Art and discipline - mutually exclusive?

[hummingbird]

New blog post
Art and discipline - mutually exclusive?
http://theshysinger-songwriter.blogspot.ca/

[Len911]

Vikki, if you want to be free from the system, you need to change the system. You aren't gonna change the system at large, but for yourself. The system you are describing, is a wage slave system. It uses terminology like lazy, productivity, profits...
So how might that system measure your art? If you aren't in the top 40, you are not successful? Your worth is measured by how many green things you accumulate. If you can't be exploited by others for more green things, then you are worthless as a cog in the wheel of production,lol?? Which is okay if you consume a lot. Consumption is an important part of the system, it needs growth to survive and can never be satisfied.

Have you ever known a gamer? They play and watch games, game shows, sports, slot machines, most hours of the day. I'm not sure I've ever heard them described as disciplined. In fact in a capitalist system, they would probably be described as lazy, unless of course they started a business "Game Book"? and sold a lot of stock and got a lot of green things, then they would be called a genius.

George Orwell was pretty keen to the language of the system.

"Arbeit macht frei", "work sets you free", the slogans on many Nazi concentration camps, is as good a metaphor as any for "the system". So Orwellian.

The important thing is not really how good or bad "the system" is or isn't, but it's a system we live in, and it's to illustrate how it influences our thinking. The language it uses. How it affects our self worth. How it makes a chore and places unrealistic expectations on us as people. How it takes something so enjoyable and turns it into misery. I love gardening, but not as a slave, a marginalized low wage landscaper, or even as a child gardening with my dad, how miserable,lol!!

Creativity is about deception and lying. Humans are really good at that from a very early age. Craft is about polishing it and making it presentable. Creativity is all we have as a tool for survival. A chimp can run faster, stronger, jumps higher, climbs better, sharper teeth... So do we really need an appointment or a time set aside for creativity? Well yes, if you think system-think. There are probably some tips to maintain the system-think so we can ease a guilty conscious. Get up at a certain time, install a time clock, schedule your breaks, dress in work clothes, call someone and kiss their butt occasionally, watch the clock, day dream about after work plans, drive around the block, take weekends off, have a friend call once in a while and tell you what a fine job you are doing, wish you had another job, worry about losing your job, go to night school to get a better job, buy a car to get to the job, buy clothes for the job, buy a lunch box to take to the job,lol! And remember, that once you make a certain amount of money, you won't work anymore, unless you become a job creator, then you are a hard worker that adds nothing to production,lol!!

Systems promise security, but are they really secure, no. If they were, there wouldn't be any worry or apprehension for the future. No insecurities. When the prescription is hard work ensures success, when success is not attained, it's because you didn't work hard enough, that's what the system says anyway. Another Orwellian deja vu.

The system hates uncapitalized art. Hippie, Bohemian. Get a day job. The conundrum is that to become the well respected capitalist artisan, most people must pay their dues as a hippie or Bohemian before they get there, and the system marginalizes and is very unkind to those who choose that path. There's no guarantee of moving from the Bohemian class to the Artisan class either. The torture is in using the language and methods of "the system" to create a nurturing and stimulating positive environment to promote inspiration and accomplishment within the realm of art. Don't most people join the military for discipline? Or at least I never much heard the term outside of spankings and when I joined the Navy! And I still don't understand the methods used to teach discipline. Well, then again maybe I do, discipline is when you learn not to question authority, and will kill or die when so ordered. Maybe art and discipline is after all, mutually exclusive!

[hummingbird]

Thanks for your thoughts!! Perhaps we could replace 'discipline' with 'routine' for semantics sake?

When I was studying voice, I had a job with some flexibility and could go to work a bit later in the day as long as I worked the set number of hours. So I'd get up in the morning, go for my walk on the seawall, have something to eat, sing my technical exercises, and walk to work. Later, after supper, I'd sing for 30 or 45 more minutes. My goal was to practice twice a day five days a week. No one told me to do this, or expected me to do it, I decided myself if I was seriously going to share a small apartment with my mother and spend two or three hundred dollars a month on lessons and coaching, and perhaps also free myself of the fears I had about performing, I had to be serious about practicing. I did that for about eight years, and I kept a practice diary so that every time the voices in my head told me I was kidding myself, that I didn't work hard enough, that I shouldn't bother, that I was never going to get 'there', I could open my notebook and point to my records and say 'look, I practiced every day this week, so shut up!'

Now I have structure to my week. My students have appointments with me, I need to be there, set up and ready for them. I need to focus my energy on them for the time they are with me, and give them the best I can of myself and whatever I know.

And then there's the writing of music. A while ago, on TAXI TV, Michael mentioned two hours a day as being a good goal for a composer or songwriter. I don't schedule that time ("I must be at my controller by 9am" - pfff), I just ask myself to find space in my day to give that time to the music and the muse. What I do in those two musical hours may vary. Sometimes it's composing, sometimes it's preparing submissions, or getting a contract and final files to a library, or listening to a la's or even going back to listen to some of my old stuff out of curiosity. Sometimes it's three hours, sometimes it's one.

