Conversations About Inspiration

The first of an occasional series of musings.

---

Where do ideas come from?

It's a simple question, and I've spent a lifetime not quite answering it. But it's the one I keep circling back to, so it seemed like the right place to begin.

Welcome. This is the first of an occasional series—musings, I like to call them—the kind of thinking that usually stays in my notebooks, or gets spoken once in a room and then evaporates. Every now and then I'll publish something here: an essay, a reflection, a contemplation of whatever cosmic reverberation happens to be echoing in my head. Some of it will be about music. Some won't. But all of it will be true from my own humble vantage on reality, and I'm grateful you'd spend even a few brain cycles here with me.

So let's start with that question.

This past April, I was lucky enough to be invited by Sondra Hall to participate in a series at OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNC Asheville, built around exactly that question. The framing came from David Lynch, who said we don't create ideas, we catch them, like fish. But how does that happen, exactly?

The format was less a class than a facilitated dialogue between artists. Each week paired two makers from different disciplines such as musicians and dancers, painters and poets, or conductors and actors. All invoke languages that don't translate obviously, but share much deeper threads. We were asked to introduce our work, then talk through the process of transforming inspiration into a finished thing. The audience was a self-selected group of adults who came genuinely ready to engage, which made it a particularly joy-filled and present space.

I had the incredible honor of being paired with Kate Weare, a dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and the founder and artistic director of the award-winning Kate Weare Company. Although our work uses different mediums, Sondra felt it shares the joy of authentic exploration, even comparing my ideas around the emotional capacity of harmonic texture and rhythmic pattern with Kate's conviction that form is meaning and emotional content is how we connect it all.

What follows are the thoughts I brought to that conversation...

---

Creativity

Creativity, by my definition, is the ongoing evolution of human perception. Neither a skill nor a talent, but an evolution: slow, cumulative, and collective. Like all evolution, it moves in both directions simultaneously. The artist and the audience co-evolve. The creator originates new ways of transmitting their ideas even as the listener assembles new ways of receiving. Over time, both are changed. In this exchange, both are equally important; neither is passive, and neither is complete absent the other.

In the human experience, art is the manifestation of this creative relationship, and it serves a much larger purpose than simple aesthetics. Darwin, beyond his famous theory of natural selection, proposed a second theory: that beauty and aesthetic preference play an equally important role in evolution and the persistence of life.

Beauty is information, and beauty is subjective. What one finds beautiful, another might not even notice, or perhaps even find repulsive. But when perception aligns, it is the signal that contact has been made between one nervous system and another, and then something larger than both. Beauty perpetuates life in the most fundamental sense: it is through the beauty of attraction that life persists. The bright colors of a flower. The blue ghost firefly's incandescent light. The elaborate eyespots of the Argus pheasant. Even the superb bird-of-paradise gets in on it, flipping a cape of black feathers up over his head and popping out two iridescent blue patches, transforming himself into a hovering oval smiley-face that then bounces around the female in a little snapping dance. (The female rejection rate is brutally high, so most of these performances are a male earnestly becoming a cartoon and getting turned down anyway.)

And yet, even in the bounty of nature, beauty can outrun utility entirely. It can become so elaborated, so autonomous, so far beyond any practical purpose, that it circles back around to something that looks almost spiritual. The club-winged manakin evolved bones dense enough to produce a clear musical note, a G, the way a violin bow draws sound from a string, at the cost of its flight.

A bird that traded flight for music. I find that almost unbearably beautiful.

On Darwin's "taste for the beautiful" and the aesthetic view of evolution, see Richard Prum's essay "Beauty Happens" in Natural History.

---

Music

Music is the art of time and emotion. It only exists in time, and only while it is being played and heard. Duration is one of its key characteristics, along with pitch, tone, timbre, and volume. But perhaps even more important than sound itself is its absence. It is the silence between notes that defines the shapes and colors of music, just as the space in a painting gives it form, or the vast emptiness between the rims defines the Grand Canyon. Without silence, there is no music. Only noise.

And woven through all of these elements is the most fundamental organizing principle of perceptible music: tension and release. The creation of harmonic or rhythmic instability and the movement toward resolution. It is the engine of every melody ever written, every chord progression ever played, every rhythm that has ever made a body move. Music creates a need in the listener and then answers it... or withholds the answer. Or answers it in a way that was completely unexpected. This is not merely a musical device, it is an emotional one. It is the reason a song can make a stranger weep.

The musician, by intuition and training, develops a lifetime of technique and vocabulary through a process called motor memory. This utilizes the same automatic portions of the brain that allow you to drive a car or ride a bicycle, any physical task that would overwhelm us entirely if we had to consciously concentrate on every nuance of execution. The process is the same for athletes, dancers, painters, potters, and every other act that involves physical execution.

Music has a singular attribute that differentiates it from most other art forms. Through vibrational waveforms, it shares emotion at a depth that is not just recognized, but physically felt by the listener. It has a way of resonating directly with our human nervous systems. I am not claiming it alone among the arts is capable of this; that would be one of the greatest falsehoods I could suppose. But I would argue it is uniquely efficient at breaking the emotional barrier.

