Little strokes fell great oaks.
Yesterday I found myself searching long and hard for an answer that’s irked me for some time. It should irk anyone, really.
Even if you are not a musician, there has had to be some point in your life where you listen to a complicated, classical composition and think to yourself, “where did they even begin?”
Some research suggests to me that it seems to be a gradual build of small ideas, amalgamating into grand compositions. Small melodies become themes. Small chord progressions become spine-tingling swells. In addition, lots of trial and error, and preservation of the best material while the lesser is lost to time.
It is perhaps because these musicians lived and breathed music, and they had the resources at hand to jot down whatever melody magically appeared in their head, they could come up with such instrumentation. But then that leads to the question… how did they keep an idea going?
It’s one thing when you have an idea. It’s one thing when you have a few ideas. It’s another thing to turn these ideas into something bigger than yourself.
Being a bit of a musician, I oftentimes struggle with the conundrum of “keeping it going”. It’s easy to get a thirty second loop down, but the great minds like Beethoven are turning such things into a 10+ minute experience, for a plethora of instruments, with no obvious repetition. I yield.
Creativity is consequently a mysterious thing to me. No matter how many times I search to try and understand it, it eludes me. Some treat it like it's a trait, or a thing you can just turn on. It instead seems to be more of something that just happens, something that takes shape at its own liberty; your mind just helps fill it in. No wonder many musicians treat their songs as if they are beings with their own souls - that quite literally seems to be the case.
But what causes these things to just happen? It looks to be experimentation that turns out to be the ultimate catalyst. As I look in my previous work, much of it was born out of experimentation.
I look to the SNAP Cauldron as an example - this place started off with a bang when I wanted to create a retro-style blog site, because I had a few words to say, as well as get my mod “Mayhem: Aegis” out there.
But now that I’ve said what I’ve wanted to say, what else is there to say? The posts have ultimately come to a halt as I aim my creativity elsewhere. The SNAP Cauldron was, ultimately, an experiment.
Or maybe we take a look at a more notable piece: Half-Life 2.
Half-Life 2 was very obviously a demo to boast the Source engine’s physics, though one might argue it hasn’t really come to an “end”, technically speaking - but there’s still something there. That also raises the question if music even needs to properly “end”. Is there a “Half-Life” in the orchestral world that I’m not aware of?
Point being, it is hard to conceptualize creativity. We attribute it as something solely from ourselves, but perhaps it is the discovery of an archetype that needs its blanks to be filled by a unique psyche. Just how notable an archetype all comes down to popularity in the final product.
Fast food creativity
Moving on to something completely different, I would like to say it is not entirely criminal to use a few premade assets in your work, but there comes a time when you use it in a “get rich quick” manner, where the final product of your work is the sum of nothing BUT premade assets.
It is like that of a fast-food joint using disgusting slosh to hastily convey ailing sustenance to the masses.
I see it many times even in the production of modern music. Beginner producers waste so much money on chords, plugins, or samples they could easily create if they just learned.
Pompous gatekeeping of music composition aside (even though I see no problem with such behavior) it is even more jarring in modern games; the indie game scene especially. Unity/Unreal Engine is notorious for models/maps/graphics being recycled ad nauseam.
Sure: on one hand, you could defend the idea of letting small-time developers get their ideas out there without the pain of having to create EVERYTHING from scratch…
…but then you’ll wonder why there’s so much insignificant junk that you have to wade through to find something good.
There is more supply than demand. It is why I say yes (without shame) to gatekeeping.
Remember what I said before?
“It is hard to conceptualize creativity. We attribute it as something solely from ourselves, but perhaps it is the discovery of an archetype that needs its blanks to be filled by a unique psyche.”
What is the sum if both the archetypes and the blanks have been hastily fulfilled with off-the-conveyor mush? Soulless, plain and simple.
