Messiness (Day 182/365)

Posted on by Dale

I’ve begun reading A Perfect Mess: the hidden benefits of disorder, which proposes that the costs of keeping things organized are not only not worth it, but are illusory. Quite the reverse, they say: mess is not only rational and natural, but also quite beneficial.

What does this have to do with creativity, here on the halfway mark to my 365 days?

Lots, as it turns out. It does not take a lot of thought to figure out how messy people are more creative. It would seem to go with the territory. I think most people would put it the other way, creative people are messy, but that’s not exactly the correlation.

It turns out that mess (and we are talking the usual messy desk, the cluttered study, the bedroom with piles of clothes) has, systemically, six characteristics which, although the authors don’t put it this way (at least not yet in the book), I am connecting to absolute creativity.

Flexibility: Systems that are completely organized are inflexible. They cannot change quickly to meet changes in the environment. I think of media specialists with perfect media centers who freak if a class shows up unscheduled. Systems with a moderate amount of mess have slack and can bend themselves into new shapes without breaking.

Completeness: When you never throw anything away, you’ve always got what you need. Look at the Eames design studio, or Nancy Willard’s drawers of flotsam. Look at my ability to pull up files or lesson plans or whip up a board game complete with projected questions for an entire class in sixty minutes. Also, if you have all this stuff at your disposal, you are more likely to make those interesting connections that flow from truly creative people.

Resonance: Messy systems are open to and can align themselves with outside influences/environments, so that unexpected effects result. The book refers to Alexander Fleming’s messy lab that allowed the intrusion of the penicillin mold into a staph culture while he was on vacation, or to wandering around a city on foot rather than sticking to the tourist attractions.

Invention: Here’s the core, at least for us working on William Blake’s Inn. Mess allows different ideas to rotate in and out of focus; neatness keeps everything boxed in and sweeps away ideas that don’t fit. Like our brainstorming of our three pieces (see completeness), we don’t reject any ideas, even sunflower gowns that spurt turtles. Sooner or later we may need that idea.

Efficiency: This one’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? But think of it like this: a person who puts everything away (e.g., “one-touch” desks) is always having to look for things (and then put them away again.) A person who keeps piles on his desk has the most recent and most useful things at his fingertips. The book gives an amazing example: an efficiency consultant gave two decks of cards to two people in the audience, one shuffled and one in order, and challenged them to pull four specified cards from the deck. Of course the person with the ordered deck found the cards faster, albeit only slightly. However, the authors did some math on the situation and found that the time it takes to put a deck of cards in order and to keep it in order far outweighed the four or five second advantage you get with an ordered deck. Plus, they slyly remind us, how useful is an ordered deck of cards?

Robustness: Messy systems are simply stronger. They are “more resistant to destruction, failure, and imitation.” I am reminded of a couple of times when one person or another sought to “improve” the car rider system at Newnan Crossing by introducing a more rigorous system of matching kids to cars. I pointed out that such rigor simply introduced more breaking points: if any part of the system failed, the whole system failed.

As I keep reading the book, which of course is total self-justification for my personal style, I’ll keep us posted on how important it is not to clear off that desk.

Workshop (Day 181/365)

Posted on by Dale

Tonight’s workshop was as exciting as last week. Attending were Melissa, Laura, Carol Lee, and Dale.

We shared our visuals for Sun & Moon Circus: Marc’s pajamaed Tiger looking at angels rolling the Sun & Moon into position; Melissa’s angel ringmaster; Carol Lee’s painted umbrella (and pencil sketches of various characters); and Dale’s fuzzy pastel drawing of the King of Cats and the “fitful flashing lights.”

Everyone had had more ideas during the week, and so we added those, and we riffed on the visuals: Sun & Moon as a two-sided puppet; the three sunflowers as a kind of curtain, parting to reveal the circus; angels with umbrellas on tightropes; clowns using the planets as balloons, bopping them up into the air; stars as tumblers; pulling the whole circus into slow motion at the final rallentando, then vanishing, with a comet sweeping across the front of the stage as the final image.

We discussed extending the circus music so that we have more than thirteen seconds of circus: pre-repeat the circus waltz, then have the chorus sing.

Then we moved on to Man in the Marmalade Hat. It clearly divides into two sections. We seized on the line “Winter is over, my loves” and made the first half (and probably the entire work up to that point) in the winter, with snow drifts sprouting green grass and flowers appearing everywhere in the second half.

Everyone saw his entrance as a parade, of course: standards, pennants, marching percussion, attendants (ice sprites in the first entrance); mop as baton. For the keepers/sleepers chorus, we thought the regular gang (tiger, king of cats, etc.) could be the dance squad. For the repeat, we posited a horde of five-year-olds in hedgehog costumes. They would come rolling out of the walls of the Inn, like clowns from a clown car.

We finished up with Two Sunflowers Move Into the Yellow Room, and we had some silly moments: the sunflowers as two old ladies, with traveling bags; the sunflowers with long dresses, from which emerge/spurt the topaz tortoises.

