Nomations Meditation
February 16, 2018
I am an artist who recognizes that art needs to exist in part as a way for people to express or manifest something that they themselves have a hard time understanding. People should be free to express what they feel they need to as long as it comes from a genuine place. However, sometimes it's hard to struggle with the idea that if you put something out there, people will love it, obsess over it, criticize it, attack it, ignore it. The personal art shouldn't suffer because of this since the muse will probably not care about this. It will tell you what it wants, not what the crowds want. I think that's the important thing to remember for me: Music freedom should be completely independent of acclaim, accolades, etc. That actually brings to mind, one of my favorite Rush lyrics, for which I have found deeper appreciation years after loving this song is: "One likes to believe in the freedom of music, but glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity."
You may wonder why I find myself mediating on this today. I recently posted about our recent nominations. There's been a very direct result from the music being nominated: more people are listening to it. It makes me think that the music is good as though I, as the composer, "did my job better" simply because of the added plays.
I looked at a chart provided by streaming services to artists with plays over time. Looking at the graph the day after the announcement I noticed how the numbers just went up tremendously. Today I see that yesterday's numbers apparently went up 4 times as more.
Does that mean that my music is somehow better now? Well, I don't believe so. It was captured at the right time and it took time to get to people. It had been out there for over a year before this new influx of traffic and the main change was the number of people exposed to it, not the music itself. It’s curious for me to think about whether this should impact my writing (i.e. make more of the same kind of music since I know "it worked") because the music I wrote was, in a way, the music I needed at the moment. If I just keep wallowing in the same emotion after not needing to understand it or process it then I'm just being self-indulgent or some other similar concept.
I do believe music should be okay to evolve beyond its first iteration or recorded version. After all, our technique improves, our needs mutate, our imagination grows, our emotions shift. If encouraged properly, the best version of a song or tune can come... 20 years from its first version, after playing it so much that maybe we realize we may have not entirely understood what we wrote in the first place, or after realizing that it can become something else.
I think producers try to emulate this idea of growth by "remixing and remastering" the same recorded performance, but the person who created that original performance wasn't probably feeling the same energy that everyone's feeling now. It should really just be performed in new ways. Live can be the obvious choice, but re-recording older music can be okay as well.
Anyway, I think that's the end of my... meditation? journaling? rant? If something I wrote is useful to people here then I'm glad.