salvation of all God's children. The scriptural prophecies about our
time talk about the "restitution of all things" or "gathering
together in one all things since the world began," i.e. a living synthesis
of spiritual and cultural elements into a celestial society. Nor is this
synthesis to be a force compelling uniformity in all our compositions. I see it
emerging from the totality of musical effort in our culture, not as something
imposed upon it. Thus one composer's style may differ greatly from another's
without upsetting the balance that synthesis requires. After all, the thread
common to all works in the kingdom and which holds the synthesis together is
found in Spirit, not in style.
It is my opinion that all those who are trying to build the
kingdom are engaged in one facet or another of creating that spiritual
synthesis that will make us all celestial in the end. Therefore it seems
ridiculous to me that we should be waging contests with each other concerning
which of the world's styles we should adopt. We must adopt what is spiritually
appropriate for the needs of the Kingdom and create our own music from whatever
resources are available and worthwhile. I refuse to exclude anything that may
serve a spiritual purpose.
The Kingdom has need for many kinds of music: The saints do
not cease to need entertainment when they are baptized, nor do they cease to
need musical inspiration, consolation, nor work music, art music, or fun music.
In short, we need music of all kinds.
What all this says to me is that I need to know as much as I
can absorb about all the styles and techniques, about all the various types of
music so that I can build bridges for the saints to worship, work, sing, and
play together. We need to write music that is helpful in the programs of the
Church, music that represents the highest aspirations of the saints for artistic
achievement, music that entertains, music that consoles. There is room, yes,
there is a crying need for all kinds of music in the kingdom.
The schools of thought in the music world are fond of
aligning themselves with this or that historical trend and belittling all other
trends as historically insignificant. Don't get caught up in this. There is, in
this dispensation, only one system which is destined to endure and that is His
system. It encompasses the good from all other systems. We may thus adopt or adapt
from the world, but in the long run, if we want to make contributions that will
endure, we will have to make them through the Kingdom.
This is why embodying the spirit in your music is so
important. Those adaptations and style influences which are ultimately
uncomfortable with the Spirit will eventually die and be cast out. Those which
capture the Spirit vividly will inspire and edify the saints and endure in
their hearts.
Let me summarize what we have to do--learn all there is to
know about our art, gain consummate skill in applying what we know to build the
Kingdom, live to have the Spirit in our lives so that we may have substance to
our art and something eternally significant to say to our fellow saints.
No one else is going to do these things. A composer from the "international set" will not come into the Church to do them for us. We who are in and of the Kingdom must do them. You and I! Do you want significant activity? This is it! The Lord has not blessed us with our talents just to make the world fat. He has blessed us so that we may build the Kingdom, edify the saints, and glorify Him who gave us all. It cannot wait until you are 50 or 60. It has to begin now.
Dear Friend,
I have more to say about "Mormon music." For a
long time I used to believe what some of our scholars told me: that we had no
heritage in music to speak of. The Victorian hymn writers of the late 1800's
and early 1900's were "uncreative, unimaginative, etc." I longed for
a tradition I could build on that would inspire me to do great things like
"all those other cultures" had achieved. As I thought about this it
occurred to me that a whole generation of us had to go out and become saturated
with the wisdom of the world to be able to return to build the Kingdom's music.
But a lot of us simply absorbed the love of the world's music and returned with
disdain for the "hick stuff" the supposedly untutored Church
musicians had produced. I hope you don't fall for any of those silly fables:
none of them will ever help you build the Kingdom.
I have come to realize that if the Kingdom has anything to
offer the world in art it must be excellence of Spirit. The time we devote to
Church activity tends to place our emphasis on spiritual rather than technical
excellence. I believe this is as it should be and as I would want it to be.
However, I will not excuse the least technical inadequacy in any of our music.
I'm certain that we have time for it: Even when I was a busy Bishop I could
have found more time for technical study than I did and I regret not having
done so. But being a bishop did not excuse me from the necessity to write
technically adequate work. Technique is, after all, the means of liberating the
Spirit.
To me as an LDS composer the Spirit is the objective of my
art and always must be. As I have looked to the music of our pioneer ancestors
I have concluded that this is how it has always been. Writing music for the
Kingdom must have been an inspiring task for George Careless because he wrote
so many inspiring hymns. There are no greater hymns in all Christian hymnody
than his "Through Deepening Trials," or Joseph J. Daynes' "As
the Dew from Heaven Distilling," or a whole host of other.
Where do you find a body of finer hymns more completely
ingrained into the fiber of a society than our hymns are ingrained in us? We
sing them every Sunday, in our homes during the week, in Aaronic Priesthood, or
Relief Society. All of us know them. There is the substance of a tradition
here: Mormons sing, often and usually quite well. They have regular experiences
combining music and the Spirit. If we can learn to capitalize on this we will
build a tradition that will last centuries, eons, and beyond.
