About a week ago I watched the 2012 movie version of Les Miserables. I never knew that Russell Crowe could sing. Who’d a thunk it? But I digress. Anyway, watching this musical tragedy (Victor Hugo does NOT do the happy dance) it got me thinking about other music tragedies. No, I’m not talking about stuff like West Side Story. I’m talking about the musical tragedies that we come up with that are literally just that. They’re terrible. They should have remained in the dark recesses of our brain and yet somehow we let them come out. And the same part is, we know they’re tragedies when we write them. By the time we are finished and listened to the finished “product” we can hardly stand to listen ourselves. But damn the torpedoes. We’re going to unleash these horrors on the outside world anyway.
Why do we do this? Well, there are several reasons. Identifying which one is yours can seriously get you out of the habit of doing such God awful things and maybe even get you to write better music more often. Otherwise, you’re destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over.
Probably the main reason why we inflict this torture on our audience is sheer stubbornness. And this stubbornness manifests itself on two levels.
First, we just can’t admit to ourselves that the piece of trash we just wrote is actually trash. We’ve brainwashed ourselves to believe that we’ve just created an offbeat masterpiece. And we keep playing it over and over and over again until it actually starts to sound good. Mission accomplished.
Secondly, we’re determined not to ever let a piece of music go to waste. The thought of having spent days if not weeks on a composition won’t allow us to just throw it in the trash when it’s done. We’re going to let the world hear it anyway. If they don’t like it, tough. We didn’t just spend 21 days of blood, sweat and tears for nothing.
Those are the main reasons for the musical tragedies we come up with, but there are others less common but still no less valid. We’ll get to these next.
One is the actual need to do something wretched. Every once in a while a composer gets a little down. Okay, maybe more than a little down. After all, he’s written piece after piece of “good” music with little if any recognition at all. He gets frustrated. He needs to find some outlet to release his frustration. He doesn’t want to go beating up on the neighbor’s dog, especially since it’s a pit bull, so he takes his frustration out on his music. He literally starts banging on the piano with the recorder going. When he’s done, he calls this a musical composition. He adds a few instruments to the mix and now it almost sounds lifelike. I am almost convinced this is what Stravinsky did with “Rite Of Spring” but again, I digress.
Letting out our frustrations on the nearest musical instrument is fine. But when we share those frustrations with the world, well, don’t expect a very cheery reception. In fact, you may get a lot of odd looks.
Then of course there is experimentation. Every once in a while. we get kind of bored with writing the same old same old. We feel a need to branch out. Problem is, we aren’t skilled enough to write other than what we’re comfortable writing. So our attempt at this so called “branching out” leaves us with a composition that is, well, let’s just say, less than musical. In fact, it’s downright awful. Now we can defer to the main reasons I cited above. At this point we can’t admit it’s bad and we refuse to chuck it in the trash. So the outside world gets to suffer right along with us.
Another reason for these musical tragedies is when a new fad comes along. You know what I mean. It doesn’t happen as often as it did in the early days of pop music when a lot of electronic music started coming out of the woodwork. But still, every once in a while, somebody will come out with something new and we just have to see if we can do something like it. The end result is usually pretty bad.
Then of course there is the case (very common I’m afraid) where we are just lousy composers to begin with. Nothing we do is really great. Some of it is okay, but much of it is bad. And when we write a real stinker, oh boy, does it smell. These are the tunes that should never see the light of day and yet we can’t help but at least let our best friend hear it. That we have a best friend afterwards is a miracle, but again, I digress.
What we need to do is be able to identify just what it is that makes us write these pieces of trash. This is hard. Like I said in an earlier article, it’s very difficult to look at your child and admit it has cancer. But until we can do this objectively, we’re never going to get out of the habit of writing bad pieces of music. We have to be able to listen to something we did and say, “This is bad” and scrap it. Delete the project, the wav file, the mp3, whatever. Make it so that it never existed and then get that wretched music out of your mind.
If you’re the experimenter, you need to be able to admit to yourself that experimentation isn’t your thing, that you need to stick with what you’re good at. And if you feel the need to let your frustrations out, do so with the understanding that when you’re done, you’re going to immediately delete all the evidence.
Les Miserables may have been a musical tragedy, but some of the music we write is just tragic, period.
Don’t let it tarnish what could have been a really great career.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim