Session Musician • Bassist • Educator

An Inner Transcription Composition Experience

Posted on 23rd February, 2022

"The ability to internally imagine sound meaningfully is not only important for music achievement [...] , but is also critical for creative thinking ability" (Webster 1990)

During the recording/composition stages of creating the pieces in 'At Home' there have been a couple of instances where an intuitive creation process has naturally occurred. Most recently in the creation of the ambient piece 'Home' (https://nicholasjameswaldock.uk/reflections/home-an-epilogue/) and before for the piece Lucky's Strike.

Much of my early composition experience was limited to that of a persistent procrastinator attempting to cultivate an ever-growing collection of voice notes on my phone. These low-fi phone recordings captured seeds of inspiration amongst snippets of bass practice recordings or gigs where momentary flashes of inspiration flared up amongst a diatribe of practice or gig noise.  My other experience, was through episodic forays into a Logic Pro X or Sibelius experimentation session that often turned an original strong enthusiasm into frustration and the demise of my creativity and enthusiasm.

Although this piece is by no means a masterpiece of compositional endeavour and skill, for me it signifies a turning point in my journey to understand myself and be a better artist, and learn more about what my sound is and what direction it is heading. The original idea came around 10 years ago during a particularly inspired time in the recording studio at Masterlink Productions with my good friend and colleague James Welch. We knew we were onto something fun and exciting during the late night sessions experimenting with our versions of South African rhythms. Eventually, over months of attempting to work through the piece- our inspiration waned and a wall was well and truly struck.

Lucky's Strike as a piece was subject to the same fateful experiences that my typical endeavours to compose had suffered. I shelved the piece along with all of the rest of my half-baked or even bearly-kneaded ideas. It sat on my recording device alongside the rest of the transient ideas. Occasionally I would attempt to reinvigorate the piece alone or with James in his studio only to hit the same creative wall each time. Eventually, we shelved it. Believing it was a piece that would never be complete. This affected me heavily as I was attached to it far more than I had been of other musical ideas. I inherently knew there was something about it, something I loved, but I had no idea how to break that creative barrier down.

Flash forward to 2016 and working on my masters degree. I had decided to apply and enrol on the Royal Northern College of Music's Popular Music Masters (MMus) programme that was designed to help musicians become better artists. I had worked as a session bassist for a number of years and knew I had something more creative and individually artistic to offer. A very vague idea of what 'my' sound could be. An idea that existed on the periphery of my awareness ever since I began playing music in a collaborative setting in a pre-music college teenage indie rock band. This was a perfect opportunity to revisit Lucky's Strike.

In collating pieces for up inevitable final recital I knew Lucky's Strike needed to be involved. I revisited the piece with reluctance, imagining the same creative frustrations would once again arise. And, they did. I was still stuck. I knew the melody wasn't right it didn't fit, didn't capture the essence of what I wanted to say, that of the joy, fun, and gratitude of learning about South African music from Lucky Ranku, for whom the piece is named. (see here for more on the initial idea for the piece)

So, here I was stuck once again, with a recital lurking inexorably around the corner. Until one moment during a writing session I had an epiphany. I had spent all this time attempting to solve this creative conundrum with logic, knowledge, and brute-force active thinking, and it had led me to multiple dead-ends. Thinking wasn't working, the only alternative was to not think about it. How does one do that? While this seemed like an interesting idea I didn't know how to go about 'not thinking'.

I pondered through the question something like this: The problem isn't lack of knowledge of harmony, melody, or rhythm, it's that everything I try doesn't intuitively sound right.... so maybe purely using thinking/knowledge and musical logic is the problem? What is left if that is removed? Nothing? Empty 'head space', intuition, peace. Empty head space can lead to the generation of new ideas, but is that thinking too? Maybe, only if it's judging. Judging means imparting a moral and value system on the idea to decide whether to accept it or not.  Ok so, listening then, just listening to what arises in the empty head space we have created by eliminating our overly conscious thought processes. Let's try it, what have I got to lose?

So I sat, and audibly visualised or 'audiated' the piece in its current form from beginning to end. I did this a few times, mainly becoming more aware of the 'thinking' and judging on what I was hearing, but one thing was for sure, the ideas were coming thick and fast. After a good while sitting and practicing this, I made a fresh pass at the piece, listening for what the new melody would be. I clearly recall the moment and the experience as it was quite profound. I heard the entire piece, as if it was complete, as if I was listening to it on a CD, I even started visualising the concert as if I was watching. It sounded complete. I heard all the melodies, sections, grooves, essential string ideas (although these were arranged properly afterwards), and to some extent- solos. The experience was so profound that I was able to replay moments and transcribe them immediately. The wall was crumbling.

I learned a great lesson from this experience that I constantly attempt to bring forward into my composition and improvisation. Create space. Space for the sub-conscious ideas to arise. All of our typical thinking and problem solving during creative practice (while often useful) can hinder our progress. The next question is, how do we learn to recognise when thinking is getting in the way?

