Sometime in the middle of grad school I was on a weekend trip to NYC and had the opportunity to see a large Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I’d already been a fan since sometime in the middle of high school—when my buddy Jason had introduced me to Warhol and the whole scene history—as from the beginning there had always been something special about Basquiat’s work that struck me, something that just seemed right.
I personally believe that the way to develop over time as an artist-composer—as opposed to a principally commercial-composer, which, though they do intersect and overlap, are different animals—is basically to look for and refine oneself, within ones work. Fundamentally, there are two constitutive pieces, or threads, to this: 1) the Idea(s), and 2) the Craft.
For some reason, at some time, we—meaning those of us who now call ourselves composers—fell in love with music, and then writing music; and this part, at least for me, was all about passion and ideas and excitement (and is in fact the same reason that I keep composing). We then take this childlike enthusiasm and this fresh pool of ideas, and we work to develop Craft, or the ability to ideally and accurately realize the Idea. We have the Idea—the creativity, the wide-eyed vision of the future yet-to-be—and the Craft—the skill set to make malleable any tool, to create any sound one imagines. The latter, generally, is what an academic institution will typically and predominately focus on helping with, and I’m not necessarily proposing any specific argument with any of that. However, what can unfortunately happen in higher music education is for Craft to somehow seem to become substitute for Idea, or to camouflage itself as Idea, or to lure us into believing that with enough Craft, Idea is just not all that important. The goal however is ideally to continually develop both creativity and engineering.
I’ve mentioned this before and am sure I will do so again and again, but I don’t believe Style is something for which one should directly, actively search. Instead, we create an existence—specifically, an artistic existence—in which we are open and able to collect ideas all the time and from everywhere (or from wherever the artist wants), filter them constantly, and over time work with and either discard the materials or make them our own. We find and refine our own tools. We find better ways of connecting our own poetries, re-collecting the internal diaspora, making the disparate as complete as it ever will be—perpetually as we can. We all come from a multitude of somewheres, and really, categories are so often for the lazy. I just look for the items—the metaphors, sounds, and suggestions—that I love and then try to work with them, as any artist does.
The much-later visit to the Brooklyn Museum took place when I was dealing a number of core concerns regarding my own composing. One of the emerging tendencies in my work was the strong, recurring gravitation toward certain core ideas, themes, motifs—a gravitation that seemed disproportionate, and whose influence demanded greater attention and became increasingly difficult to ignore the clearer and more self-confident I became with regard to other aspects of my composing. There were certain ideas—usually very general like a motif or metaphor, but occasionally more specific like a particular rhythmic motive—that kept interjecting, needing to be included again and again in different ways. And concomitantly, the new work would only feel right were the gregarious, seemingly-foreign entity ultimately incorporated.
It was an obsession with a handful of recurring, undercurrent ideas—a strange collection of things, it seemed to me, and strange how the collection allowed itself to be added to, like some secret society. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with or sure how I felt about this general compositional tendency, being in a particularly insecure part of my education at the time; I wondered, even amidst all my desires toward self-determination, whether this was “legitimate” (ah, the things we wonder about in school…)—whether this aspect of how I worked or felt compelled to work was “okay.”
The Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition had 150 paintings of all sizes, full of strong, jutting gestures, “crudeness” and elegance presented as anything but opposites, and endless examples of gorgeous, flagrant obsession: an entire personal iconography. The poet had created and exploited his own hieroglyphics of rough imageries, shapes, words, references, fragments of personal and cultural histories—a fundamental but personal alphabet, pieces of a language for endless combinations and degrees of inclusion and re-contextualization—and the results were there for all to see. For me, personally, it was genius.
Maybe we shouldn’t need to get permission; maybe we artists should just be able to evolve all on our own, to figure out what we need to do and then do it. Whatever the case may be, with this experience the man gave me permission to make obsession a permanent tool and I instead began thinking about how to to more ideally make use of this natural tendency within myself instead of fighting it. This experience had a permanent impact on the way that I think about creating, and I am still utterly taken by his work—what an absolutely unbelievable artist. RIP JMB 08121998.
