Originality
Originality
Joel Chadabe
I’ve just retired from 33 years of teaching at State University of New York. I remain a professor, however, in that I teach a course in electronic music at Bennington College and I expect to continue to do so for a few more years. In my view, my most important responsibility as a teacher has been, and remains, to help my students achieve success in whatever their aspirations are.
But I’ve also noticed that concepts of what constitutes success have changed greatly since the 1960s when I began to teach. As a young composer, I was intent on developing my own ideas. As I saw it, worldly success indicated artistic failure. If a lot of people liked it, I thought, it had to be bad. New ideas were extremely important to me. I was interested in the unusual, the exceptional, the noncommercial side of things. In fact, my motivation in accepting a faculty position was to insulate myself from the commercial world. And my attitudes were not unique to me. They were shared by many of my friends. Our new and noncommercial ideas were supported by foundations, government agencies, and academia, all of which helped us to develop new ideas.
Developing new ideas, however, can be extremely difficult. We live in a consumer’s world.
So let’s discuss the idea of originality.
Let’s imagine a measurement of originality that is represented by a line extending from left to right across a page. At the left extreme of the line there is a repetitive figure that repeats and repeats and repeats, while at the right extreme of the line there is a non-repetitive figure that never repeats, that nothing is ever caused, and everything that happens is without expectation.
The repetition at the left extreme of our imagined left-to-right line is coherent and easily understood because everything that happens has happened before. Consequently, you’ve had prior experience with it and you find it easy to understand. But you also find it unexceptional and banal. Even boring.
The non-repetitive figure at the right extreme of our imagined left-to-right line is incoherent and difficult to understand because you’ve had no prior experience with it.
In short, looking at our line from extreme left to extreme right, the continuum extends from complete coherence to complete incoherence.
What we call meaning is somewhere between complete coherence and complete incoherence, somewhere in between falling asleep and suffering anxiety attacks.
In general, I observe that what is most usually considered meaningful and successful is somewhere from the center towards the left, where a large number of people are likely to be comfortable with what they hear again, but not fall asleep.
At the same time, I observe that original ideas start somewhere at the right side of center. And then, as time passes, the idea slides towards the left, from being original to being gradually better-understood and increasingly successful.
The meaning of original in this context refers to something that you have not heard before. You may not like originality, but as I mean the word here, it suggests a lack of history. In a word, original means new. Debussy, Varese, Ives, and Cage, for examples, are, in my opinion, the most original pre-technology composers in the 20th century because their work does not have an apparent history. In other words, their work is not a repetition of something that came before.
If originality in music is the goal, my advice to a student is to develop an original idea and grow with it.
One implication in the association of originality with newness is that originality is dependent upon a large vocabulary. How can you write a book if all you know is two words? The fewer words you have to work with, after all, the more you’ll repeat them.
In this context, vocabulary means resources. It comes down to understanding what’s already happened. And understanding what’s happening in the world around you.
History and adventure.