(Photo 1) Try to ignore the lovely décor and think of the size and shape of the space. In the photo below you can see the room at CBGB where some of the music I wrote was first heard. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted - of course we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.
After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same.
RELAX SOUNDS CHANGES VOLUME BY ITSELF SOFTWARE
In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software “makes” the art, the music, or whatever. That holds true for the other arts as well: pictures are created that fit and look good on white walls in galleries just as music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not in both). In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. Thank goodness, for example, that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we make something. I’m proposing that this is not entirely the bad thing one might expect it to be. The emotional story - “something to get off my chest” - still gets told, but its form is guided by prior contextual restrictions. Opportunity and availability are often the mother of invention. Dark and emotional materials usually find a way in, and the tailoring process - form being tailored to fit a given context - is largely unconscious, instinctive. Just because the form that one’s work will take is predetermined and opportunistic (meaning one makes something because the opportunity is there), it doesn’t mean that creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. I believe that we unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats.
This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be, but I think the path of creation is almost 180 degrees from this model. Or that the rock-and-roll singer is driven by desire and demons, and out bursts this amazing, perfectly shaped song that had to be three minutes and twelve seconds - nothing more, nothing less. The accepted narrative suggests that a classical composer gets a strange look in his or her eye and begins furiously scribbling a fully realized composition that couldn’t exist in any other form. That doesn’t sound like much of an insight, but it’s actually the opposite of conventional wisdom, which maintains that creation emerges out of some interior emotion, from an upwelling of passion or feeling, and that the creative urge will brook no accommodation, that it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read, or seen. That insight is that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation. Excerpted from "How Music Works." All of the images David Byrne discusses in this essay are in a slide show at the bottom of the story.
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