The Artist is the Audience's Brush

I awoke with this analogy in mind: that writing is organized in two great domains: the architecture and the construction, or building phase. In the first architectural phase, a grand design must be conceived and carefully drawn up in overall conception as well as to result in the equivalent of a blueprint, or design plan. In the building phase, structural logic and sequence must guide the craft to build from the ground up. The complete foundation with precursor systems must precede the construction of the edifice. The words are the lumber, the sentences are the joins. Quality is a concern at every phase and step.

Without any part of these, the project fails. There is no building built without a good plan, without a proper foundation, good lumber, and good joinery. For making these statements, I might be accused and convicted of stating the obvious; yet it comes to me as if for the first time.

But wait. What about improvisation? In music, improvisation is often the most satisfying of musics. How does improvisation fit into the analogy—if at all?

It helps to remember that music is an entire abstract language unto itself, and as such, parallels more intimately the language used in speaking and writing than the visual language of architecture. The levels of complexity that can be achieved in the verbal and musical languages exceeds that of the visual field by orders of magnitude due to the complete lack of physical restraint.

I remember it being argued that good improvisation requires as much or more planning and skill as does the standard, pre-composed music that corresponds in our analogy to the architecture-followed-by-construction approach to writing. The great improviser is enabled by incalculable hours of discipline and practice in all of the principle materials and devices of music to tap this hard-earned knowledge base and repertoire of skills in acts of spontaneous composition. The process closely resembles performance in the linguistic arts of speech, conversation, and discourse, which can be characterized in the same terms. For those who listen to good improvisation, it is usually obvious that themes and structures are present—if embryonic, manipulated, fleeting, or subconscious—or that certain instruments play the role of structural thrall to the improviser; in particular, the bass, which provides a rationalizing foundation in harmony, and the drums which provide a temporal one. The greatest improvisers, though, like Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, needed no one to provide any rationalizing foundation at all. Each statement they produced contained its own manifest logic; each sound, or note, or phrase, or motif, or sentence they played was developed by some human logic from the one that preceded it and by the one that was to follow. In contrast with the explicit structural design and planning of the architectural approach, the structure in improvisation is largely subtle, or implicit.

But how does this apply to the analogy with writing? Improvisers pursue expressionistic ideals for which there was and is a very limited and specialized audience. By a very wide margin, the audience that is qualified to listen with substantial comprehension and appreciation to musical improvisation is minuscule. Interpretively enabled listening requires many hours of discipline and learning in musical materials and practices in order to prepare the listener to understand what an artist is doing with that material, and to be capable of decoding and interpreting the information stream as it is delivered in real time and perceived. Few, indeed, are they who can do so in any appreciable degree, and so the audience for this music is quite small. To provide illustrative comparisons, how many are they who have read with full comprehension Joyce's Ulysses, or Finnegan's Wake? On a lower plane, how many can and have read Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species? On a still lower plane, how many have read the full text of Whitman's Leaves of Grass? (And yet, how many sing their praises?)

Untutored audiences need full measures of structure and organization; they need explicit guidance and direction. The lapine audience requires pleasure, security, and visceral stimulation, and it fears and shies away from complexity, unpredictability, and unfamiliarity. Such audiences demand distillations, summaries, abstracts, exegeses, encapsulations, interpretive sermons, simplifications.

The writer who wants thereby to put bread on his or her table needs an audience of patrons. Such writers will design and craft writings that meet and do not exceed the needs of, and provide pleasure to, the greatest possible number of people. They not only want, but need a large audience. Benjamin Franklin, writing as Poor Richard in 1733, wrote, “Would you live with ease, Do what you ought, and not what you please.” Writers already ensconced in the echelons of fame and fortune (or of ascetic dispositions) can afford to write for their own idealistic or personal reasons and with contempt for the size of their audience.

In this, and by way of conclusion, Benjamin Franklin's advice is as good or better than most when he, in speaking of the books he authored, wrote, “Yet, like Feasts I'd have my Books Rather be pleasing to the Guests than Cooks.”

That's it, in a nutshell!