hall is now a movie theater for the ears.
BIRDS DO IT
The adaptive aspect of creativity isn’t limited to musicians and composers (or artists in any other media). It extends into the natural world as well. David Attenborough and others have claimed that birdcalls have evolved to fit the environment.3 In dense jungle foliage, a constant, repetitive, and brief signal within a narrow frequency works best—the repetition is like an error-correcting device. If the intended recipient didn’t get the first transmission, an identical one will follow.
Birds that live on the forest floor evolved lower-pitched calls, so they don’t bounce or become distorted by the ground as higher-pitched sounds might. Water birds have calls that, unsurprisingly, cut through the ambient sounds of water, and birds that live in the plains and grasslands, like the Savannah Sparrow, have buzzing calls that can traverse long distances.
Eyal Shy of Wayne State University says that birdsongs vary even within the same species.4 The pitch of the song of the Scarlet Tanager, for example, is different in the East, where the woods are denser, than it is in the West.V
And birds of the same species adjust their singing as their habitat changes too. Birds in San Francisco were found to have raised the pitch of their songs over forty years in order to be better heard above the noises of the increased traffic.5
It’s not just birds, either. In the waters around New Zealand, whale calls have adapted to the increase in shipping noise over the last few decades—the hum of engines and thrash of propellers. Whales need to signal over huge distances to survive, and one hopes that they continue to adapt to this audio pollution.
So musical evolution and adaptation is an interspecies phenomenon. And presumably, as some claim, birds enjoy singing, even though they, like us, change their tunes over time. The joy of making music will find a way, regardless of the context and the form that emerges to best fit it. The musician David Rothenberg claims that “life is far more interesting than it needs to be, because the forces that guide it are not merely practical.”
Finding examples to prove that music composition depends on its context comes naturally to me. But I have a feeling that this somewhat reversed view of creation—that it is more pragmatic and adaptive than some might think—happens a lot, and in very different areas. It’s “reversed” because the venues—or the fields and woodlands, in the case of the birds—were not built to accommodate whatever egotistical or artistic urge the composers have. We and the birds adapt, and it’s fine.
What’s interesting to me is not that these practical adaptations happen (in retrospect that seems predictable and obvious), but what it means for our perception of creativity.
It seems that creativity, whether birdsong, painting, or songwriting, is as adaptive as anything else. Genius—the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work—seems to appear when a thing is perfectly suited to its context. When something works, it strikes us as not just being a clever adaptation, but as emotionally resonant as well. When the right thing is in the right place, we are moved.
Scarlet Tanager by Joe Thompson
In my experience, the emotionally charged content always lies there, hidden, waiting to be tapped, and although musicians tailor and mold their work to how and where it will be best heard or seen, the agony and the ecstasy can be relied on to fill whatever shape is available.
We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that—the art of it—is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.
CHAPTER TWO
My Life in Performance
The process of writing music doesn’t follow a strict path. For some composers, music is created via notation, the written system of markings that some percentage of musicians share as a common language. Even if an instrument (traditionally a piano) is used as an aid in composition, this kind of music emerges as a written entity. Changes in the score might be made at a later date by performing musicians or by the composer, but the writing is largely done without input from actual players. More recently, music began to be created mechanically or digitally, by an accretion and layering of sounds, samples, notes, and bits dragged and thrown together either physically or in the virtual world of a computer.
Though much of my own music may initially have been composed in isolation, it only approached its final shape as a result of being performed live. As with jazz and folk musicians, everything was expected to be thrown into the crucible of a gig, to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew. In junior high school I played in bands with friends, covering popular songs, but at some point, maybe after a rival’s friend pulled the plug on us at a battle of the bands, I contemplated playing solo.
After some time rethinking things and learning more songs written by others in my bedroom, I began to frequent the coffee house at the local university and realized that the folk scene represented there was insular and needed refreshing. Well, at least that’s how it looked to me. This was the late sixties, and I was still in high school, but anyone could see and hear that the purism of folk was being blown away by the need of rock, soul, and pop to absorb everything in their path. The folk scene was low energy too, as if the confessional mode and folk’s inherent sincerity was somehow enervating in and of itself. That couldn’t be good!
I decided to perform rock songs by my favorites at the time—the Who, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the Kinks—on acoustic guitar, believing that some of those songs were written with as much integrity as the folkier stuff people in the café more often heard, and that they might therefore find a receptive audience. I seem to recall that it worked; they had somehow never heard these songs! All I’d done was move the songs to a new context. Because I performed them more energetically than the standard folk artist might present his own material, people listened, or maybe they were just stunned at the audacity of a precocious teenager. I played Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on ukulele, shifting the context of those songs even further afield. I might have even risked scratching some dirges on a violin I’d inherited. It was an oddball mishmash, but it wasn’t boring.
I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one might ask (and people did) what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage. (I didn’t ask myself such questions at the time.) In retrospect, I guess that like many others, I decided that making my art in public (even if that meant playing people’s songs at that point) was a way of reaching out and communicating when ordinary chitchat was not comfortable for me. It seemed not only a way to “speak” in another language, but also a means of entry into conversation—other musicians and even girls (!) would talk to someone who had just been on stage.
Performing must have seemed like my only option. There was also the remote possibility that I would briefly be the hero and reap some social and personal rewards in other areas beyond mere communication, though I doubt I would have admitted that to myself. Poor Susan Boyle; I can identify. Despite all this, Desperate Dave did not have ambitions to be a professional musician—that seemed wholly unrealistic.
Years later I diagnosed myself as having a very mild (I think) form of Asperger’s
