Letters to a Young Mormon Composer
Merrill Bradshaw
© 1979 by Brigham Young University Publications
All rights reserved
Second edition 1979. First printing.
Printed in the United States of America
6-79 400 41507
SPIRIT AND MUSIC
(Revised Edition)
Letters to a Young Mormon Composer
by
Merrill Bradshaw
Letter Number One
My Dear Friend,
This is a letter to you and others like you who a re developing your skills as composers and your desire to serve the Kingdom. If you will permit me, I would like to share some ideas that may help you to find yourself in relation to your music, the Church, and your testimony.
There is a deep yearning for the expression of eternal things that lies at the roots of great art. It seldom seems to find satisfaction these days because so much of what has taken the place of art in our lives is hostile to the things of eternal worth. Nevertheless, if we are to commit ourselves to producing art, that yearning is the source of what we do and moves our spirits toward the discipline, the energy, and the dedication required.
Definitions of music come and go, varying with then new insights of every age. But there are some things that are pretty well understood and seem to have lasting value for our concept of music and our activity as composers. First, music consists not so much of notes as of movement in sound. The expressive values of music are not carried by the notes themselves but rather by the movement between notes and the relationships established by that movement. Movement in sound when it embodies the inner gestures of the human spirit, is the substance of the musical art.
Second, there are many other human activities which may embody those gestures: dance, sculpture, literature, prayer. Prayer especially consists of the human spirit striving to express itself to God. Thus it is described as “the motion of a hidden fire that trembles in the breast.” The “motion of a hidden fire” and “expressive movement in sound,” considered together make it easy to understand the D&C description: “the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me.” There is a strong, parallel, essential relationship between prayer, music, and the motions of the spirit.
Our task as composers is to find the “hidden fire” or the expressive contours of our spiritual impulses and embody them in sound. That is rather easy to put into words but much more demanding to put into action. The process consists of relating your sensitivity for sound to your sensitivity for the spirit. As a means of getting at this process, let me mention some of the traps we must avoid.
The first is the temptation of the Academic Heresy. This is the myth that says, “If we follow the rules we will write good music.” On the surface it is very convincing because we all recognize that good things must be done correctly. The fallacy in the academic heresy is the assumption that following the rules of harmony, counterpoint, etc., will suffice to make a piece of music good. You must never believe that: it is far too easy. What makes a piece of music good is if it embodies or expresses the “hidden fire” so vividly that other people are made to feel it. Anything less that this is a deception. You see, the rules are always made after the fact to help students learn how this or that great master did it. But the great master, no matter how great his technique, really did it by putting his technique at the service of his spiritual impulses. Your spiritual impulses music become strong enough to project their meaning through sound, not just sufficient to follow someone’s rules about how the great masters did it.
Another trap is the temptation of the Mass Audience Heresy: “The piece that is accepted by the most people is the best piece.” It has a corollary: “The piece which produces the most income is the best piece.” Can you sense how far this is removed from the need to find the eternal and express it well? I’m not against having people like my music, nor do I despise income from the sale of my creations. These are both pleasant. But when they become the basic motive for my creative efforts they degrade the product of those efforts until they become incapable of satisfying my hunger to express the things of eternity.
Equally damaging is the temptation of the Esoteric Heresy: “The music that is the most complicated, unusual, and difficult is the best music.” This is frequently accompanied by its arrogant put-down of the audience: “…only the truly intelligent can appreciate great art.” This is the rut on the other side of the road. Complexity is not an essential ingredient of great art. In this you must take care, however, because there are fine works of art with great spirit which inspire partly because they rely on a certain profundity that can be achieved by intricacy. But it is not complexity that makes them great: it is the intensity with which they bring us face to face with the Spirit.
Then there is the Sanctimonious Heresy: “Music that is serious, gloomy, or which frowns at the life of man must be great music.” This is, of course, no more true than its opposite. The hidden fire may, on occasion, give solemn, even gloomy vibrations. But it may also produce peace, smiles, ecstasy, or vigor. A long face has no relation to greatness. I must say, however, that when you are dealing with the things of eternity and the Spirit is stirring inside you, even the brighter moods fit into a framework that is ultimately significant and hence, serious.
Confusion between the sanctimonious long face and the recognition of eternal significance has caused some people to forget that the fruits of the Spirit are joy, peace, love, and faith.
The temptation of the Sentimental Heresy is especially difficult to deal with or resist. It is based on a distrust of honest emotion. This distrust leads to a need to “fancy it up,” so that others will like it better. This in turn leads to a wide discrepancy between the nature of the emotion and the elaborateness of its expression.
In this kind of situation technical inadequacies of the composer become especially apparent. We find in this sentimentality, therefore, either profound emotion which is shattered by crudity of expression, or more frequently a kind of overkill in which ideas of an essential simplicity are “dolled up” in excessively fancy dress.
The desire for this “overkill” leads easily into a dependence on cliché. Clichés are worn-out formulas which rob your expression of its vitality. They represent the “easy way” out of the struggle for vigorous, precise expression. They are the substance of the sentimentalist music, both in composition and response to it.
And so with sentimentalist music we find sensitive people uncomfortable with the falseness of the emotional overkill, offended by the crudity of expression, bored by the clichés, and appalled by the poor taste which uses elaborate language for trivial ideas. When you hear people respond to one of these pieces you will find sentimentalists “loving” them effusively. But sensitive people are either silent to avoid offense, or vigorous in their denunciation of what has been to them a most embarrassing and painful experience.
