Mr Magpie

In the process of developing my writing practice I’ve come to realize that, at least for me, there are only two types of writing days: really good or really bad. 

On the really good days, I find music to be an impediment: it pulls me out of the focused, flowing state into which I have been lucky enough to slip and seeps into the naturally occurring cracks between thoughts, filling the space where something unexpected and perhaps even true might have bloomed with the known, solid fact of a recording, a still and easy beauty that distracts me from the feebly stirring, naked, sometimes very ugly but no less precious thing I’m trying to keep from dying on the table. In other words, it fucks everything up. 

On the really bad days, though, when I have either so many thoughts jumbling together that they are suffocating one another in a kind of nightmarish festival crowd crush, or so few that I can practically feel the dust motes falling onto the floor of my apparently hollow skull, music can be a lifesaver. 

Listening separates me, at least somewhat, from myself, which, given my tendency to spend many hours alone on many days in a row in a small room thinking, is an intrinsic relief. I find that with the little gift of this separation I become able again to clearly and without judgement rebalance the respective levels of the critical and the creative in my thinking, which sets my writing working again. Without that symbiosis, I’m screwed. 

Music is also simply a pleasure, one which I find can introduce just enough of a dopamine pick-me-up to encourage my brain-which is often lacking in that department, and in sleep-to get going: to walk to where the fragments are and start picking some up and putting them together. To start doing the work.

Music can be that one beer before the party, or better yet that deep breath that carries me, still a child trying to swim the length of the pool without coming up for air, across. (Or, if you’re a pessimist, perhaps it’s the microdose of coke that gets the rat going through the maze again.) The worst thing that can happen is that we have to come up for air and try again.

For myself, and for anyone else who finds they run out of breath every once in a while, I’m curating a mix of music that I find particularly suitable for the act and process of writing. I use the present tense because I suspect that, like the universe, it will be ever-expanding. Shuffle it, play it in order, steal one or two pieces from it: I hope it might help. It consists of music without lyrics, (mostly) without voices, and without, for the most part, overt rhythm – all things that tend to take me a little bit too far into active listening territory for writing. As a musician who has a hard time listening any other way, I’ve tried to be extra sensitive about my choices in order to avoid distraction. This does not mean that I think this music is not worthy of close attention, only that it is not the type to get up in your face and demand it. (I have a deeply skeptical view of ‘ambient’ music as both an idea and a reality, given just how precious music is to me and how much of daily life is already choked up with noise of all kinds, but – for the times when quiet, for whatever reason, feels genuinely difficult to deal with, I can let it slide.)

An aside: this mix is populated with quite a few pieces by Morton Feldman. Somehow his work feels uniquely suited for writing, and I think I have some idea of why. A teacher of mine once posited that you only really get in to a Feldman piece quite a while after it has started, ‘a while’ meaning, in some cases, a duration exceeding the length of an average symphony. Only after your heartbeat calms, and the constancy of your breathing becomes apparent to you again-in other words, when your physical rhythms slow enough for your mental processes to become conscious-can you reach the state of emptiness required for his music, which is usually cyclical, quiet, and somehow fragile, to really flow through you. While I would call this state of mind ‘presence’, I suppose some would call it boredom. I think either state is valid, and both can provide the conditions for good writing.

Feldman’s music, especially his later output, is a direct result of a writing process which he describes thusly:

“[Lately] I’ve been writing very long pieces… only because of my concentration. My pieces are to some degree a performance. I’m highly concentrated when I work…

When I sit down and write a piece. I’m in thought. And as I’m moving, I’m focusing from one thought to another. And the whole idea of being in thought is to find the right kinds of notation at that moment that presents that thought. How can I talk about my work? I’m intensely involved as I do it. Most of the time I write in ink. And I don’t write in ink because I feel the work is “ex cathedra”. I write in ink because it is a way of telling me how concentrated I am. That is, if I start using my eraser, or if I start changing things, I get up and I have breakfast. I’m not concentrated. I thought I was concentrated. I’ve got no plans for the day, but I put in a day’s work. And that’s an intuitive feeling. I might work around the clock. I might work 10 hours, 15 hours. I might work 2 hours. I have to feel I did a day’s work, that I shouldn’t go on. But I don’t leave the house. I’m waiting.”

I share this only because, as a writer of words who also makes music, practical experience tells me that this advice can be just as useful for writers as it might be for composers. When Karlheinz Stockhausen asked Feldman what the secret of his music was, he replied, famously, “I don’t push the sounds around.” These days I try to do the same: to not push the sounds, or the words, or the thoughts, or the feelings, for that matter, around. All I want when I wake up in the morning is the little I need in order to concentrate: to focus from one thought to another, to think a bit but not too much, in other words, to work.

Some days, silence is enough. Sometimes, you need a little music. And maybe a cup of coffee. I’m off to make some now. See you around. 

Links: Youtube | Spotify

Full (initial) Tracklist:

1. As Long as I Can Hold My Breath – Harold Budd
2. Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello – Morton Feldman
3. Veil of Orpheus – Harold Budd
4. Inner Cities I – Alvin Curran
5. In a Landscape – John Cage
6. Piano Piece 1952 – Morton Feldman
7. Last Pieces I – Morton Feldman
8. Last Pieces III – Morton Feldman
9. Piece For Four Pianos – Morton Feldman
10. Für Alina – Arvo Pärt
11. First Light – Harold Budd and Brian Eno
12. Piano Aquieu – Stars Of The Lid
13. Melancholia XII – William Basinski
14. Melancholia II – William Basinski
15. Melancholia XIV – William Basinski
16. Cascade – William Basinski
17. Abandoned Cities – Harold Budd
18. Stateless – Dirty Beaches
19. Ione – Deep Listening Band
20. Time Washes Away Everything – Dirty Beaches
21. Glory Canon III – Live in Hagakyrka – Kali Malone
22. Time Away – Andy Stott
23. Fog Tropes – Ingram Marshall
24. Spectacle of Ritual – Kali Malone
25. Sacrificial Code – Live in Hagakyrka – Kali Malone
26. Prelude – Live in Hagakyrka – Kali Malone
27. I Will Surround You – Stars Of The Lid
28. Mullholland – Stars Of The Lid
29. The Lonely People (Are Getting Lonelier) – Stars Of The Lid
30. Broken Harbors, Pt. 2 – Stars Of The Lid
31. Broken Harbors, Pt. 3 – Stars Of The Lid
32. Living Torch I – Kali Malone
33. Pacific Ocean – Dirty Beaches
34. Dust Breeding (1.316)+ – Stars Of The Lid
35. Mono No Aware – William Basinski and Lawrence English
36. In Stellar Orbit – Raum
37. 1483 Caxton Golden Leg. 208 B/2 He Put Not Away the Wodenes of His Flessh With a Sherde or Shelle. – Akira Rabelais
38. Sleep – Grouper
39. With the Gift of Your Small Breath – Akira Rabelais
40. Occam River XXII – Éliane Radigue, Carol Robinson, and Bertrand Gauguet
41. Jetsun Mila Pt. 1 – Éliane Radigue
42. Kailasha – Éliane Radigue
43. Phantasmagoria of nothingness (Prey to our emotions) – Chubby Wolf
44. On burnt, gauzed wings – Chubby Wolf
45. Kyema (Intermediate States) – Éliane Radigue
46. Made of Air – Grouper
47. Watermusic – William Basinski
48. Watermusic II – William Basinski

NB: I highly recommend reading Feldman’s writings and interviews. They are full of thought-provoking ideas about art of all kinds and are often highly entertaining.