Imagine a film or television show without music. You know the moment your favorite procedural ends and the song comes in, carrying that sense of hope and resolution? Or the sense of foreboding when Darth Vader appears, made inevitable by John Williams' darkened theme? Every major franchise understands this instinctively. Music is the parallel component to the visual that bypasses the intellect entirely, goes straight to the central nervous system, and manipulates our emotional strings.

---

Improvisation

Improvisation is creativity in real time. It is the act of making something from nothing in the moment, drawing on a lifetime of accumulated skill in order to free the nervous system to produce an outcome that could not have been predicted or planned. It is simultaneously the most disciplined and the most surrendered thing an artist can do, and it requires something beyond skill: a willingness to be truly vulnerable, to trust the moment, to trust your collaborators, to trust the accumulated weight of everything you have ever learned... and felt... and played. Some would call it spiritual channeling, or communicating with your definition of the divine. I define it as swimming in the cosmic ether, and it is best when you find yourself in the unconscious flow, that moment when the perceptive brain enters a form of obliviousness that melts the walls of perception into true experience, which some would say is the definition of consciousness itself.

---

Constraint and Freedom

Humanity's great task, as some would say... and curse as others would observe... is to create order out of chaos. It is in the deepest of our stories: from the opening of Genesis, to the Egyptian myth of Ma'at imposing order on the primordial void, to the Hindu concept of Rita, the cosmic order underlying all existence, to the Taoist vision of the ten thousand things emerging from the undifferentiated whole. Even in our community structures, we build houses, roads, and bridges to impose our will upon the natural world in a way we believe brings order to our perception of the chaos of nature. Meanwhile, our intellectual and philosophical efforts attempt to discover and name the interlocking systems that define the undefinable. On this much at least, science and religion can agree.

This mystery is at the core of our being. It is the essence of what we are, and is, in my humble opinion, the root of all creativity.

Every creative act is a negotiation between constraint and freedom. They are not opposites; they are two halves of the same whole, symbiotic partners each giving the other meaning. Just as there is no light without dark, no day without night, no joy without suffering, there can be no understanding of freedom without constraint.

Motor memory is constraint that produces freedom. The thousands of hours of practice, the scales, the theory, the vocabulary: all of it exists only to get out of the way. These are the deeply internalized tools that allow the conscious mind to completely let go. Improvisation is freedom that requires constraint. The form, the key, the tempo, the trust between players: these are not limitations. They are the banks that shape the river and give it its force. Without the banks there is no current, only flood. And noise music, the apparent destruction of all constraints, is perhaps the most extreme test of this relationship. It asks the listener to surrender every expectation, every learned pattern, every evolutionary impulse toward resolution. It is freedom so total it becomes its own kind of discipline.

This is the ultimate human struggle. This is what it means to be alive. We build structures to feel safe, break them to feel alive, and then build them all over again. Every life is this. Every relationship is this. Every piece of music is this. It is the philosophical purpose behind tension and release, which is the simplest definition of emotional experience.

The artist's job is not to resolve the tension between constraint and freedom. It is to inhabit it fully, and to invite the audience in.

---

Sinfonietta Helene

On September 27th, 2024, Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina. Our mountains, our rivers, our community. Over a hundred people lost their lives. Thousands lost their homes. In the days that followed, I found myself with two questions I couldn't shake: What can I do? And how do I make sense of what has happened to us?

I was sitting at my piano, an instrument I barely know how to play, deliberately, so that I have no motor memory to rely on. I was feeling. I was searching. I was reaching deep into the universe to ask why there was so much suffering. And the universe was largely silent, as the universe is wont to be. There is no why in the chaos and entropy of existence. And yet, my nervous system divined a theme, a sound, a musical phrase that so perfectly encapsulated my experience of suffering and despair that it immediately told me it wanted to be something much more than a set of notes beneath my fingertips.

I believe that composing is the process of fearless decision-making. I knew at that moment that this melody wanted to be a symphony. I have listened to classical music my entire life, in all its deviations from the Renaissance to today, and I have a deep respect for the magnitude of the art form.

But I had never written a symphony before.

What did I have? Knowledge, experience, tools, skills, empathy, and an unwavering dauntlessness. What did I not have? Academic credentials, a history as a symphonic composer, and fear. Does any of that matter when you are compelled to do something?

And let me take a moment to say that for me, this is what defines a true artist. You create because you have to. You have no choice in the matter, because your soul wants to communicate in ways much deeper than the polite niceties, or lack thereof, of daily life.

So I sat down, and I started to write. Four months later, I had my first complete draft. I could keep talking about this process, and I will in the coming months. But for now I think we've already hit on what matters most.

We are ALL capable creative creatures. We already use the powers of our nervous systems to feel and express our deeper truths. And everything, everything, is relative. There are no absolute poles of good and bad when it comes to art. Yes, there are creations that perhaps belong within the walls of your own home, but that does not in any way negate the expressive value, or the intrinsic meaning, of what the act of creation does for you as a human being. From a musical perspective, I like to say: if you can play well enough for someone else to feel what you are feeling, you are successful as a musical artist.