All these heresies are dangerous because they deter you from your fundamental task: to find the Spirit of God and embody its expressive movement in your music so that performers who have the Spirit may give it life as they perform your music and listeners may be inspired with the love of eternal things.
I need to say a word about the “deep yearning for the expression of eternal things which is at the roots of all great art” as I mentioned earlier. Very often, as we begin our growth in artistic things, other interests sneak in and displace that hunger: a desire to “make it big” in the world; a desire to impress the leaders to insure our ascent in professional music circles; a desire to master the musical language, etc. I suspect such digressions are a necessary part of our development. But they must remain digressions. If any of them permanently occupy our attention, they will sap our creative desire to express eternity, which alone has the fire to inspire great music.
To accomplish your task there are several requirements. First you must live so that you can feel the movement of the Spirit in your heart. What you do in music will always betray what you are. You cannot escape it! Consequently, you must become so attuned to the eternal that you live in, for, and by the Spirit. It is not enough to be a nominal latter-day saint who composes. Your “Mormonness” must become the fundamental impetus of your creativity. (Mormonness means your Mormon view of eternal things.)
Second, you must become technically adequate to the task of embodying the Spirit in your music. This demands much beyond the mere mastery of harmony or orchestration, or form. It demands the absolute ability to make the notes do your bidding so that the Spirit will not be restrained by your inability to respond.
Third, you must always remember your audience. Nevertheless it is not your task to do only what they want you to do–your task is to inspire them with insights into eternal things. Audiences tend to like only that which they know already. A composer has no prospects for success if that tendency is not challenged. To challenge it successfully you must capture the hidden fire so vividly that the lethargy of the audience is overcome and they feel the motions of the Spirit in spite of themselves.
There is another view of the audience that should be kept in your thinking. The ultimate audience for all that we do here on earth is God. This means that no matter what the demands of other audiences, we must create our music so that we please Him first. When we and our earthly audiences are both seeking the Spirit and responding to it there is no problem. But when our worldly objectives and prejudices color our judgment, or when the earthly audience refuses because of ignorance, prejudice, or laziness to participate with the Spirit, we have contentions that can only lead to paralysis of creativity or a certain propagandistic pandering to the degenerating tastes of those who are too lazy to think and feel.
There have been very few instances where people have been inspired by a discourse in a language they didn’t understand. This is also true of music. The stylistic struggles of the ’50’s and ’60’s have made all of us sensitive to the need for freshness of style. But choosing a style so foreign that it gives your audience no way to relate is as ridiculous as speaking Schwytzertutsch to the native in Oaxaca. It makes it exceedingly difficult to establish contact with the Spirit. You should gain a command of many styles, but you should speak Chinese only when there are Chinese to hear it.
The gift you have is quite fragile. Nearly all people who are at all sensitive to music have it in some degree. If you are lucky as a composer you have it to a very intense degree. It is this intensity which is so fragile. It is easy for a careless word, a bad experience, or a bad conscience to distract you to the extent that you cannot work in the vigor and excitement of the Spirit but simply go through the motions without applying either your own energy or the energy of the Spirit to your task. You must protect yourself from the experiences and situations that may shatter your gift, and you must nourish it and strengthen it constantly.
The Spirit always exacts its full price and you must be willing to pay it. When the spirit you are seeking is especially profound or needs to be sustained over a long period of time, the price in effort, commitment, and sacrifice becomes frightening, even to the extent that you may not have the courage to undertake the project requiring it. But take note: you avoid the sacrifices and the commitment at great risk, for it then becomes even more difficult to muster the courage for a large project and soon you are unable to tackle anything but trivia.
A lot of this may seem easy to say, and thus easy to do. This is deceptive on both counts. In the first place it is not easy to say until you have formulated the thoughts in your mind clearly enough to say them. The ideas in these letters have been many years growing to their present state. They have been stated, revised, restated, discarded, revived, reversed, twisted, straightened, and refined. And this was the easy part. It is even more difficult to do the things required of a composer, difficult because they involve the Spirit in its most personal, expansive, direct, intimate sense. Even when we comply sincerely with all of the normal approaches to the Spirit, we do not command it; it commands us. And thus we are subject to all the fluctuations of our own readiness, as well as the purposes of the Spirit itself. In addition, there is nothing to indicate that even when the Spirit operates most actively with us the work is easy. It is not.
Writing good music is almost always agonizing–because music expresses your most fundamental, personal, honest self. Expressing that self, especially when some of the movements of the Spirit are in areas undefined by previous clear experiences, requires self-reappraisal on an intense level. The physical work of pushing a pencil over the score is nothing. The mental and spiritual effort are enormous, agonizing, and exhausting on a level many people in other professions, and many amateur composers never dream of. Composing is a gift from heaven; but it is a gift of tools, not a gift of finished products, and even use of the tools is not mastered in four years, or eight, or twenty. If you work as hard as you can all your life, still, at the end, creating good new music will be a challenge and a lot of hard work. And if it embodies the Spirit, it will still be worth all you have learned and gained, worth your life’s last, and best, effort.