But we also had some interesting motifs: a troupe of traveling sunflowers, which we’ve seen between numbers or even during numbers before this one, and begin with the troupe arriving on another journey, stopping facing upstage. The Two Sunflowers turn (with their traveling bags packed) and begin their duet as they move forward.

Again, we have to extend the piece: it’s 1:01 total. Again, easy to solve. We just repeat and expand the waltz after the chorus, then repeat the chorus bit. Finally the traveling troupe continues its journey while the Two Sunflowers settle in. Lots o’ ideas for topaz tortoises.

Assignment: visuals for Man in the Marmalade Hat and Two Sunflowers, and play with some choreography for the hedgehogs.

Soon it will be time for us to stop drawing and writing, and start moving and building.

Nothing (Day 180/365)

Posted on by Dale

It’s pretty disheartening to be approaching the halfway point and have a day when I accomplished nothing, but there it is.

update: It occurred to me that I had actually done something creative today, so I’m retracting my “nothing.” (See, Cordelia, it’s not so hard.)

At school, I’m gearing up for teachers to design and build “reading caves” in the media center on March 2, Dr. Seuss’s birthday and Read Across America Day. I’m encouraging them to use Mr. McGroovy’s box rivets, and yesterday I decided to build one myself. It’s going to be Hogwarts, with an entrance hall, the dining hall, and commons rooms for Gryffindor and Slytherin.

Essentially, it’s two library tables shoved into an aisle between shelves with about three feet of space between them. Surround the whole thing with cardboard, painted inside and out.

I’ll keep you posted.

Louvre (Day 178/365)

Posted on by Dale

Today we went to the Louvre exhibit at the High Museum. It was the first time we’ve been to the High since they’ve added the new buildings, which is bad of us. Very spectacular spaces, indeed.

As usual when faced with the products of Versailles/Louvre, I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of commitment represented: talent, work hours, materials. The amount of money involved, I suspect, was not as vast as you might think, because the artists and artisans who created these things were not well paid, except for the stars.

The first floor gallery was devoted to drawings from the kings’ collections. Drawing was not the art form it became later, because it’s a personal art form, just the artist and the pencil, then just the viewer and the paper. Most of these drawings were sketches or studies for more public works: portraits, murals, etc.

The thing that fascinated me most about these works was the draftsmanship. Unlike many recent works on paper, these drawings were not about the surface of the paper. You rarely thought about the line qua line, or masses of color vis á vis the edge of the surface. Instead, you see a shoulder, a chest, a calf, a face, and you truly have to force yourself to see lines of chalk at all. And I tried. I tried to reduce the drawing to chalk-on-paper, but I couldn’t. I tried to see areas of light and dark, but all I could see was perfectly formed musculature. This never ceases to amaze me.

It also reminded me that I must create a visual for Wednesday night’s workshop, some moment from Sun & Moon Circus.

Further updating, and Momix (Day 177/365)

Posted on by Dale

I spent most of today at Clayton State, hosting the parent orientation video for the Governor’s Honors Program. Ten times I listen to my voice narrate the same video, and then I answer many of the same questions afterwards. Not hard work, and the parents are mostly nice and not too frantic about the situation. (Notice that I was at Clayton State, not at Pebblebrook, where the dance mamas are all frantic.)

I continued opening the orchestral scores in Finale 2007, converting them from Finale 2006. There are some strangenesses occurring. For example, most ritards/rallentandos, anything that uses a gently sloping line to define the slowing of the tempo, essentially stopped playing. I switched all of those from using the gently sloping line to just slowing the tempo down. The orchestra will read rallentando, and the mp3s will sound as if they’ve slowed, so it’s the best compromise for the moment.

Some files lost track of which instruments had been assigned to which staff. That’s tedious to fix, but not a terrible thing.

The strings are interpreting any nonslurred sixteenth notes as spiccato, which is rarely the way I want them played. That must have to do with the Garritan Personal Orchestra instruments and the way they are interpreted by the new program. It sucks. I’d like it if Garritan fixed all their stuff soon.

The ratchet, which shows up in Postcard, is very timid, not like the nice loud whacker in 2006.

Some frustrations.

Later: after spending all day informing parents about what GHP is about, I joined Ginny at the Ferst Center for Momix’s Lunar Sea. Gimmicky, but fun, and often very beautiful.

The whole show was behind a scrim, onto which hallucinatory images were projected. Behind the scrim, the dancers were clad in blacklight costumes, and that’s all we saw the whole evening, costumes and props. Often there would be partners clad completely in black, so that the blacklight dancers appeared to float or otherwise defy gravity. Like I said, very gimmicky, but often compelling images.

The curtain call was the most fun curtain call I’ve seen in a long time: first, a company call (minus the scrim) in their black suits, then a second one in their spandex, followed by individual dance riffs by each dancer, presumably to impress upon us that these are “real” dancers. And they were. The men especially were quite impressive in their little spandex shorts: built like bodybuilders, they moved with balletic speed and grace. They were beautifully strong and beautifully graceful. Damn them.

