#65

When teaching a professional practices course, I always opened with this quote from Barry Moser.

Talent
“The best advice I could possibly give you, and forgive me if this seems glib, is to work. Work. Work. Work.
Every day. At the same time every day. For as long as you can take it every day, work, work, work.
Understand? Talent is for shit. I’ve taught school for nearly thirty years and never met a student who did not
have some talent. It is as common as house dust or kudzu vine in Alabama and is just about as valuable.
Nothing is as valuable as the habit of work, and work has to become a habit. This I learned from Flannery
O’Connor. Read her. Read her letters especially, and her essays. You will learn more about what it is you
want to do from people like her and Ben Shahn and Eudora Welty than you will ever learn from drawing
classes. Read. Read. Read. You are in the business of words more than pictures. You must understand
words and the craft and art of putting words together to move men’s souls and minds and hearts. Listen to
music. Listen to Bach’s Art of the Fugue and the Goldberg Variations over and over and over. Every day, day
after day after day until you begin to sense, if not understand, what he is up to. Then try to implement what
you intuit from Bach into your own work. I don’t care if you don’t like classical music. Do it. It is invaluable, but
you have to listen, and then don’t listen. Let it fill your mind at one moment and then let it flow over you and
into you until you are paying it no attention whatever. Bach will teach you form and structure and rhythm and
all sorts of things you never imagined.

Second to the value of work is the willingness to fail. Faulkner said that to not fail is to be perfect and that if
we ever did anything perfect nothing would remain but to cut the throat. Experiment and fail. Move on.
Experiment and fail. Move on. Always keep in motion and finish the job even if it is not exactly what you
hoped it would be, is not as good as it could be. It will never be as good as it could be. But each time you
must try to make it as good as it could be. Its shortcomings will reveal themselves in time, sometimes to your
embarrassment, but that’s ok. It’s part of the growth process. Failure is the foundation of growth. I’ve done
over 200 books and not one of them is perfect. But.I would rather have the 200 imperfect books that comprise
my history and mark the vectors of my path through my art form than to have one perfect book which would
comprise nothing but its own perfect self and denote no vectors of a life lived, and an art form struggled with
and occasionally, very occasionally, bested. More I cannot advise you except (as corny and prosaic as it may
seem) put love first in your life, love of yourself and your work and of other people, and of whatever things of
the spirit move and motivate you, and to have fun and maintain a fierce sense of humor. There is nothing so
serious or important that it can’t be laughed at, or even poked a little fun at. Practice safe sex. Don’t do heavy
drugs. Don’t get drunk and drive a car. Eat your greens. Get plenty of sleep.”
-Barry Moser

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#66

Appreciate the sentiment but don’t forget to play.

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#67

We must distinguish between craft and creativity. In the visual world, once the camera was developed we had a better device for representation and painting could free itself from craft. Few today would doubt that Rothko is master even though we all can put color on canvas.

Punk rock arose in part out of the belief that great music did not require mastery of an instrument and a million dollar recording studio.

Some will always love Rachmaninoff or Eddie Van Halen because they are in awe of their technical prowess.

Personally, I do not believe that technique alone moves the soul.

So the question become “What do you mean by talent” Is John Cage’s 3:33 the product of extraordinary talent?

The plethora of today’s sound toys and DAWs allow more of us to make sound irrespective of our mastery of any particular instrument. Also the destruction of the music distribution monopoly means that there are no longer a few who decide what the public gets to hear.

To me talent today means that you have the guts to put before the public the noise you make and say “I believe this is worthwhile”

I suspect that we all hear music that we think is crap, but at least its creator had the guts to put it out there so you can have that opinion.

Remember – Ambient is today’s punk rock

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#68

Sure, but punk rock is pretty one-dimensional stuff. Mastery allows you to express more complex and varied emotions. It’s difficult to do a deep dive into the human psyche without chops. Rarely happens. I won’t say never, but it’s rare. The most profound artists almost always have strong technique.

#69

I think Brian Eno quick touring when he realized that he really couldn’t play any instrument.

1 Like
#70

This relates to something I think about often; art, craft and creativity. I’ll see if I can articulate my thinking concisely.

First of all I’ll talk about art. In particular I consider the cornerstone of art to be intent: the intent to evoke a response in the consumer. Without intent then I don’t consider the creator is creating art. The art being successful or not relates to how the consumer’s response relates to that intent.