Now I would like to say a word about authority. We are part of an authoritarian Church, at least in those things which have to do with the governance of the Church. This is as it must and should be. I have observed a tendency among many artists in and out of music to belittle the things the brethren say about art. (I would venture that when we talk technical matter they would be the last to claim expertise.) But we must remember that they have a “perfect sense of what is real” and that when we are wrestling with the basic issues of our art, their advice will often be helpful, even when unpleasant to our swelling egos. We will do well to respond to their advice without resentment, for resentment takes the Spirit away. When embodying the Spirit is our objective we cannot reject the counsel of the servants of God without estranging ourselves from the very thing that is at the root of our art.
I hope this letter has not been too long. May some of the ideas prove helpful to you. There will be more to come.
Letter Number Two
Dear Friend,
You have asked why we must be concerned with eternal things in all that we do. Why should we be sanctimonious when what we are trying to do is write something that is pleasing to our audience? Why must we always be seeking the spirit when we just want to have an exciting experience with music? These important questions cannot be overlooked without missing one of the most important facets of our role. You see, the usual view of what we mean when we talk of “eternal things” or of “the spirit” gets tied up in a very narrow view of what is eternal or what the spirit can do; as if the spirit were only interested in our going to Church on Sundays or chalking up so many welfare hours, or as if God’s children would cease to need spiritual refreshment when they join the Kingdom or would never dare smile again or dance or laugh. Any good Mormon knows that is not true.
In view of what I have just said, I think you would be making a big mistake if you did not conscientiously seek the spirit as a source of musical guidance, no matter what type of music you were trying to write. But I hope you can see that this does not put you in the position of being sanctimonious about your music. On the contrary, it should make you seek in all your music–pretty, catchy, jazzy, or whatever, to make it the prettiest, catchiest, jazziest, etc. because those virtues will not cease to be a part of our lives when we enter the joy of the Celestial Kingdom. Rather, each of the virtues, magnified to a celestial level. is a righteous part of building the Kingdome of God and is not incompatible with seeking the assistance of the spirit in your work.
As a matter of fact, I think seeking those virtues when you write is certainly closer to what we believe than simply praying and then abandoning yourself to the arbitrariness of whatever might enter your mind. Trying to write something that is as pretty as you can imagine so that others might enjoy it comes very close in my thinking to paralleling “This is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” that we read in the scriptures. I think it is motivated by the spirit just as much as if you had formally said “Lord bless me.” The better the song, the more eternal its nature. Thus my insistence on the spirit in your work is not eliminating things you think are not spiritual but rather it is extending the idea of the spiritual to include many things that are normally not mentioned in those terms. I think our idea of eternal life is tied up with joy, rejoicing, love, beauty, and excellence and all the other virtues.
The result of this line of reasoning (or feeling) is that I believe you are partaking of the spiritual when you make a judgment about the virtue of what you write. And when you perceive real virtue and reject the defective, the shallow, the ineffective, you are being spiritual in your composing in the highest sense of what spiritual can mean to any of us. Therefore I do not believe that the spirit is limited to certain kinds of music and impossible in certain other kinds. Jazz or Rock or Hymns for instance, can be used for either good or bad. We need always to be perceptive when we are influenced by music or art of any type, and we ought to be striving to find the virtuous, lovely, praiseworthy things in all of our experiences. The danger of bigotry is always with us and unless we are careful about how we relate eternal things to our activities in this life, we may end up prisoners of our biases, left behind by the demands of a world-wide multinational church and a society that has no more room for petty prejudice.
I think what you have to do as a composer is uplift. Any style or idiom you choose to write in should be the means of uplifting those who listen to your music. I hope it is clear by now that I am not willing to restrict “uplift” to mean only “preachy” things. If you manage to help someone perceive beauty or joy or happiness or even fun (in a righteous context) you are uplifting him.
Your response to my letter suggests a reluctance on your part to be identified with a narrow concept of Mormonness. I share that reluctance. It is not the narrow concept of Mormonism that should be the fundamental impetus of your creativity but rather that world-encompassing, mind-expanding spiritualization of experience in its most universal righteous application which should be your “fire.” The sum total of all your character traits and ancestry, your convictions and attitudes, your aspirations and feelings-for-the-meaning-of-the-universe are all a part of the way you express that fire. Far from narrowing you down to a back-yard variety of Mormon provincialism, I would have you expand your view to let your most exalted ideas of Mormonism find expression so that all may be uplifted.
We must stop thinking of our religion as a limiting factor in our lives! It should be a liberating factor! It should inspire us with greater joy, insight, intelligence, and sensitivity here, and a vision of possibilities never seen by other mortals for beauty of expression, intensity of emotion, and sophistication of response to the arts. But we will never accomplish it if we do not insist on the responsibility of every Latter-day Saint to see the spirit in its true light.
Letter Number Three
Dear Friend,
In my first letter I harped quite heavily on “embodying the Spirit in music.” I don’t think the point can be made too strongly. We both know that’s “where it is.” People think about music in many ways. Most of the ways will have something to offer us in one part of our activity or another. What is necessary for us is to somehow fit the pieces together to make a coherent system which will be a catalyst for our own creativity. As I see it there are three levels or categories into which the various kinds of thinking may be grouped. I call them Grammatical, Rhetorical, and Spiritual.
