It is typical for me to redo music I make for my students. What sounded good on my expensive headphones may sound too muddy, too bright, too filtery, to dry, too whatever…in the classroom, coming out the little speaker of my cheap, portable PA and balanced against the sound of dozens of beginner violinists sawing away. I am lucky to have this real-life laboratory for trying out my modest creations. If I were left to myself to decide what “worked”, I would probably fall into a pit of despair.
At the end of a 4th grade strings class, today, one of the students told me she’d been practicing using my website, and that she had a favorite practice piece, which I had to guess. After my few wrong guesses, she said, “Happy Farmer” (I made an open-string warmup of Robert Schumann’s piece). Funny, a year ago, another student from another school ( I teach at seven different schools) told me her favorite piece, also, was “Happy Farmer”.
So I gave myself a modest pat on the shoulder for not screwing up what was already a perfectly formed little piece of music. I admire Schumann. As a composer, he seemed more concerned with expressing elegance of form…than trying to be “creative” or making a musical statement. It must be a terrible burden, worrying about being creative, all the time.
Sometimes, the dialog about music-making seems to focus on a zero-sum game between creative purity and sellout-manship. And I could probably make arguments for either. It is hard for me to like anything I make…if nobody else likes it. At the same time, I don’t want anyone to tell me how to make “my” music. So, there is a creative tension between me, the artist, and my audience.
Most of the unhappiness I read about on this forum, related to music production, seems to be rooted in social isolation. Many others have pointed out how therapeutic it is to make music with other human beings. My students are a part of my production cycle, described by educators as plan, teach, reflect, apply (changes).
