On the doomed love cycle
Being an artist is great because you can indulge in borderline unhealthy emotional dynamics and it’s okay because that’s what artists are supposed to do.
I have a tendency to fall in love with works of music like they’re people. That’s normal and not at all concerning, right? A lot of non-sentient things in music are people to me. Pianos, they’re people. My hands, they’re people. The metronome, it’s people. This is what happens when you devote a huge portion of your life to something that requires long periods of isolation and a great deal of emotional transference.
(I think this is something that should be issued as a warning to parents interested in getting their kid started in music lessons. Pros: good for brain, teaches discipline and craft and delayed gratification and all that, nurtures a love for the arts. Cons: nonstop drama, will make you very weird.)
Anyway. Works of music, now, they’re not even tangible the way instruments or bodies are. Sure, the sheet music is a thing you can hold and touch and bring to a photoshoot, but the score isn’t really the music—it’s a set of instructions for making, or at least approximating, the thing itself. The actual music is something that barely exists: all that work, and the final product is just a moment, a thing that briefly takes shape in the form of someone else’s eardrums vibrating, and then it’s gone. The music is a ghost, and falling in love with it is a fool’s errand.
But fall in love with it I do. I don’t know how other people fall in love with music, but for me it involves a worrying degree of pathological obsession that would make me extremely toxic if these works actually were people. I hear a piece, I’m smitten, I have to listen to it on repeat over and over for days on end and, when that is not enough, I have to learn to play it myself so that I can possess it fully.
It is not enough to admire the music, to enjoy it from a distance, to appreciate others playing it; no, I have to take it apart and be inside of it and then embody it myself, and if I don’t do that I will be in perpetual agony from it not being mine, from not being able to subsume my whole body and soul in it. Is this healthy? It seems healthy.
I do not know how to not be like this. I would love to know how to not feel that agony when a piece isn’t mine. And just to confirm, yes, this is what plays in my head every time I say “agony”:
Normally (“normally”) the cycle works itself out: I learn the piece, the infatuation evaporates once I realize actual work is involved learning the piece, I kind of hate the piece, I develop a new kind of love for the piece, I perform the piece, people love the piece, I feel at peace with the piece.
Then another piece comes along, I get distracted, and I completely forget everything that happened up until that point. Yes, I am basically the dude in the distracted boyfriend meme.
I have found, since I started making and releasing studio recordings, that throwing recording into the mix supercharges the obsession-loathing cycle. By the time I’m through recording and editing, I can’t stand to hear the piece anymore in any form.
It doesn’t matter whether I think a recording by a different artist is “better” or “worse” than mine—it eats me alive either way. I realize it’s very narcissistic to center yourself so strongly while experiencing someone else’s art, but hey, you have to be a little bit of a narcissist to be an artist. But obviously I’m not going to listen to my own recordings for enjoyment—while I’m a narcissist, I’m not that much of a narcissist. I can’t listen to my own polished track without being haunted by all the flaws and bad takes burned into my memory, to the point that I can barely hear the track for what it is and I become consumed with self-loathing.
If just learning and performing a piece complicates my love for it, recording goes a step further: it renders me unable to hear the piece for years afterwards, like someone in the aftermath of a bad breakup who can’t go anywhere that reminds them of their ex. It’s very problematic, and the reasonable course of action would be to do some DIY exposure therapy and make myself listen to recordings until I normalize and realize that hearing someone else playing something is not going to kill me.
But I am not a reasonable person. I am an artist. Being an artist is great because you can indulge in borderline unhealthy emotional dynamics and it’s okay because that’s what artists are supposed to do. So instead of making small incremental changes that will better my life, I choose to be noble and dramatic about launching myself toward my fate, like a Shakespearean tragic hero.
So here’s how I see it: every time I record a work, I’m making a sacrifice. I’m choosing to kill my own love for that work in hopes that someone else somewhere will love it in a way I can’t.
This is a better explanation for myself than the alternative, which is that I suffer from an embarrassing form of amnesia. Each time I start the cycle for a new piece I’m dying to share, I’m so love-drunk that I completely forget what happened with the last piece I recorded. The amnesia is so bad, in fact, that I wrote out all these thoughts this week, thinking I hadn’t articulated them before, then did a little search and realized I had already written some form of this and promptly forgot because I got distracted by more music. Again:
This week I fell deeply in love and went full-tilt into the process all over again: listening on repeat, poring over the score, learning to play (I’m currently 20 measures into memorizing it). This time, though, I was just coming off the heels of wrapping edits on a previous work, too fresh for the amnesia to kick in, and that added a fatalistic little frisson of doom to the cycle. I fell for the work, thought I must have you! and, this time, became acutely aware that I had started the clock on it.
There is a short, straight path from Point A (me falling in love with this work) to Point B (me not being able to bear listening to it again). The more I dive into this work, the faster I hasten the end, the bitter heartbreak.
One day, I’ll figure out how to do music and be normal about it. Until then, I will be going all “Agony (Reprise)” on myself.