The Grammatical is the “rule level” where the nature of the elements of music is considered. The rules of harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and form belong here. Many people who compose spend all their time and effort on grammatical considerations and seldom move on to more meaningful activity. I hesitate to call this type of activity “creative” because to do anything creative you have to transcend that “building-stone mentality” which is so characteristic of this level. The architect concerned only about bricks could never conceive the arch.
The Rhetorical level has to do with larger scale structure. The word “rhetoric” refers to the structure of the argument and has been used for centuries to refer to that part of the study of language which has to do with putting the grammatical elements together to make meaning clear and convincing. This is the level at which the architect thinks not so much about bricks as about walls, arches, and windows. This is where concerns about structure and form begin to become creative. Notes grow together to become melodies, chords to become progressions, phrases to become songs, movements to become symphonies. The interrelation of the parts, their effect upon the totality of the piece, upon climax, cadence, and energy are all rhetorical considerations. In its highest applications the rhetorical consideration is concerned with how convincing the gestures are, how they fit together, how they relate to each other on a broader scale.
That spiritual level relates to the fundamental questions of the piece as a work of art. What is it trying to say? How does the artist relate to his God? To his audience? What is he trying to do for them? What kind of respect does he have for them? What is he getting out of the relationship? What are they getting? Many people believe that the spiritual is a realm that can be dealt with only after the rhetorical is mastered, which in turn must wait for the mastery of the grammatical. The result is that most people seldom advance beyond the grammatical if they even master that. In reality, the grammatical, rhetorical, and spiritual must be working together in your considerations from the first conception of a piece. Rhetoric without Spirit, grammar without rhetorical structure, and Spirit without technique are all equally indefensible. The artist must be master of all three.
You and I both know people whose spirit is at least a positive feature of their makeup, but they have no understanding of the grammar and thus write bad music. We know people whose grammar is impeccable but who have not learned to put together a convincing climax. And unfortunately we also know people who have excellent control of grammar and rhetoric, but who never create genuine art because they have no spiritual substance to work with.
We must acquire absolute mastery of grammar, complete understanding of rhetoric, and thorough spirituality before we can accomplish the great tasks that lie before us as composers in the Kingdom. The task is far beyond the “quickie course” as you know by now. It is a life’s work which can be only begun in your youth. Its ultimate destiny will be realized only in the celestial kingdom.
Letter Number Four
Dear Friend,
I have talked about music being the embodiment of gesture in sound. I think you may want some clarification of the idea.
First let’s talk a bit more about the nature of gesture. Gesture is expressive movement. It is alive, vital, dynamic. It exists in time, of course, but the important part is that it lives. There are many people who make music clinical, mathematical, or sterile by concentrating upon the physical properties of sound, the interesting numerological relationships of sounds, or artificial rules, principles, or methods used to organize the mind in relation to music. But it must be remembered, especially by composers, that even if these properties of sound, these relationships, these methods are important to understand so that the mind may be at rest, they are not the substance of music. There is a spirit that lives in music, a spirit that gives it life. Without it, music is as dead as the body without its spirit. If you want to feel that spirit you must not only allow it to find a way into your being, but you must take hold of it and pull with it, sensing its contours in all their subtleties, not only giving yourself to its experience, but providing the energy that make it live in you. This is true whether you participate as a composer, a performer or a listener.
Now, as a composer, how do you embody that gesture in sound? Let me point out first that the sound image of the gesture is not a simple picture transmitted by pitch contours alone. It is rather a composite of several parameters interacting with each other to give the most precise shape to the most subtle nuances of the gesture. These parameters are encompassed by the standard four dimensions of sound: pitch, volume, duration, and timbre. However, in the infinite combinations and variations of these there are many more that emerge: density, dissonance level, the pace of change, tonal tensions, register, range, energy level, thematic structure, silence, and so on. It is important to recognize that even though one or more parameters may be highlighted at any given moment of a piece all parameters cooperate simultaneously in every moment of music to give it its shape and bring the gesture to life. In composing a piece you have control over all of them and must be sure that each of them is contributing its portion exactly to embody the gesture you are working with. This assumes that you are sensitive to the subtleties of all of these parameters, not only in the technical sense of knowing and mastering their features, but in the spiritual feel of their “aliveness” in your own responses to them. This seems to be a complicated thing, and it would be next to impossible if you were dependent upon intellectual mastery alone. Intellectual mastery is helpful and grow throughout your life gradually maturing as you continue your work. But there is also a natural intuitive grasp of the substance of these parameters which is, by itself, more sure for most of us than the intellectual mastery of the materials, this intuitive grasp is critical in our responses to the relation of the given parameter to the shape of the gesture as a whole. This is significant not only to the composer who may intellectually discover that he has created new relationships only after he has finished a piece, but also for the performers and listeners who intuitively grasp the spiritual significance of music far beyond their intellectual penetration.
The composer who mistrusts his intuition tends to write intellectual exercises in which there is little live gesture. On the other hand, the composer who doesn’t know the substance of his art intellectually tends to be hamstrung, not being able to find the ways to shape his ideas precisely. You must be able to both think what you feel and feel what you think.
