Part 2: The Creative Undercurrent: Navigating Inspiration and Melancholy
Composers digs, NYC 2025
From the vivid landscapes of imagination to the quiet battles within, exploring the intricate dance between artistic drive and the emotional spectrum.
Of all my earliest memories of life, the ones that stand out the most seem to have to do with my creative drive. Not just my penchant for music but my love of painting, writing stories, plays, movies: you name it. I also had a love for science fiction and fantasy (and still do). And monsters. I loved monsters. If I had watched a monster movie that day, by that night when I went to bed, the monster was lurking in my closet.
Southern California had no shortage of things to stimulate one’s imagination either. Not only was I living in the movie capital of the world, but I grew up not far from Disneyland, a huge purveyor of fantasy. I was also a big fan of the Los Angeles Museum of Science. It had many interactive displays that were fun and stimulating. Close by were the Natural History Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits, which made dinosaurs come alive for me.
The music scene was what really got it going for me though. Everything was available: pop music, country, folk, R&B, classical, jazz; whatever. My parents had a modest but diverse record collection which I went through quickly. The L.A. radio stations offered every kind of music under the sun. Live music events were a part of everyday life, and you could find it almost everywhere: concert halls, amphitheaters, clubs, public parks, sports stadiums, television shows. My hometown of Long Beach had the Long Beach Municipal Band. A civil service job with professional musicians who, aside from playing concerts in the parks during the summer, would come to all the schools in the Long Beach Unified School System and perform concerts. I was maybe six years old when I first heard them, and I remember being thrilled.
Unbeknownst to me, I was being set up to be chosen. In one of my many conversations with my often sage-like Uncle Murray, he once said that he felt people were born “hardwired in different ways.” I believe I was hardwired to be a composer. I had to be a musician first, but it led me down the path to composition.
I started playing the guitar at nine because of the Beach Boys and the Beatles. My parents, never dreaming as to how this was going to pan out later on, bought me a guitar and music lessons at the same time. So right from the beginning, I was playing and learning the technical aspects of music. Later, I switched to playing bass, picked up trombone in junior high, and then played piano. My mom had rented a spinet, and even though I had no formal teaching, I figured out fairly easily how to play by myself.
I was about fifteen years old when I composed my first piece. I was playing bass in a quartet which also included a drummer, tenor sax, and a trombone. It was just a short tune in D minor and had a kind of Latin beat. I could read and write bass and treble clef, and I figured out how to transpose for the tenor sax, and I brought the piece in to play. The horn players were a bit older than me, and they loved it. I was so thrilled that I could impress the big kids! However, when I heard my musical thoughts coming alive for the first time, I was hooked. To this day, when I hear my pieces performed, I get that same feeling I had when I was a kid.
The feeling I get from composing a successful piece is not just about the music itself. That is, it’s not just the notes and chords and sounds that satisfy me. There is a sense of organization. An organization of time. Time is the way we perceive music. When I hit a note on the piano, it only exists as long as I hold it out. When I let go of it, it’s gone. Forever. All I have left is a memory (until I hit the next note!).
A composer must utilize two primary aspects of artistic endeavor: technical facility and creativity. One is practical; the other, abstract. Technical facility (for any art form) is comprised of the tools artists need to create their works. For a composer, that would be items such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and orchestration. Music theory (also a tool) is the understanding of how to manipulate those items into a compositional form.
Technical facility being the practical side, creativity then is the abstract side. The tools of music composing are pretty black and white: notes, rhythms, chords, dynamics, articulations, etc. Very substantive items. How then, does one define something so abstract as creativity? One definition of creativity may be “the field of unlimited possibilities. All activity and solutions that ever were, are, or will be, existing all at the same time.” Creativity is that device that tells a composer to move the next note up instead of down or to make the next chord minor instead of major, even though the theory book says to do it the other way. It’s what makes us use an oboe in a certain passage even though the passage is crying out for a French horn.
We (composers) often think that we are in control of every aspect of our pieces. For the most part, we are. But how do you control a source of unlimited possibilities? The answer is “techniques.” If you go into your abstract, creative world and extract ideas, they will come out just as you found them: wild and unrefined. And you can use them just as they are if it suits you. The more introspective composer will take a look at those raw ideas and hone and refine them. Perhaps to add consistency in the developing form.
It’s a very discerning process. A composer has to be the writer, editor, and critic at the same time. In real life, if you had three different people for each of those processes, you know there would be egos flaring up! A composer must endure all these things from within. It is often not easy and can be emotionally and physically draining.
An aspect of one’s creative drive is the fact that it is not concerned with your feelings. It is dispassionate and only knows that it wants you to continue to create. You can say, “I’m sorry, but I am really tired. I haven’t eaten all day, and my eyes and ears are shot.” Your muse does not care. She will always come back with, “Well, that’s okay. You don’t mind just continuing to write, do you? You can survive on that alone. It’ll be fine.”
Another item about the “field of all possibilities” is that when we think “all possibilities,” we often think of them as positive outcomes. But in the world of complete abstraction, good lives side by side with evil. Angels with monsters. Mentors with demons. And since they are side by side, it is often impossible to touch one without touching the other.
I have had the experience, more often than not, of having an emotional letdown or experiencing depression after completing a piece. It doesn’t matter if I am happy or not about the outcome of the composition. The time one spends inside that abstract place always seems to have an effect on one’s emotions. Emotions themselves are abstract, so spending an extended time in an abstract, creative world can fire up a lot of stuff.
It is important then, for a composer (or anyone engaged in the creative process) to be aware of the fact that creativity and depression often go hand in hand with each other. And it’s easy to say that one is good and the other bad, but I don’t think that is necessarily the case. Instead, they might be reliant on each other to function correctly. Not that they have to. Believe me, I would be thrilled if I never had to deal with another depressive state again. But, as I become more experienced with this kind of symbiotic relationship, it seems more familiar to me, and so instead of trying to vanquish myself of my demons, I just kind of welcome them in and try to see how they matter in the creative process.
Rich Shemaria July 6, 2025