This year, I am doing two year-long projects. I am listening to all the works of Bach, and I am continuing to write two lines in a sonnet every day (thus producing one sonnet a week).
We are in the middle of the year, without a whole lot of new project motivation to be found. Today I will listen to BWV #174, which is my 174th church cantata (I’ll also listen to BWV #903, which is a chromatic fantasia and fugue for harpsichord, in case anyone is wondering).
That is a lot of cantatas, some more workaday than others. Bach was a practical musician, and was often writing to have something for Sunday. I recently listened to #169 and #170, which are both cantatas for an alto soloist. The Wikipedia entry notes that these were composed at the same time and it is assumed that Bach had a capable alto soloist at his disposal then, which I just love. Here we are, still listening to this music 300 years later, but at the time it was like, “Hey, we’ve got Gertrude for another 2 months, what can we crank out while she’s here?”
Anyway, Bach wrote a lot, but in the writing a lot, he would create bits of brilliance — and then over the course of his life he would collect those bits of brilliance and put them all into his masterworks. I love hearing threads of the B-Minor Mass in some of these cantatas. (The opening choral fugue in #171 is quite similar to the second Credo in the B-Minor Mass, for instance). One reason to persist in the mushy middle of any project is to hear these things. I would never have listened to BWV #171 in the absence of this project, but now I heard that thread and can see how Bach’s 1729 (we think) composition came back to life 20 years later (the B-Minor mass is roughly 1748-1749). You never know when the good stuff is going to happen.
That idea that you never know when the good stuff is going to happen is important for listening…and also for creating. As I study creativity in general, I keep coming back to this: Breakthroughs tend to come from a volume strategy. Quantity and quality aren’t at odds. Quantity leads to quality. When you do a lot of something, you produce a lot of middling stuff, you produce some bad stuff. But you also produce some good stuff, which hopefully you have the ability to recognize.
I’ve been pondering this with my much more mundane second project — writing a sonnet a week. This is my second year of doing this, which means that I’ve written approximately 75 sonnets. The one I am writing this week is definitely on the lower end of the bell curve. Yes, I really did rhyme the words “eyes” and “surprise” and that’s probably not even the worst of it. I could tell by Tuesday that I wasn’t feeling it and this week’s sonnet is not one I will likely be sharing.
But I’ll keep writing it. I’ll finish it. Because it is in the discipline of persisting through the mushy middle that we actually get to something that is usable — a line, a couplet, maybe even a whole stanza or poem. Without that discipline, the good stuff will never get a chance — and I’d like to give it any opportunity I can.
I needed to read this post today, Laura! Such a great reminder (currently in the murky middle on several ongoing projects) and I love seeing it from the angle of Bach’s works and your own creative pursuits.
@Elisabeth – thank you so much! So glad you found it helpful.
Love this! Remind me – did you make your own calendar for listening to all of Bach or find one? Either way, is it available somewhere? Thinking I might like to try it.
@Lizzy- I am creating my own calendar. I’ve only set it up through the end of July but I keep adding to it, and I know I’m on track to finish. If you’d like a copy you can email me (lvanderkam at yahoo dot com).
I really enjoyed your thoughts on quantity leading to quality. I was employed as the director of music for a church for 14 years. As much as I would like to say that everything I planned and executed with my various choirs and musicians was divinely inspired, it was also very often the result of ‘Sunday comes around every week and we need music for worship” energy. But, in the midst of that, there were truly some incredible musical moments and wonderful pieces that inspired meaningful worship. Sometimes getting the job done is just about getting it done, but sometimes there is brilliance along the way!
@Melissa – absolutely! Deadlines mean we do the thing, but when we do the thing over and over again, just by the general bell curve distribution of things sometimes we do some really cool stuff.