Letter Number Five
Dear Friend,
The question of style is one of the most difficult for it involves clear thinking in an area where all the heresies about the arts entice you away from your basic position. The problem seems to come into clearest focus when you deal with so-called “modern music.” Since at least as long ago as ancient Egypt people have been assigning new music to the inspiration of the devil. Those styles currently in vogue were, a couple of decades ago or a couple of centuries ago, considered irreverent, rebellious, or crude. It seems always to have been so.
But there is one knife that cuts through this dense jungle: your task as a composer is to find the hidden fire, fathom its contours, and embody them in sound so that they may be communicated to your audience. Somehow when a man’s soul is in contact with that fire he doesn’t worry much about style.
The complicating factor is your relationship with your audience, and the questions here are on the spiritual level. What do you think of your audience? Are they smart or “dumb?” Do they desire edification or entertainment? Are you willing to operate on their level of expression? What will that do to your own sense of what is good? Are they open or closed? What are the requirements of your message? Can you say what you have to say in a style that they will understand?
The easy, snobbish answer to these and similar questions is to “do your own thing” and let the chips fall where they may. But remember you are trying to embody the Spirit so that it will be communicated to others. A style, picked up from some extraneous source and grafted on to your embodiment of the Spirit, will not make your music any better. It will probably result in stilted, artificial expression which may communicate something only to the devotees of that style.
What I am really saying is if you are primarily concerned with the exquisite expression of the Spirit to your fellow man, style will grow out of it with an intensity and conviction that is captivating to all who hear. Anything more or less than this seems to me to be artificial and bound to fail.
But I have also a word for your listener. (You can tell them for me.) If the listener is striving together with you to gain the experience of the Spirit, you won’t fail. If he is contending with you about style, you can only succeed by capitulating (which is no success at all). Somehow we must get out of the situation where “they” are on one side and “we” are on the other. We both want (or should want) the same thing: vital spiritual experience.
Now what have I said? Be true to the Spirit. Let it dictate both style and content. Seek it when you listen.
You see! Style isn’t so difficult after all!
Letter Number Six
Dear Friend,
My previous letter on style may have seemed to side-step some of the issues. But I think what I have to say in this on will fill in some of the gaps. I’d like to talk about “Mormon music.”
In your lifetime and mine we have seen somewhat of a polarization of people into several musical camps. Each has a type of music it loves, people who supply the music they need, and a great suspicion of the other camps. I refuse to take sides in this fracas. I say, “a blessing on all of their righteous effort.” But as I intimated in my last letter, I don’t consider a refusal to listen to each other to be righteous. Therefore, the question is this: How can we build bridges between the various cultural groups in the kingdom so they can listen to each other.
Let me give a quick philosophical-theological foundation for my position. Mormonism is different from the rest of Christianity in a very important way: we believe that there have been repeated, valid revelations of God’s plan from heaven throughout the history of mankind. We believe that not all of those revelations are contained in the Bible nor in the modern scriptures, nor limited to the two or three principle locations with which existing scriptures are identified. There emerges, rather, a picture with many different cultures, locations, and eras, each part of a great master plan in the heavens for the salvation of all God’s children. The scriptural prophecies about our time talk about the “restitution of all things” or “gathering together in one all things since the world began,” i.e. a living synthesis of spiritual and cultural elements into a celestial society. Nor is this synthesis to be a force compelling uniformity in all our compositions. I see it emerging from the totality of musical effort in our culture, not as something imposed upon it. Thus one composer’s style may differ greatly from another’s without upsetting the balance that synthesis requires. After all, the thread common to all works in the kingdom and which holds the synthesis together is found in Spirit, not in style.
It is my opinion that all those who are trying to build the kingdom are engaged in one facet or another of creating that spiritual synthesis that will make us all celestial in the end. Therefore it seems ridiculous to me that we should be waging contests with each other concerning which of the world’s styles we should adopt. We must adopt what is spiritually appropriate for the needs of the Kingdom and create our own music from whatever resources are available and worthwhile. I refuse to exclude anything that may serve a spiritual purpose.
The Kingdom has need for many kinds of music: The saints do not cease to need entertainment when they are baptized, nor do they cease to need musical inspiration, consolation, nor work music, art music, or fun music. In short, we need music of all kinds.
What all this says to me is that I need to know as much as I can absorb about all the styles and techniques, about all the various types of music so that I can build bridges for the saints to worship, work, sing, and play together. We need to write music that is helpful in the programs of the Church, music that represents the highest aspirations of the saints for artistic achievement, music that entertains, music that consoles. There is room, yes, there is a crying need for all kinds of music in the kingdom.
The schools of thought in the music world are fond of aligning themselves with this or that historical trend and belittling all other trends as historically insignificant. Don’t get caught up in this. There is, in this dispensation, only one system which is destined to endure and that is His system. It encompasses the good from all other systems. We may thus adopt or adapt from the world, but in the long run, if we want to make contributions that will endure, we will have to make them through the Kingdom.
This is why embodying the spirit in your music is so important. Those adaptations and style influences which are ultimately uncomfortable with the Spirit will eventually die and be cast out. Those which capture the Spirit vividly will inspire and edify the saints and endure in their hearts.
Let me summarize what we have to do–learn all there is to know about our art, gain consummate skill in applying what we know to build the Kingdom, live to have the Spirit in our lives so that we may have substance to our art and something eternally significant to say to our fellow saints.
