Issue No. 35: Deep Analogies and Broad Listening
In his best-selling book Range, journalist David Epstein includes an entire chapter dedicated to the value of thinking outside one’s experience and expertise. In particular he details the differences between types of analogic thinking: “surface analogies” are those in which the objects/situations being compared share obvious categorization whereas “deep” or “structural analogies” draw links between scenarios through more abstract, complex references.
For example, in one case study business students were asked to create solutions for a floundering tech company. Comparing the company under examination to other computer companies - like Apple and Dell - is an example of a surface analogy and generated a few potentially helpful courses of action for the failing business. However, the students who compared the tech startup with business profiles like Nike and McDonald’s actually generated far more plentiful and insightful business plans than their tech-obsessed peers. Epstein: “Just being reminded to analogize widely (i.e. ‘deeply/structurally’) made the business students more creative.”
Considering domains outside one’s focus can easily seem like a waste of time or irrelevant, but often it’s precisely this kind of consideration that offers novel and effective solutions.
This is why I suggest that composers - of all ages/experience levels but particularly younger composers - listen to as broad of an array of music as possible, especially when on the surface it sounds absolutely nothing like what they are seeking to create.
Back when I was on Twitter (a social media platform I abandoned this summer after being on for over a decade), I tweeted my belief that composers would do well to listen to the extraordinary cycle of sixteen string quartets by Beethoven.
After a couple of initial “likes,” I began receiving negative tweet responses from contemporary composers ranging from a petulant albeit pithy “No.” to a “not all composers want to write string quartets that sound like Beethoven.”
Replies such as these - but especially my latter example - reveal a fixation on surface analogical thinking. That is, an assumption is being made that one can only learn from music that is superficially stylistically akin to what is desired as a creative result. One may certainly pursue this ideology but I believe it to be limiting at best and hubristic at worst.
Rather, I recommend that composers listen to music unlike what they wish to write as well. Lessons may be learned here through structural analogic thinking. My pieces don’t sound like Beethoven; nor do I want them to! However I can still study that astonishing corpus of music contemplating, for example, the relationship between register and dynamics, or the fluctuation of longer and shorter durations within a movement, or the timing of silences, or how dynamics might emphasize drastic shifts in harmony, and so forth.
Extend this to genres outside your own. When you’re writing a pop song, ask yourself what solutions Boulez would bring to the table. When writing a jazz chart, ponder Schubert. When composing a violin concerto, listen to Janelle Monáe. Deep wells of creativity are found in realms beyond surface analogies.
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