The Courage to be Obscure

Withstanding the Crucible of Time Through Unlikely Art

I was born an artist. Specifically, and ultimately, an abstract electronic composer. I have spent my life wondering about the mysterious force that produced the great artists I admired. What probably started as a childhood pass time of bad radio sing-along with the artists of the 70s, soon turned into a passion that led me into a life I still struggle to understand but one I have come to grips with and have embraced as the only way it could have gone. Change one little decision or event and the scaffolding of a lifetime may come tumbling down. I can say this because I am free. I think freely. I only accept the influences I choose and hold the rest as inapplicable to the moment. I have no regrets in my creativity or my craft and I understand the balance necessary to maintain and use both in the creation of my personal artistic expression. I also understand that the closest I will ever get to perfection is to finish a composition and start another one.

Through the course of this writing, I am likely to make statements that some do not agree with. I am good with that. These are my thoughts formed from my life and my observations. Right or wrong, I know that before I understood the difference between the craft of imitation and the exploration of creative possibilities, I did not understand myself, the music industry, or the artists I admire. In time, making this realization and having it seep into every thought henceforth surfaced a horrible truth — I must embrace the risk of total obscurity to be the composer I must be. While this may not sound too horrible, there is a price for freedom and everyone’s is different. For me and my style of composition, this self imposed altruism comes with the cost of extreme non-comercialism which in turn wipes out nearly all possibility of recognition, influence, wealth, and fame. What’s the incentive? Self fulfillment? Yes, definitly, but I also like to think my chosen path may introduce the slightest potential of timeless imortality. The potential to truely create something that an engaged listener will have never heard before. Incentive in the form of stockpiled possibilities I can pull out as fuel for my intrinsic motivation whenever it waivers. I will also never knowif it comes to pass.

As a composer who is now completely comfortable and contented in their medium and with their station in the infinite history of music, I know the struggle, endured over a lifetime, that finally led to what I think of as compositional bliss. At 56, I am finally the composer I’ve always wanted to be. It took no training, no money, no secret sauce. I simply surrendered to myself and my art with no preconditions and no preconceptions. However, as difficult as this was for me to achieve, I have known the answer my whole life. I knew this as a student. In fact, I read it in a book that partially inspired this writing, when I was 15.

The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (pub 1984), was a critical and historical survey by the jazz critic and historian John Litweiler. Litweiler’s book traces the evolution of free jazz through artists like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor.

I read this book while I was in high school and learning rock guitar. Like all my friends, inspired by Rush, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Yngwie Malmsteen, and a myriad of other artists, records consumed every dollar I could lay my hands on. The allure of being a “star” or “professional” consumed my imagination of the future. Though Free Jazz wasn’t a direct influence on my later compositions, it introduced me to new ideas. I would inevitably and repeatedly encounter these same ideas as I progressed through ten years of post high school education and three college degrees in music composition the last of which was in electronic music composition.

When I finished my formal music training, it was 1997. CSound was the language of electronic composition and I was very fortunate to have worked on a project with Barry Vercoe and Analog Devices as an intern during my DMA. Barry is no longer with us. I know he is resting in peace somewhere enjoying the ongoing prevalence of CSound in avant-guard electronic composition. (Fun Factoid: As a result of the aforementioned project, CSound could auto-tune a voice using Linear Predictive Coding in real-time. I believe this was before the first software-only, real-time product by Anteres. See “The CSound Book”.)

Confusion set in when I found myself unable to make any sort of living as a trained composer. There was a single tenure track professor gig for every 1000 applicants. I had a wide network but most openings were for terminal graduate students. I applied to Skywalker Sound, DigiDesign (pre-Avid Pro Tools), every studio I could find, assistant positions at symphony orchestras, the list goes on. In the end, my marketable skill was C++ programming resulting from my computer music composition track. And thus, I began my 2+ decades as a corporate inductee. As of this writing, I am a tenured executive, business owner, and expert in enterprise technology and leadership.

Wait! What happened to the boyhood dream of being a composer, or a rock guitarist, or even a music professor? Why didn’t any of those things happen? Simple answer — fear of not meeting the expected level of productivity that society, my peers, my parents, my instructors, my employers, and my own conscience had ingrained in me over a lifetime. I had no facility to develop the archetypical mindset that would have been necessary to undo or avoid this societal conditioning. I simply didn’t want the discomfort and disruption. I wanted to be comfortable, to fit in, and to oder out in restaurants for the rest of my life.

Piece of hindsight advice #1:Do not automatically accept the imposed doctrine of society, family, friends, teachers, and your own inner fear. Critically accept that doctrine if and only if it inspires you to dream a dream you love and to follow through with it.

For some, this path will cast you into the void of non-conformity so be cautious. It won’t be possible or practical if there are any traditional or institutional objectives on your to-do list. For example, I was at university for 10 years. How many times did I surrender my pride to further my institutional objectives? This is rhetorical. The answer is too many! But this is when I started to recognize that my trusted role models weren’t always right and they sometimes gave misleading direction. Not intentionally. From their point of view, it was applicable. Seeing the world through my own eyes took practice and failure. I learned to push back and I learned to back off before destroying an opportunity. The key is conscientious balance. By the way, this gets harder as one gets older.

Piece of hindsight advice #2: Education has tremendous value when viewed as a form of accelerated experimentation. Do not skip it.

“I don’t need to know music theory!” Ok, well, have fun instantly knowing what the sound in your head is so you can draw the MIDI in seconds rather than hours. Have fun spending days with a synthesizer plugin only to stumble on hard panned saw waves, slightly detuned, with a 4-pole filter envelope set for a fast attack, punchy decay, near zero sustain, and a touch of release (common pluck sound, good for bass). Learned concepts with a little practice are a fast substitute for a lifetime of experimentation that someone else has already completed and disseminated. Education catches you up to the vanguard so you can spend your time on planet earth pushing the envelope. Don’t skip this! I still use the basic synth patch cited above. But I don’t have to invent it or any of the other ones I know from training. Who knew that phase modulation would do the exact same thing as classic frequency modulation but with 90% less compute overhead. I did! I read about it and no longer care.

As an aside, I met John Chowning at a SEAMUS conference. I believe it was 1996. I will never forget it. He was very cool and interested in what we were doing with computers decades after he democratized FM synthesis. Thanks for dub-step John! I know you are audio-rate-modulating your heart out at obscure fractional ratios that perfectly model a slightly out of tune harp. I hope the angels appreciate it :)

Piece of hindsight advice #3: Try being obscure. Take the red pill. There are more of us than you know. Freedom is a guaranteed outcome for those creating art as their true self with no compromise. Maybe, just maybe, you will withstand the crucible of time.

Wrapping all this into an ideology, the result is this — by intentionally pushing outside of what we have already done, we have the opportunity to create thinks that are unexpected, that do not match a preconception, that are evolutions of what we have taken in as influence, that are ultimately our own unique voice. We can deliberately experiment. We can deliberately make ourselves and others uncomfortable. We can flirt with obscurity making art that almost nobody will like. In doing that, we may just create something that will withstand the crucible of time and become a valuable source of inspiration for those who come after us.

Tim