No one else is going to do these things. A composer from the “international set” will not come into the Church to do them for us. We who are in and of the Kingdom must do them. You and I! Do you want significant activity? This is it! The Lord has not blessed us with our talents just to make the world fat. He has blessed us so that we may build the Kingdom, edify the saints, and glorify Him who gave us all. It cannot wait until you are 50 or 60. It has to begin now.
Letter Number Seven
Dear Friend,
I have more to say about “Mormon music.” For a long time I used to believe what some of our scholars told me: that we had no heritage in music to speak of. The Victorian hymn writers of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s were “uncreative, unimaginative, etc.” I longed for a tradition I could build on that would inspire me to do great things like “all those other cultures” had achieved. As I thought about this it occurred to me that a whole generation of us had to go out and become saturated with the wisdom of the world to be able to return to build the Kingdom’s music. But a lot of us simply absorbed the love of the world’s music and returned with disdain for the “hick stuff” the supposedly untutored Church musicians had produced. I hope you don’t fall for any of those silly fables: none of them will ever help you build the Kingdom.
I have come to realize that if the Kingdom has anything to offer the world in art it must be excellence of Spirit. The time we devote to Church activity tends to place our emphasis on spiritual rather than technical excellence. I believe this is as it should be and as I would want it to be. However, I will not excuse the least technical inadequacy in any of our music. I’m certain that we have time for it: Even when I was a busy Bishop I could have found more time for technical study than I did and I regret not having done so. But being a bishop did not excuse me from the necessity to write technically adequate work. Technique is, after all, the means of liberating the Spirit.
To me as an LDS composer the Spirit is the objective of my art and always must be. As I have looked to the music of our pioneer ancestors I have concluded that this is how it has always been. Writing music for the Kingdom must have been an inspiring task for George Careless because he wrote so many inspiring hymns. There are no greater hymns in all Christian hymnody than his “Through Deepening Trials,” or Joseph J. Daynes’ “As the Dew from Heaven Distilling,” or a whole host of other.
Where do you find a body of finer hymns more completely ingrained into the fiber of a society than our hymns are ingrained in us? We sing them every Sunday, in our homes during the week, in Aaronic Priesthood, or Relief Society. All of us know them. There is the substance of a tradition here: Mormons sing, often and usually quite well. They have regular experiences combining music and the Spirit. If we can learn to capitalize on this we will build a tradition that will last centuries, eons, and beyond.
Any composer who has captured the Spirit vividly becomes an ancestor to the traditions of the Kingdom. Anything we write that captures the Spirit becomes a part of that tradition. Any style that lifts spirits becomes a useful model. We do not lack for philosophy, models, tradition, or need. We lack only vigor, imagination, and spunk. Let us be creative with these materials and we will edify the Kingdom, even the whole world.
Letter Number Eight
Dear Friend,
Of course there is such a thing as inspiration! Every composer experiences it. I would almost go so far as to say that every human being experiences it. It is that flash of insight that is necessary for any creative activity to take place. But you must realize that the romanticized image of the composer seized by some sort of uncontrollable creative frenzy and dashing off masterpieces without thought or exertion is a vicious lie. I don’t know of anyone who has had a first-hand experience like that.
What really happens? It seems to go something like this: You work it out in your mind over a period of time, fussing, brooding, simmering, until you finally put it together. Then you can feel in your heart if it is right.
I don’t think I have ever had an exciting “idea” come to me except when I was working on the piece associated with it. This doesn’t mean it always happens in the studio, because when I am really working on a piece it is always with me in my mind, turning over and over, trying to be born. Therefore, the idea may come to me while driving, walking, etc. But most of the time it comes to me while I am in the studio working.
Many people have asked me specifically if I was inspired to write The Restoration. I think I can say “yes.” I developed a desire to do the work or over a period of years, thinking about it, collecting biases, background, impressions and feelings about what the piece should be when I finally got around to writing it. When I actually began the work there was fasting and prayer, a period of spiritual dedication and supplication as I tried to gain an overall view of it. There was no great flash of sudden inspiration. The work unfolded itself to me over a long period of time. There were many moments when, after working long and hard on a passage, the Spirit burned in me and I could feel the excitement that comes when you know it is right.
(I must say however, that this was not an exceptional experience with The Restoration. This is, after all, the way it goes with all my activities, Church, vocational, family, recreation. And I believe it happens to most of the Saints.)
What this says to you as a composer is not too difficult to understand: If you want inspiration, get to work! “You must work it out in your mind, then ask me.” If it is right the Spirit will confirm it in your bosom. If it is wrong, “dullness of spirit” and you must continue to work it out until the Spirit says yes.
How do you work it out in your mind? My own answer is to saturate myself with the materials I am working with: energy flow, dissonance level, texture, the key, the medium, the motives, the phrases. I plan the form as carefully as I can. I try vigorously to project the piece forward in time. All these things are fed into my mind in the spirit of the work. I work as hard as I can to find an answer. Then I rely on my spiritual instincts, enriched by all I have learned and impelled by the input of all these things, to help me arrive at THE solution. Not until the Spirit is satisfied can I give up the search.
This method of operation has some beautiful advantages. My instinctive perception is apparently sharper than my conscious intellectual processes because many things emerge which are far more interesting and exciting than my intellect will concoct. I continue discovering these surprise relationships long after a work is finished. I have also noted that the rhythmic continuity of the work is much more convincing and satisfying when arrived at by instinct than when arrived at by strictly intellectual processes.