How does this relate to my processes in the other pieces from the At Home album. In most cases, ideas were a mixture of the two contrasting processes, with some pieces sometimes relying more on one method than the other. I will endeavour to define them briefly as:

  1. Conscious Creativity - knowledge compositional thinking, musical logic, cause/effect, questioning
  2. Subconscious Listening - listening to ideas that arise in the vacuum of the absence of thinking. Then transcribing with judgement saved for later.

Conscious Creativity - Active Thinking

Here, I am defining Conscious Creativity as any sort of endeavour that includes an active thought-process. In composition for example, this could be making the decision to use a particular harmonic device or progression because it is a learned and proven approach that is effective for expressing a particular idea. It is a parcel of pre-learned knowledge deliberately used; or, in improvisation, the thought and decision of what lick/line/resolution to play where and over what chord or the thinking of the type of sound or colour desired.

This is an active-thinking approach that draws upon learned knowledge, decision making, generating explicit connections between knowledge sets, and personal preferences and biases. These can be as overt as "I will now do X because of Y", or they can be subtle and such as judging an idea with good/bad or like/dislike based on what we know fits within our knowledge of 'good practice'.

Subconscious Listening - Passive Listening

What I call here Passive Listening is akin to what Paul Schaeffer refers to as Reduced Listening, as expressed by Michael Chion (1994, pg 29). In that it is "the listening mode that focuses on the traits of sound itself, independent of its cause and meaning". It's definition is continued as requiring the sound listened to to be "fixed", i.e. recorded where they "acquire the status of veritable objects".

Where I am attempted to diverge here is through a distinction between reduced listening to external sounds verses internal/visualised sounds. But the process is the same, listening for a fixed auditor-ally visualised sound rather than a fixed sound existing externally that we then experience. There is an additional distinction to make here in how this process differs from Audiation- "the hearing of music in one's mind when the sound is not physically present." (Gordon, 1985). The distinction is similar to that drawn before with Reduced Listening, in that I am focusing on the passive aspects of audiation and not the engaged, active processes. A crude example of the latter being the intention and attempt to 'hear' an elephant trumpeting the national anthem.

I define Subconscious Listening or perhaps Passive-Subconscious-Listening to imply the absence of a thought-process, is when the mind is quiet and new creative ideas arise out of the 'ether' to be heard and transcribed with no context, judgement, or value imposed. These are the un-harassed ideas that are free to come and go before the later processes of values and biases get involved. This is because, as soon as such biases do get involved it can impact and taint the purity of subsequent creative ideas, and taint the fertile ground of an empty mind.

The following is a theoretical model of creative endeavour created by Peter Webster from an article entitled Creativity as Creative Thinking (1990). While comprehensive, this model attempts to demonstrate the nature of creative thought developed through the use of 'Enabling Skills' and 'Enabling Conditions'. These are the skills and conditions that are required in order to procure creative thought.

Enabling Skills pertains to the ability to understand and use musical syntax, tonal and rhythmic patterns. The skills that allow complex manipulations of thought and sound to create music. Enabling Conditions are the non-musical elements such as motivation (the extent to which the creator stays on task), environment and personality. Within this Webster includes Subconscious Imagery which is "the presence of mental activity that occurs quite apart from the conscious mind and may help to inform the creative process".

While Webster's model seemingly endeavours  to explain the entirety of the creative process, I am attempting to simplify and model my above described experience using a simpler dualistic method of expressing the audiating task. In doing so I shall borrow some of Webster's definitions which are pertinent.

Accumulated Knowledge-Base

This is defined as the culmination of all musical knowledge (i.e. harmonic/melodic/rhythmic, historical, contextual), musical vocabulary as vehicles for musical expression, and historical personal experience including biases that shape decision making. Essentially, that which makes the creator an individual capable of creative expression.

Enabling Skills and Conditions

Incorporating Webster's definitions that include aesthetic sensitivity- the extent to which a creator can "shape sound structures to capture the deepest levels of personal feeling" (Webster 1990 pg 24), and craftsmanship as the ability to apply and manipulate information from the knowledge-base. These skills alongside the knowledge-base set the scene for musical aptitude. The Enabling Conditions include general motivational and environmental elements conducive to creating practice alongside individual personality traits and biases in relation to creative decision making, which include but are not limited to traits of openness and curiosity.

This is a first attempt at such a model and will no doubt require refining. Additionally, this model is only a small part of the puzzle to understanding one's creative process. It is an attempt of make explicit that which is usually tacit in the artist experience, and as with most elements of creative education and development, it should be approached as an idea for the utility of self-development and not a self-evident truth.

Nick

References:

Posted In: Reflections on Practice

Tagged: Composition, Creativity, Practice, Practice as Research


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