Discipline, or routine, or commitment, is necessary in order to achieve the completion of the work we set out to do... assuming we actually do want to be the go-to composer for a library or tv show, or score a short film, or meet the deadline for a brief or a listing. My point is, having that kind of approach to your creative work doesn't make you less artistic. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be a better artist, to grow and learn in skill and understanding, and nothing wrong with aspiring to make a living from your art.

Do we pooh pooh the Sistine Chapel because someone paid Di Vinci to be there every day and paint it? Didn't all the great composers work for benefactors in order to survive? Why are "art & inspiration" and money considered to be mutually exclusive? *Grins*

[Kolstad]

Great thoughts in that blogpost, Vikki!
I believe it is an art to create useful music.
As you of course are well aware of, that is not as easy as it sounds, and recquire skills in many areas, talents and plenty creative effort.

In many ways, the way people traditionally have thought and talked about art is a problem. The emperor has no clothes on, as music is as much perspiration as inspiration as anything.
We don't think an office clerk needs to be inspired to get work done, why should we think a musician needs to? They both know the work, and have the tools to do it. There are quality standards both can learn, and achieve as part of the work routine. What matters is who's discipline it is that will structure the work day, because creative musicians may require a different discipline that is adapted to the efforts required to craft music. That's part of the quality requirement. If discipline is tailored to the creative individual, I believe discipline can be liberating and empowering, if it enables you to be more creative and not the opposite. But if it the kind of universal paternalistic type of discipline that so often rules in mainstream society, it can be a highly counterproductive and destructive force, of course. Discipline is not the problem, but who gets to define what discipline is, is critical.

But, if contemporary ideas of art goes beyond the ancient understanding of craft, and involves acts of free speech? True, the musicians job involves more opportunity for personal expression, but most everyone express themselves in one way or another everyday, and not every musician has to be a political activist (allthough, that is also a way to be useful). Actually, even if you are a political activist, and understand how to integrate that into your music, it is not per default in conflict with shopping the work to a market where it is put to use. Uses of production music is sometimes in films or shows, which basic philosophy is quite critical of current systems, dominant politics, routinezed living ect. So, even if you think you are shopping corporate music, it can actually be used in an activist way, and by detour be incorporated in art, understood in a more traditional way. Therefore I don't subscribe to the idea that if you are doing tv/film music and has to operate within certain parameters, you are automatically subjecting yourself to "the system". Like Dean writes in his book "Demystifying the genre", there are parameters you need to stay within everywhere, which actually makes sense and is helpful to you, not the opposite.

So, I believe that you can in every concievable way, merge art, discipline and commerce, without compromizing your ideals. If you want to, that is. Sometimes artists are their own worst enemies, and try to provoke people who are actually on their side, yet without them realizing it. Just because people are in a good position and can provide opportunities for you, doesn't make them an enemy of thought or immoral. I think many people in Hollywood are good examples of that, a lot of screenwriters, as well as many people doing indie films. That's where musicians can feel that we're in this thing together with authors, producers and film makers. The creative bunch!

[Len911]

It's a good thing Michelangelo got paid, because Da Vinci gets the credit?

Did someone say work?? My main point is how language affects thinking and vice versa. Work, play. The key is to tell others you are working, whilst you tell yourself you are playing. I want to work at Carnegie Hall, I want to play Carnegie Hall. It isn't merely words, that would be Orwellian.

It's like money. In and of itself it is worthless, that's why we spend it,lol! The definition of insanity is having money in your pocket and starving to death. Though in some systems money becomes the focus. An economic system is the free flow of money. If you want a thriving economy, you place the money in the hands of the people who will spend it, not bank it. Austerity is stupid! It's like people who focus on the cost of making a penny when it exceeds the value of a penny. That might be a problem if the penny stayed out of circulation. But if you did the math on how many times a penny changed hands, and how much tax revenue that one penny made in it's lifetime, making a penny generates far more in revenue than if it were made of gold, lol!

The value in art is that it makes us feel and makes us think. I don't have any ideals as to art and commerce, there doesn't really seem to be any relation. It's kind of a clunky pairing. Art seems to be free of any such restraint. Linking art and commerce appears more like an attempt at enslavement. But if it's enslaved, it's probably not art. If there's not a determination, then there isn't a judgment. Morally, I don't know, is the tritone still considered the "devil's chord"?

[DesireInspires]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with compromising one's ideals. I say that it is almost a waste to have ideals in the first place. Adapt to the ideals of the greater society, and you will always fit in. Art is a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded.

[Len911]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with compromising one's ideals. I say that it is almost a waste to have ideals in the first place. Adapt to the ideals of the greater society, and you will always fit in. Art is a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded.

I'm not sure I could have described, "lack of integrity", any better.

[DesireInspires]

I'm not sure I could have described, "lack of integrity", any better.

I wouldn't go that far. The thing is that most art is quickly forgotten. You can make vapid music. You can make music with a message. And you can fail or succeed all the same.

Pick your battles. You cannot win them all.

[Casey H]

Not mutually exclusive at all. I write songs for Film/TV. I use my creativeness while balancing what works for Film/TV scenes all the time, especially on lyrics.

I re-craft a lot of songs, some recent and some from years back, to be more marketable today. No one can tell me I'm not applying creativity and art to that process.

JMHO
Casey