In setting up your own methods of working, you must take care that the details of your method are a help rather than a bother. This applies specifically to the keyboard. Some composers can think effectively at the keyboard especially when they are able to make their minds dictate to the keyboard and not vice versa. But many young composers use the keyboard as a means of avoiding the mental effort necessary to decide how to notate an idea. This makes the “crutch” your king, not your servant. If you use the keyboard to check your notation, OK! But if you find that your ideas are limited to what you can play at the keyboard, watch out! You may be in trouble.
What do we do when the inspiration stops? This is a good question that causes much discouragement among composers. My answer has to be in three stages. The first is to load up your mind with the work by thinking and feeling through as many alternatives as you can find. Live with it day and night. The second stage is the reflective stage. Step back and relax. Think about something else for a day or an hour or a week. Third, go back and work on it. Repeat the three steps as needed. Generally this will solve your problem unless your motivation is lagging. If your motivation is lagging you have a spiritual problem that needs to be solved. New perspectives, rest, new activities occasionally help. Fasting, prayer, and study also help. A good talk with a spiritual advisor can also help. When all is said and done, however, inspiration comes from another source. If it is not sending any signals we can’t receive them.
I believe in inspiration. I also believe a composer must know everything he can find out about music and use it regularly in his composition. This means composition is work. Somehow inspiration and work are inextricably combined in the act of composing. May the Spirit bless your strivings!
Letter Number Nine
Dear Friend,
Before we finish these discussions, we need to talk about commercialism. Commercialism is writing for money. To most people it represents success: when people are willing to pay for your music it indicates that what you write is successful.
But I think one of our greatest problems today is that commercial music tends to be superficial, banal, and formula-ridden. The reason is not hard to find. Too many of our composers write for money before they have learned their craft and before they have established their own spiritual foundations. As a result, their creations are limited by insufficient technique or by shallowness of thought or both.
This is not helped by the fact that by and large our audiences (for commercial music) are conditioned to be shallow in their demands. Thus we have put together a market in which shallow people demand shallow music from shallow composers.
The fundamental problem with commercialism is that it muddies the basic wellsprings necessary for artistic creation and compromises the basic moral and ethical values which make creation possible. Then all the artist has to offer his public is his technique at the service of whatever values can buy it. A society which by its attitudes, economics, standards of taste, and general objectives, forces creative artists to become commercial in order to survive will get just what it deserves: propaganda.
A society which is willing to endure the insights of its artists, to make their activities rewarding, to insist on the best work they can do, and to promote the ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness in art at whatever cost will get what it deserves: Art, spiritual satisfaction, spiritual growth.
In commercialism, since the ultimate question is simply “how can I make money,” the direction of concern is always pandering to the standards, tastes, and desires of the consumer. “How can I create something of value” must necessarily be subordinated to “What can I get people to buy?” In the arts and humanities we cannot ask, “What should people be confronted with?” but only, “What would they like to hear, see, use?”
In this light the words of Paul: “The love of money is the root of all evil,” has special meaning. For if the love of money (read “comfort, status, popularity”) leads our artists to tell us only what we will buy, then we will not get to hear what we should hear. How can the Spirit shine through to inspire us under these conditions? How can we respond to our hunger for eternal things when our music is so preoccupied with earthly things?
No, I think commercialism represents an evil. I believe we should seek spiritual ends before we seek economic ends in our music. I hope you won’t write for money too soon, nor too earnestly.
Letter Number Ten
Dear Friend,
I was wondering how long you would let me go on without getting specific about what you need to learn as you prepare yourself for a career as a composer. It must be obvious to everyone that you do have to possess some very specific gifts and develop them in very intense ways or you will always be hamstrung in your efforts to compose.
The first thing I would stress to everyone who wants to compose: there is no substitute for a good ear. Music is first and foremost an art of sound and your ear must learn to discriminate and relate sounds in every way and to a degree of acuteness that most people think is impossible. You have to hear intervals, chords, lines, densities, intensities, qualities and discriminate with extreme subtlety between the finest gradations of all of these. You have to be able to hear sounds in your imagination and transfer them from your imagination into reality both by writing them down and by performing them. There is no substitute for this and if your ear is not capable of this kind of listening, you will always have difficulty with music.
We say “ear” when what we really mean, of course, is the mind using the ear’s data to make judgments. Obviously, everyone hears pitches, tone colors, durations, and intensities or they would not be able to recognize who is talking, or what song is the national anthem, or other such simple things which we all hear regularly and apparently very well. So it is really the mind that we are training. The ability to discriminate seems, nevertheless, to be one that depends heavily upon the experiences of early childhood for its foundation. Children who never try to discriminate sound or duplicate pitches or tone colors when young often have great difficulty getting their brains to function in ways that well-trained ears function. So listen carefully and work your ear always to hear as much as possible. It is a most important asset to any composer.
The fundamentals of good voice leading and part-writing must become second nature to a composer. First year harmony courses introduce the skills, but they often get hung up on details of the rules and neglect making the skills become a significant part of your musical thinking. Often this means thinking two or more parts at a time, that is, making the relationships between the parts such a fluent part of your attention that you perceive the whole at one time both mentally and aurally.