Secondly I’ll talk about craft; for me craft is the application of a set of skills you use in a particular domain. Your craft is what you might use to translate a concept into reality; that concept might be yours or someone else’s. Success of your craft is how well you can do this translation.

Third is creativity. For me this is how much your art (or craft) go outside of the norm, but also how intentional and specific that difference is. This means random experimentation may result in sounds far outside the norm, but probably lacking in specificity and intent.

4:33 would be an example of something creative and artistic but not requiring much craft. Classic punk could be called art and craft though perhaps not that creative. Some ambient is art, but a lot is purely craft; similarly some is quite creative but a lot is less so. A lot of music I make isn’t creative and is not art, just craft. Some always use all three, some use none of the above.

Anyway, these are just some of my thoughts, I’d love to hear everyone else’s perspective.

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#71

Many of the first popular punk records were recorded in nice studios or stages, like Wessex, Radio City, Elektra Sound Producers, Electric Lady and The Hit Factory. Not exactly peoples’ basements. They still wanted to sound good.

Bad Brains, Inner Ear and Smart Studios came later.

A lot of the early punk mythos was just marketing.

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#72

I recall Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle (which first performed in '76) saying that one of her greatest talents was never actually learning how to play guitar. Now decades later, TG is considered incredibly influential.

I know many technically outstanding musicians, who are completely unable to improvise.

I agree that technical skill gives you the ability to accurately express what is in your head. I recall in art school learning to draw precisely what I saw. I agree that this was a valuable craft to learn, but one I quickly abandoned for a more expressive way of painting. Technical skill alone has never made great art.

Today all of us technically inept musician have toys that allow us to express ourselves and that is a good thing even if others consider it racket.

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#73

Yes, but sometimes technical skill or innovation is inseparable from the art, the expression of color and emotion. Such as Titian then Rembrandt with glazes and impasto.

And the power of their art requires no blurb or explanation, it is obvious.

#74

To me it seems that once art “freed” itself from craft (quotes are intended), it drifted into the opposite corner and there’s now a dogma about avoiding craft like hell, not unlike the whole “avoiding tonality” thing in avantgarde and academic music. While there was a point to it when the idea originated, and back then was actually a very strong thing, It feels pretty arbitrary and hollow in 2020.

Well, the destruction of the music distribution monopoly only created a new monopoly, didn’t it? Now the likes of spotify and apple are in charge.

But it’s true that we can more easily expose ourselves to very different kinds of music and have easier access to otherwise pretty hard to find material. One just needs to be able to search for them, and handle the enormous amount of music that is available.

I was just thinking about the whole thing and I realized that a substancial portion of the musical artists who I really admire often state in their interviews that they are not very good at playing an instrument. Where “not being very good at playing an instrument” usually means, to play a song from a score, play a melody other people know, or play more complex things. Most of these people do use a specific instrument in their practice though. Be it the guitar, bass or piano.
I guess I really identify in this, since I would also describe myself as somebody who is not very good at playing an instrument in the above sense.

I guess in many cases it’s also really a matter of what you’re passionate about. You’re probably not going to be very good at things you’re not that passionate about, and even if life is making it hard for you you’ll find ways to do the things you love.
Though it’s always a lot of factors at play, which to me this whole discussion points out pretty well, if I put all the various thoughts on the matter together.

This is an intersting thought.
Spontaneusly I would say that there’s a low entry barrier in ambient, though that might mean that anybody can make it, which I don’t think is entirely true. Any kind of music is now easy to make. I can write a symphony if I want. I have all the tools. It would be a really bad one though I’m sure.
I can try to play/sing an unplugged version rock song on the guitar, since I both have a mic, a computer with some fx and a guitar of some kind, but it would likely be a total catastrophy.
I can make an ambient track and… well… I’m still trying to figure out if I’m any good at it.
There’s the big question if some types of music “expose” their being bad more easily, but that’s another dicussion entirely. The whole “bad music” notion is a very complex and debatable matter.

Some ambient has a really strong impact on me, and really draws me into, and some other leaves me totally cold and bored and I think I can identify some key skills and developed sensibilities at work for most of the artists I really admire.