Any composer who has captured the Spirit vividly becomes an ancestor to the traditions of the Kingdom. Anything we write that captures the Spirit becomes a part of that tradition. Any style that lifts spirits becomes a useful model. We do not lack for philosophy, models, tradition, or need. We lack only vigor, imagination, and spunk. Let us be creative with these materials and we will edify the Kingdom, even the whole world.
Dear Friend,
Of course there is such a thing as inspiration! Every
composer experiences it. I would almost go so far as to say that every human
being experiences it. It is that flash of insight that is necessary for any
creative activity to take place. But you must realize that the romanticized
image of the composer seized by some sort of uncontrollable creative frenzy and
dashing off masterpieces without thought or exertion is a vicious lie. I don't
know of anyone who has had a first-hand experience like that.
What really happens? It seems to go something like this: You
work it out in your mind over a period of time, fussing, brooding, simmering,
until you finally put it together. Then you can feel in your heart if it is
right.
I don't think I have ever had an exciting "idea"
come to me except when I was working on the piece associated with it. This
doesn't mean it always happens in the studio, because when I am really working
on a piece it is always with me in my mind, turning over and over, trying to be
born. Therefore, the idea may come to me while driving, walking, etc. But most
of the time it comes to me while I am in the studio working.
Many people have asked me specifically if I was inspired to
write The Restoration. I think I can say "yes." I developed a desire
to do the work or over a period of years, thinking about it, collecting biases,
background, impressions and feelings about what the piece should be when I
finally got around to writing it. When I actually began the work there was
fasting and prayer, a period of spiritual dedication and supplication as I
tried to gain an overall view of it. There was no great flash of sudden
inspiration. The work unfolded itself to me over a long period of time. There
were many moments when, after working long and hard on a passage, the Spirit burned
in me and I could feel the excitement that comes when you know it is right.
(I must say however, that this was not an exceptional
experience with The Restoration. This is, after all, the way it goes with all
my activities, Church, vocational, family, recreation. And I believe it happens
to most of the Saints.)
What this says to you as a composer is not too difficult to
understand: If you want inspiration, get to work! "You must work it out in
your mind, then ask me." If it is right the Spirit will confirm it in your
bosom. If it is wrong, "dullness of spirit" and you must continue to
work it out until the Spirit says yes.
How do you work it out in your mind? My own answer is to
saturate myself with the materials I am working with: energy flow, dissonance
level, texture, the key, the medium, the motives, the phrases. I plan the form
as carefully as I can. I try vigorously to project the piece forward in time.
All these things are fed into my mind in the spirit of the work. I work as hard
as I can to find an answer. Then I rely on my spiritual instincts, enriched by
all I have learned and impelled by the input of all these things, to help me
arrive at THE solution. Not until the Spirit is satisfied can I give up the
search.
This method of operation has some beautiful advantages. My
instinctive perception is apparently sharper than my conscious intellectual
processes because many things emerge which are far more interesting and
exciting than my intellect will concoct. I continue discovering these surprise relationships
long after a work is finished. I have also noted that the rhythmic continuity
of the work is much more convincing and satisfying when arrived at by instinct
than when arrived at by strictly intellectual processes.
In setting up your own methods of working, you must take
care that the details of your method are a help rather than a bother. This
applies specifically to the keyboard. Some composers can think effectively at
the keyboard especially when they are able to make their minds dictate to the
keyboard and not vice versa. But many young composers use the keyboard as a
means of avoiding the mental effort necessary to decide how to notate an idea.
This makes the "crutch" your king, not your servant. If you use the
keyboard to check your notation, OK! But if you find that your ideas are
limited to what you can play at the keyboard, watch out! You may be in trouble.
What do we do when the inspiration stops? This is a good
question that causes much discouragement among composers. My answer has to be
in three stages. The first is to load up your mind with the work by thinking
and feeling through as many alternatives as you can find. Live with it day and
night. The second stage is the reflective stage. Step back and relax. Think
about something else for a day or an hour or a week. Third, go back and work on
it. Repeat the three steps as needed. Generally this will solve your problem
unless your motivation is lagging. If your motivation is lagging you have a
spiritual problem that needs to be solved. New perspectives, rest, new
activities occasionally help. Fasting, prayer, and study also help. A good talk
with a spiritual advisor can also help. When all is said and done, however,
inspiration comes from another source. If it is not sending any signals we
can't receive them.
I believe in inspiration. I also believe a composer must know everything he can find out about music and use it regularly in his composition. This means composition is work. Somehow inspiration and work are inextricably combined in the act of composing. May the Spirit bless your strivings!