You need to become sensitive to “line,” i.e. to the way a musical idea flows. You need to become sensitive to how minor alterations in the pitch, rhythm, or intensity, or even the color of the line affects its meaning. Then you need to learn how to use that sensitivity to shape the lines of your music to give them the “just-exactly-right” impact on your listener. You need to become sensitive to the balance between sections of a piece so that you can shape the form of your music.
All these skills are interdependent. Each affects the other. As your sensitivity increases, you will learn the subtleties of that interdependence. But the increases will only take place as you write piece after piece after piece. Far too many young composers expect that the first thing they write will somehow rival the masterpieces of the greatest composers which they wrote only after many years of refining their skills and directing their lives to produce the spirituality and depth that they finally express. Be patient and keep working to hone your own sensitivities to a keen edge so that you will, as you mature, be able to express yourself with the sureness and conviction of a master.
There is another dimension you must pay attention to: General musical background. You need to know a great number of the fine works produced by the great composers of the past and present. In fact, I would say you need to love such works, in all kinds of styles and idioms. You need to get acquainted with the music of many different cultures and countries. You need to know the music of other churches in the deepest intensity with which their souls approach the worship of God. You need to know the music of our own history, the hymns, the folk materials, etc., etc., etc.
You need to take all the steps you can to understand your career on gospel principles. You need to understand the relationships between the gospel and your career principles. The Gospel needs to be the center of your life and the beacon which not only shows you the reefs and rocks, but illuminates your professional activity and enriches all you do as a composer.
The things I have enumerated here are not easy. Many do not have the ear to even try to listen to music this seriously, let alone try to write music that is this intense. But if you want to be a real Mormon composer, you have no choice. How are we to provide the example for the world if we are behind them in anything? Only by getting ahead of them in everything with the leg-up provided by the insights of the gospel and the spirit. So get about it!
Letter Number Eleven
My Dear Friend,
These letters have touched on many of the issues we must face in our daily activity as composers. The way you deal with them in your own development will probably determine what kind of composer you turn out to be. But perhaps the most important matter of all has not been touched yet.
You are engaged in learning what you need to know to become a successful human being and a composer. At the end of four years, if your persist till then, you will get a certificate that says you have completed the course of study. This is a deception. The demanding task of mastering musical materials cannot be accomplished in four short years. The technical proficiency needed to control your expression so that the Spirit may speak precisely through you grows throughout your life. When you neglect it, it will take some time to regain your former skill and fluency with it. This doesn’t take place in a linear fashion. It grows here a little, there a little, piecemeal, but almost always in connection with a composition you are working on.
Even so, I believe that technical proficiency does tend to reach a plateau where additional technical development becomes dependent on something else: your spiritual development. It would be too easy to describe this development in terms of full tithing, temple visits, welfare hours, genealogy, etc., and these are important enough in themselves. But they are only outward manifestations of what I am talking about: the growth of your spirit and your insights so that you love profoundly, perceive mercifully and act with pure motives. As these magnify your soul you will be able to project that spiritual growth in your music. I would even venture that you will not be able to conceal it if you should wish to. This type of technical and spiritual growth is promoted by careful study, not only of music (which is important), but of the scriptures and other spiritual things; and of great literature, drama, painting, and dance; of history and psychology, politics and business, current events and entertainment. When you are working on an important composition the warehouse of your resources–intellectual, spiritual, musical, and instinctive–will be filled with the riches you have stored up through what you have lived and through your study.
Your growth is also promoted by activity. It is not enough to read about love or compassion, or helping. You must love, and forgive, and assist so that your experiences are first hand. It has been said by heretics that Mormons will never produce great art because they don’t experience life: they don’t fornicate, carouse, or even drink coffee. But for us the materials of great art are not found in wickedness (wickedness never was happiness), but in righteousness. In those things which really count–deep love of family, true service to fellow man, sharing, helping, caring, blessing mankind by our lives–we must be in the lead. For us, true art consists not of sordid experience but of the richness of the imagination, the soundness of technique, the vividness with which we capture the hidden fire that comes from the Spirit.
We have often quoted the thirteenth Article of Faith as a justification for activity in areas having to do with aesthetic sensitivities: “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy” (which covers almost any activity that is worthwhile) “we seek after these things.” I place emphasis on “seeking” because so often we tend to think that with music we may wallow in our own prejudices and cut out everything else. But I say to you that such illusions are dangerously close to being hardhearted and stiffnecked, and they breed offenses for which we will all have to answer on judgment day. So many of our musicians give all they have freely and intensely, trying to express their love of the Lord and the Gospel and their fellow members of the Church only to find blind prejudice and narrowmindedness preventing the members of the Church from receiving the benefit of the musician’s efforts. When you hear something that is over your head, the secret is not to close your ears: it is to lift your head and discover the beauty, the spirit, and the love that is there, that you might be edified and delighted with the profound beauties of the music, whatever the style, tempo, medium, or age of the music.
May I suggest that you keep close to your spiritual leaders. They probably won’t help your technique but they have a responsibility to help you with the Spirit. And when those great crises come in your life where fundamental reevaluations of your life are shaking you to the roots – fasting, prayer, temple sessions, and a thorough commitment to do the will of God will see you through. After all, if you know you are doing His will, the rest falls into place.