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#75

Not to derail the thread, but I think you have a very narrow idea of what punk is… see: Wire, Pere Ubu, Mission of Burma, This Heat, Swell Maps, …

And to make this more relevant to the thread, none of the greatness of these groups was necessarily technical in a traditional sense. But it was extremely creative, deep, and moving.

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#76

This seems key - mastery hovering somewhere around the area where expression or intent are fully ( or as ‘fully’ as is realistic) matched by skill.

This is interesting, and a stance I’m sympathetic to, but where would it leave things like automatic writing or the works of Pollock (I may be wrong but I believe he was trying to get conscious intention out of the way)?

Perhaps we could argue that ‘getting oneself out of the way of the process’ is itself a kind of meta-intention?

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#77

If the goal is success–however defined–then hard work and perseverance are likely to yield results.

On the other hand, when a toddler bangs on one of those candy-colored toy xylophones, the goal is self-amusement, not self-improvement. That’s the model I follow.

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#78

When a toddler bangs on a xylophone, they are developing their gross and fine motor skills. So the goal is in fact self-improvement. Perhaps more so than any navel-gazing “artist.”

How do you know what they are feeling anyway?

I’m not being completely serious, but you get my point.

#79

This isn’t really a meta-intention, it is a direct artistic intention that was quite dominant during the mid-20th-century avant garde and conceptual artists. It’s very common to find art where the intention is in the actions and gesture, not in the material output, but that doesn’t make it less intentional.

This seems to be veering away from the original thread topic, so if we want to keep going maybe best to move to another thread…

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#80

Let’s say there is someone we can all agree is talented, if someone copies their work and nobody knows that the work is copied is that talent?

Now what if someone spent an inordinate amount of time learning what it takes to reproduce the talented artist’s work to the point where their work is indistinguishable from the talented artist’s work is that talent?

If we cloned the original artist and the clone produced the original artist’s work is that talent?

1 Like
#81

I guess the “talent” i.e. the amount of work, intelligence, skill and experience it takes to clone an artist’s work is somehow dependant on how much craft is involved.
But yes, it might take some of it.

and btw.

So the third intelligence is musical intelligence and that’s the capacity to appreciate different kinds of musics, to produce the music by voice or by an instrument or to conduct music. And people say well music is a talent. It’s not an intelligence. And I say well why if you’re good with words is that an intelligence, but if you’re good with tones and rhythms and timbres nobody’s ever given me a good answer which is why it makes sense to talk about musical intelligence. And at certain cultures over history, musical intelligence has been very important.

Source: https://bigthink.com/videos/howard-gardner-on-the-eight-intelligences

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#82

I feel as though Borges already answered this particular question with Pierre Menard’s Quixote.

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#83

I guess what I was thinking here was not purely intent in the action of the artist, but more intent and specificity in the response it tries to elicit. The intent in creation is perhaps better described as choice.

Focusing on intent in response, let’s consider some examples. Works of craft can elicit emotional response without that being the intent of the creator. An example is if I play something improvised on the piano and it makes a listener start crying: if I didn’t intend to do that, then I don’t consider it art. If I have a grand design to stick a pineapple to a wall to elicit confusion in a gallery goer and everyone sees through the ruse, it’s still art by virtue of my intent.

Intent in the action of creation is a different aspect. Even if my process lacks direct intent my selection of that process in itself was a choice and hence intent (or maybe meta-intent). It’s hard to imagine a human acting without intent or drive at some base level. In my mind, if the piece wasn’t intentional then it was accidental but deciding it is art is the choice. For example If I dropped a paint palette in the floor while walking to the canvas to paint then pick it up and take it to a gallery. The creation was an accident, but I chose to label it art and share it: That choice was an expression of intent.

#84

I watched that whole thing and something about how he breaks down the intelligences doesn’t sit well with me because it feels like someone going to a buffet, grabbing some food, arranging it in a certain way and declaring that “you’ve all just been calling it food, but I’ve decided there are eight food groups”. The issue isn’t that he’s deciding to break it down into the 8 groups because they do make some sense from a western philosophy human point of view. It’s that he’s only been visiting buffets and decided to declare that all food should be categorized that way.

Of course this is way off topic at this point, but my original intent to ask those questions was to suss out for myself where I feel those boundaries lie and see where others feel they lie.