Sowash: Trio #2 for violin, clarinet and piano.
How does a painter know when a painting is finished? How does a writer know that this is the final draft? How does a composer know that further tinkering will not improve the piece?
Fascinating questions, the answers to which, including the one I am about to venture, ought to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
Because … the only experience of Life we have is our own. Each of us is an island, notwithstanding John Donne’s assertion to the contrary, and we draw our conclusions from what has passed in the tiny worlds we inhabit. We are all Robinson Crusoe; that is why we still read that book, almost 300 years after it was written. I’ve read it three times.
Vast gulfs separate us. We are profoundly different from one another.
When some loud mouth announces that “Deep down we are all the same,” it’s because they want to sell us something: a product, a faith, a political allegiance. How dare they presume to know about what we are like, deep down?
Each of our stories is unique. The wonder is that we can communicate at all. Every painting, story and piece of music is a message in a bottle, tossed from another island, washed up on our shore.
Thus, I can only guess how other artists might sense when a work is complete.
But I can tell you authoritatively how I know when my own work is done.
From the time I started, as a boy, “making up stuff” — stories, tunes, ideas — I have partnered with what I can best describe as a voice. As I worked on creative projects, this voice would speak to me, almost audibly, saying, “Try an F sharp here, delay the punch line there, put in another measure before the climax, add a pinch of dissonance, make it spookier, make it funnier, smooth it out, give that tune to the cello, this part is too obvious, too pat.”
I rarely resisted, almost always tried what was suggested. When I ignored this free advice, the forward momentum of my piece or story would flounder. A piece of music or writing, as it is being newly born, knows where it wants to go. My task has been to learn to stay out of the way.
Take these weekly missives you kindly allow me to share. (Thank you! I am immensely grateful for the privilege of sharing my life’s work in this way.) I slap out a rough draft and then re-read and re-write, dozens of times, implementing suggestions from you-know-what.
As I bring to reality a piece of music or writing, the voice makes fewer and fewer suggestions. When the voice falls silent, when there are no more suggestions, that’s when I know the work is done. Just now I re-read this message for the last time … and the only peep of advice that came was to add this sentence I am now writing.
ln my childhood, teens and twenties, I never thought about the source of this voice. I took it for granted. In my thirties, reading about Carl Jung’s thoughts on these matters, I began to understand my experience in a new way.
In creative work, at least in mine, there is an extra-human influence, coming from outside my conscious mind, to which no suitable name can be given because the old name has been soiled by so much ignoble use. It is the very thing — that other-, extra-, beyond- thing which I have tentatively termed ‘a voice' -- with which we partner and work. And, yes, it is the thing we worship, each in our way, implicitly or devoutly, as suits our tastes.
I felt a peculiar relief, a curious unclenching, when I found this same thought, beautifully expressed, in Odell Shepard’s book The Cabin Down the Glen:
"There is some Power ... that stands waiting to help, to cheer, and to guide us. I do not care to name it now, for all names are limitations, but I believe that each of the great worships of the world has been addressed to this Power, has been the rediscovery by some direct and penetrative mind of a truth that all right-living people have always dimly known. When we work against this Power, we fail. When we try to work without it, we merely exhaust ourselves. When we work with it, we succeed and fulfill our destiny."
When I set out to write “Sunny Days,“ my first trio for violin, clarinet and piano, I planned a five-movement work; the third was to be a set of variations on a Belo-Russian folksong. But as I worked on that movement the voice's suggestions came in a flood and, though I tried to keep the movement concise, it grew longer and longer. Soon, it was almost as long as the other four movements combined and still the suggestions kept coming.
Finally, I accepted the inevitable: this movement was determined, perhaps predestined, to become a separate work, “an island, entire of itself,” to quote Mr. Donne.
So I cast it loose from “Sunny Days” and let it expand even further until it became my Trio #2 for violin, clarinet and piano, a work in a single 15-minute movement, subtitled, "American Variations on Belo-Russian Folksong.”
To hear the Verdehr Trio’s exuberant performance, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/amer_vari_beloruss.mp3
To see a PDF of the score, click here:
http://www.sowash.com/recordings/mp3/amer_vari_beloruss.pdf