Dear Friend,
Before we finish these discussions, we need to talk about commercialism. Commercialism is writing for money. To most people it represents success: when people are willing to pay for your music it indicates that what you write is successful.
But I think one of our greatest problems today is that
commercial music tends to be superficial, banal, and formula-ridden. The reason
is not hard to find. Too many of our composers write for money before they have
learned their craft and before they have established their own spiritual
foundations. As a result, their creations are limited by insufficient technique
or by shallowness of thought or both.
This is not helped by the fact that by and large our
audiences (for commercial music) are conditioned to be shallow in their
demands. Thus we have put together a market in which shallow people demand
shallow music from shallow composers.
The fundamental problem with commercialism is that it
muddies the basic wellsprings necessary for artistic creation and compromises
the basic moral and ethical values which make creation possible. Then all the
artist has to offer his public is his technique at the service of whatever
values can buy it. A society which by its attitudes, economics, standards of
taste, and general objectives, forces creative artists to become commercial in
order to survive will get just what it deserves: propaganda.
A society which is willing to endure the insights of its
artists, to make their activities rewarding, to insist on the best work they
can do, and to promote the ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness in art at
whatever cost will get what it deserves: Art, spiritual satisfaction, spiritual
growth.
In commercialism, since the ultimate question is simply
"how can I make money," the direction of concern is always pandering
to the standards, tastes, and desires of the consumer. "How can I create
something of value" must necessarily be subordinated to "What can I
get people to buy?" In the arts and humanities we cannot ask, "What
should people be confronted with?" but only, "What would they like to
hear, see, use?"
In this light the words of Paul: "The love of money is
the root of all evil," has special meaning. For if the love of money (read
"comfort, status, popularity") leads our artists to tell us only what
we will buy, then we will not get to hear what we should hear. How can the
Spirit shine through to inspire us under these conditions? How can we respond
to our hunger for eternal things when our music is so preoccupied with earthly
things?
No, I think commercialism represents an evil. I believe we should seek spiritual ends before we seek economic ends in our music. I hope you won't write for money too soon, nor too earnestly.
Dear Friend,
I was wondering how long you would let me go on without
getting specific about what you need to learn as you prepare yourself for a
career as a composer. It must be obvious to everyone that you do have to
possess some very specific gifts and develop them in very intense ways or you
will always be hamstrung in your efforts to compose.
The first thing I would stress to everyone who wants to
compose: there is no substitute for a good ear. Music is first and foremost an
art of sound and your ear must learn to discriminate and relate sounds in every
way and to a degree of acuteness that most people think is impossible. You have
to hear intervals, chords, lines, densities, intensities, qualities and
discriminate with extreme subtlety between the finest gradations of all of
these. You have to be able to hear sounds in your imagination and transfer them
from your imagination into reality both by writing them down and by performing
them. There is no substitute for this and if your ear is not capable of this
kind of listening, you will always have difficulty with music.
We say "ear" when what we really mean, of course,
is the mind using the ear's data to make judgments. Obviously, everyone hears
pitches, tone colors, durations, and intensities or they would not be able to
recognize who is talking, or what song is the national anthem, or other such
simple things which we all hear regularly and apparently very well. So it is
really the mind that we are training. The ability to discriminate seems,
nevertheless, to be one that depends heavily upon the experiences of early
childhood for its foundation. Children who never try to discriminate sound or
duplicate pitches or tone colors when young often have great difficulty getting
their brains to function in ways that well-trained ears function. So listen
carefully and work your ear always to hear as much as possible. It is a most
important asset to any composer.
The fundamentals of good voice leading and part-writing must
become second nature to a composer. First year harmony courses introduce the
skills, but they often get hung up on details of the rules and neglect making
the skills become a significant part of your musical thinking. Often this means
thinking two or more parts at a time, that is, making the relationships between
the parts such a fluent part of your attention that you perceive the whole at
one time both mentally and aurally.
You need to become sensitive to "line," i.e. to
the way a musical idea flows. You need to become sensitive to how minor
alterations in the pitch, rhythm, or intensity, or even the color of the line
affects its meaning. Then you need to learn how to use that sensitivity to
shape the lines of your music to give them the "just-exactly-right"
impact on your listener. You need to become sensitive to the balance between
sections of a piece so that you can shape the form of your music.
All these skills are interdependent. Each affects the other.
As your sensitivity increases, you will learn the subtleties of that
interdependence. But the increases will only take place as you write piece
after piece after piece. Far too many young composers expect that the first
thing they write will somehow rival the masterpieces of the greatest composers
which they wrote only after many years of refining their skills and directing
their lives to produce the spirituality and depth that they finally express. Be
patient and keep working to hone your own sensitivities to a keen edge so that
you will, as you mature, be able to express yourself with the sureness and
conviction of a master.
There is another dimension you must pay attention to:
General musical background. You need to know a great number of the fine works
produced by the great composers of the past and present. In fact, I would say
you need to love such works, in all kinds of styles and idioms. You need to get
acquainted with the music of many different cultures and countries. You need to
know the music of other churches in the deepest intensity with which their
souls approach the worship of God. You need to know the music of our own
history, the hymns, the folk materials, etc., etc., etc.
You need to take all the steps you can to understand your
career on gospel principles. You need to understand the relationships between
the gospel and your career principles. The Gospel needs to be the center of
your life and the beacon which not only shows you the reefs and rocks, but
illuminates your professional activity and enriches all you do as a composer.
The things I have enumerated here are not easy. Many do not have the ear to even try to listen to music this seriously, let alone try to write music that is this intense. But if you want to be a real Mormon composer, you have no choice. How are we to provide the example for the world if we are behind them in anything? Only by getting ahead of them in everything with the leg-up provided by the insights of the gospel and the spirit. So get about it!
Letter Number Eleven
My Dear Friend,
These letters have touched on many of the issues we must
face in our daily activity as composers. The way you deal with them in your own
development will probably determine what kind of composer you turn out to be.
But perhaps the most important matter of all has not been touched yet.
You are engaged in learning what you need to know to become
a successful human being and a composer. At the end of four years, if your
persist till then, you will get a certificate that says you have completed the
course of study. This is a deception. The demanding task of mastering musical
materials cannot be accomplished in four short years. The technical proficiency
needed to control your expression so that the Spirit may speak precisely
through you grows throughout your life. When you neglect it, it will take some
time to regain your former skill and fluency with it. This doesn't take place
in a linear fashion. It grows here a little, there a little, piecemeal, but
almost always in connection with a composition you are working on.
Even so, I believe that technical proficiency does tend to
reach a plateau where additional technical development becomes dependent on
something else: your spiritual development. It would be too easy to describe
this development in terms of full tithing, temple visits, welfare hours,
genealogy, etc., and these are important enough in themselves. But they are
only outward manifestations of what I am talking about: the growth of your
spirit and your insights so that you love profoundly, perceive mercifully and
act with pure motives. As these magnify your soul you will be able to project
that spiritual growth in your music. I would even venture that you will not be
able to conceal it if you should wish to. This type of technical and spiritual
growth is promoted by careful study, not only of music (which is important),
but of the scriptures and other spiritual things; and of great literature,
drama, painting, and dance; of history and psychology, politics and business,
current events and entertainment. When you are working on an important
composition the warehouse of your resources--intellectual, spiritual, musical,
and instinctive--will be filled with the riches you have stored up through what
you have lived and through your study.
Your growth is also promoted by activity. It is not enough
to read about love or compassion, or helping. You must love, and forgive, and
assist so that your experiences are first hand. It has been said by heretics
that Mormons will never produce great art because they don't experience life:
they don't fornicate, carouse, or even drink coffee. But for us the materials
of great art are not found in wickedness (wickedness never was happiness), but
in righteousness. In those things which really count--deep love of family, true
service to fellow man, sharing, helping, caring, blessing mankind by our
lives--we must be in the lead. For us, true art consists not of sordid
experience but of the richness of the imagination, the soundness of technique,
the vividness with which we capture the hidden fire that comes from the Spirit.
We have often quoted the thirteenth Article of Faith as a
justification for activity in areas having to do with aesthetic sensitivities:
"If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or
praiseworthy" (which covers almost any activity that is worthwhile)
"we seek after these things." I place emphasis on "seeking"
because so often we tend to think that with music we may wallow in our own
prejudices and cut out everything else. But I say to you that such illusions
are dangerously close to being hardhearted and stiffnecked, and they breed
offenses for which we will all have to answer on judgment day. So many of our
musicians give all they have freely and intensely, trying to express their love
of the Lord and the Gospel and their fellow members of the Church only to find
blind prejudice and narrowmindedness preventing the members of the Church from
receiving the benefit of the musician's efforts. When you hear something that
is over your head, the secret is not to close your ears: it is to lift your
head and discover the beauty, the spirit, and the love that is there, that you
might be edified and delighted with the profound beauties of the music,
whatever the style, tempo, medium, or age of the music.
May I suggest that you keep close to your spiritual leaders. They probably won't help your technique but they have a responsibility to help you with the Spirit. And when those great crises come in your life where fundamental reevaluations of your life are shaking you to the roots - fasting, prayer, temple sessions, and a thorough commitment to do the will of God will see you through. After all, if you know you are doing His will, the rest falls into place.