This is not an easy post to write. I want to avoid all the veritable cliches of saying things like "wow, doesn't time just vanish", although there is some truth in this. I can't believe how quickly time goes, or that it's already June. It seemed like I was seeing in the New Year with the other guys from Virgin just last week.
An analogy. Compare my life to the orbit of an electron. Round and round it goes - indifferent, perpetual and unfailing. Like most other people my age, I long to discover the wider world out there, if only I had the financial disposition to do so. Of slightly more pressing importance is the extreme difficulty in breaking into the industry I want to make a career in - the music business. Music equipment is, on the whole, not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, and most amateurs - even semi-pros - will head into a studio to record audio. But I am not part of a boy band like Busted, which conventional studio setups cater for. I like a greater degree of experimentation in my music. I want to find a studio that merely has a piano in, so why am I having so much difficulty finding one? Am I not looking hard enough?
The experience of university was a double-edged sword. It advanced my knowledge of Western classical music, which was the primary aim anyway, and it gave me something much greater - the ability to relax, perhaps not be so introspective, (why am I writing this, then?) and a certain level of independence. I made some very good friends during my time there, learnt that (surprise, surprise) most girls are completely useless, and brown-nosing will get you anywhere.
What university did NOT teach me at any point was the technical - some might say useful - aspects of recording music in the modern sense. This is the point at which I get a more-than-slight suspicion I have wasted almost three years of my life studying a pointless degree and a five figure sum on a needless student loan. Recognising this, I went to a college in North London last summer for an introduction to Pro Tools module, which I passed. If I pass 3 other linked modules then I will be a qualified Pro Tools operator, enhancing my job prospects. The problem of money arises yet again - each module is in the region of £600 or more.
There are more basic problems, though. Frequently when I am working on the rock opera, I will come up with a riff that I will then score out, but only to a certain extent. Then I will give up on that riff and start on a completely new direction. It is almost as though something inside of me is telling me to give up on it, that it will never be performed, that you might as well do something vaguely more constructive with your time.
So then I think ... well, if I were to give up on music, what else am I good at? The answer is very little. At high school, maths was the other thing I was even remotely good at, and god only knows there are a billion better mathematicians out there than me. For the time being at least, it looks as though music is here to stay. And I do enjoy making music, but the problem is I am not sure if that will readily translate into producing vast quantities of it throughout a career in film or TV music. For instance, I want all my music to be innovative, creative and original. Buzzwords from a modernist philosophy, you might say, but those words are what I'm sticking to. So how far and how long can a composer go creatively before he exhausts all musical trains of thought? How many ways are there to write an F minor chord? How many ways can you write a piece for violin? As Wittgenstein said in The Tractatus: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." In its most primal, reduced form, one must always consider music a language. It has many nuances, shades and colours, and has an admirable range of expression. Therefore, the key to constantly being innovative and challenging in music is to probably find a way to remove these limits. And that is a question I am unable to answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment