London, 2018, featured on www.crosseyedpianist.com

 

A few months ago, I made the decision of starting a new day job outside of the music industry. This choice, and temporary departure from constant musicality, has had immediate impacts on my career as a composer and artist.

Spending less time devoted to music taught me to give more value to musical moments. Taking some distance from musical instruments also showed me to approach music differently, and to hear differently—to see afresh—,and has improved my interest in other arts. Consequently, listening to music in a new way taught me to speak the language of music freshly, and therefore compose differently.

 

Having less time devoted to music taught me to organise myself differently, and to value the musical moments that remained. Music has always been in the foreground of my daily life, and having the feeling that I had all the time in the world to dedicate to music was  sometimes synonym to neglect. On the contrary, realising that each musical moment that I spend is being timed has had the effect of making me self-conscious of what I want to hear, discover and learn about. Another consequence of having little musical time is that I have learned how to tame the muse—so it comes out when I need it. I have started writing differently, from necessity, and to quote Rossini: “Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity”.

Being left with a set of ears as my principal instrument made me start listening again, differently. By taking some distance I took my ears—and to some extent my eyes—off what I had been focusing in the past, and I started looking elsewhere, coming back to a greater variety of music and breaking the boundaries the instruments had made. As a result, I expanded my interests in different arts; photography, architecture, design, cinema and literature. I feel like I’m a different—if not better—aesthete.

Whoever learns to listen better has a lot of chances of ending up speaking better. Whether that is the case here is unknown yet, however I feel like I write differently, more freely. The absence of instrument—the translator—resulted in myself being forced to speak the language by taking more risks. The absence of the limits of my own technical abilities have also expanded my creativity, not only in terms of the language itself, but also in my choices of instruments and colours.

 

There are of course a few drawbacks to taking some distance from music. The main one being that I miss the instruments, which I have barely touched in months, both and contradictorily, by lack of envy and lack of time. Louis Armstrong used to say “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it”. Similarly, I feel like my instrumental skills are getting weaker and weaker everyday. There are also things that I am probably missing out because of the limited approach I have on hearing and creating music. Inspiration used to come from improvisation and practical mistakes as much as ideas emerging from my brain.

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Important decisions have impacts that spread towards different parts of one’s life. This change of route has had a direct influence on my career and growth as a composer and artist.

Being a little further from music taught me to give more importance to the moments I can devote to it.

Additionally, stepping away from the practice of an instrument seems to have made me a different—and perhaps better—musician. The multiplicity of mediums in approach and expression in regards to arts has allowed me to find alternatives in discovering and understand new music and arts.

It is said that Mahler was more of a composer than a performer, and Berlioz did not play any instruments—it did not stop them from composing great music, and hopefully this will apply to me.