Updating Blake (Day 176/365)

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I’m at a hotel in Lithia Springs, staying overnight as the GHP interviews get under way. After I checked in this afternoon, I decided to go ahead and start converting all the orchestral scores from Finale 2006 to Finale 2007.

I got the first two pieces done, not without some scary moments: a ritard in William Blake’s Inn froze the notes. I thought I had a dead file, but deleting the ritard marking fixed everything.

Since I now have enough memory to work Finale properly, I’ve begun rethinking some of the orchestration. For example, I’ve added a lovely gong to the opening and closing of the first piece. The next time you hear some of these, they’re going to sound subtly different!

Another hearing (Day 175/365)

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Other than the run-of-the-mill creativity at school (banners and handouts and such), I didn’t really create anything today. Tonight, I did have the opportunity to expose a few more people to William Blake’s Inn. Ginny’s book club had their first meeting of the year, and she and Bette decided that their first book ought to be A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. They invited me to talk about the music and the production, so I did. The Ladies of the Club were impressed.

Then I retreated to my study to catch up on some reading.

Workshop (Day 174/365)

Posted on by Dale

Wow o wow o wow!

Tonight we had our first workshop for William Blake’s Inn. In attendance were Marc and Molly Honea, Carol Lee Shankel, Melissa Houghton, Laura Lambert, Brenda Weaver, and me.

I brought everybody up to speed on what we were doing there, and what our eventual options were for the backers audition in May: we could stage a piece, we could stage puppet version of a piece (to show what an elaborate staging would look like), or we could project designs/sketches/ideas of a piece.

We passed out the scores and scripts to our three pieces, and we listened to all three. I sang them.

Then Marc talked about some approaches he had taken to coming up with ideas for the songs. We decided to work on Sun & Moon Circus first, so I rolled out a long piece of paper and taped it to the mirror.

We listened to the piece again, and wrote down images and thoughts and moods and feelings and ideas and characters.

Then we shared, and this is going to be the most fun, coming up with all the ideas that we can then use as staging. Marc contributed the idea of the Tiger and King of Cats, et al., having a magic slide show in their room. Among the images they’re watching are the Sun and Moon. Tiger begins to hear noises and gets spooked. I talked about how the music was both ominous and anticipatory.

Other ideas: the Rabbit as butler, turning into a ringmaster. The Inn as the living quarters for children’s toys, and the children have come for a visit. Angels outside the inn with the chime that recurs in the music, like on a clock. The Sun and Moon appearing on swings, or on circus drums. The Sun and Moon both as dancers and as puppets.

The Inn in the background with puppet versions of the characters we see later close up. A fullscale circus at the end of the song, with tumblers, angel tightrope walkers, clowns. The Tiger is pushed to jump through a hoop.

Several of us realized up front that one thing we have to keep in mind is what children will do in each piece. Since I originally wrote the work as a song cycle for adult chorus, I especially have to think about working children into the vocal texture.

Lots more ideas as well, but you get the picture.

We then watched the documentary on Nancy Willard, Uncommon Sense. She is amazing, both as a writer and as an artist. Very inspiring.

Homework for next week: draw/paint/collage a moment from Sun & Moon Circus. This is going to be fabulous!

I’m a composer (Day 173/365)

Posted on by Dale

Seeing the article in the paper on Sunday was an interesting experience. For one thing, there was the surprise; I had expected the Times-Herald to publish it earlier in the week, and when they didn’t I assumed they had just tossed it. So it was a pleasant surprise to see it on Sunday morning.

It was more than pleasant. It was gratifying. The unambiguous headline: “William Blake’s Inn Moves into Production.” The outright definition of Lacuna as a local theatre cooperative. The ridiculously oversized photo of me and the flowers, with the sly caption about William Blake having sent the flowers from Poughkeepsie.

And more than all this, I realized, the shock accorded by the leap of faith it took for me to call myself “composer Dale Lyles.”

I am sure there are those who read the article and who snorted at the designation. I don’t think I’d be surprised at a list of those names, either. But over the past year or so, I have come to a new understanding of myself in that regard, and I am more than comfortable calling myself a composer.

Am I a trained musician? Nope, other than paying attention under various choral directors. Do I know one chord inversion from another? Maybe. If it’s a triad. In the home key. Could I write a susp. aug. 9th chord? Not if my life depended on it. (I’m not really even sure whether “susp. aug. 9th chord” is a real thing.)

But am I a composer? Yes, I am. I write music. I write lovely, effective music, and I’m getting better at it all the time. The last two pieces I’ve written, Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way, and the Epilogue, are very nice indeed. Those who might snort at my calling myself a composer have not heard this work.

That sounds a little defensive, and I don’t mean it to be. My point is that I think I’ve reached a new plateau in my creative efforts and can ditch some of my insecurities. I can make music do what I want it to, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s what a composer does.