The Failure of My Success

Why Your Best Work Is Buried Under Your Worst

A guy goes up to a sculptor and says, “How do you make a statue of a naked lady?” The sculptor replies, “Well, I start with this big chunk of marble. Then I chip away everything that doesn’t look like a naked lady.”

That old joke suggests a kind of reverse system of creativity. Instead of building something from the ground up, the artist removes what is already there — to reveal the beauty that lies beneath.

I thank Bob Brookmeyer, a wonderful musical mentor, for this concept. Before Bob started a piece, he believed it was already written. His job, he told me, was to remove the layers, to get to the melody, harmony, and emotions that were already there. He’d also say, “stay within the core of your piece.” That one took me awhile to comprehend. But I finally realized what he meant: Create a single idea of what your piece is about, and then tell us all you know about it. Any material that is not related to the original idea doesn’t belong in the composition. Like the sculptor chipping away all the marble that’s not a naked lady.

These ideas have served me time and again in my compositions and helped me grow as a composer. Without them, I would never have produced many of my contemporary orchestral pieces.

I’m not a big believer in inspiration. There’s an old saying: “Inspiration is that thing that happens while you’re working.” It means that when you get stuck in the creative process, instead of waiting around for an idea to strike, continue to work through it. And draw on the wealth of compositional tools that you have (hopefully) developed through hard, focused effort.

Or, as Bob would say, “Go back to your core idea and develop it.”

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!), that process involves a certain amount of failure — something that’s familiar to every artist. For every note I allow to remain in my compositions, I get rid of countless more (the exact number is a mystery). It’s a practice that involves a great deal of experimenting (improvising). In a single passage I may try a dozen variations of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ideas before I find the ones that work. But “staying within the core” of my piece allows me to use techniques that make the selection process logical. That, in turn, helps me connect passages with a great deal of continuity.

This is not a new process. Composers have used it for hundreds of years. It’s evident in the works of Bach and Mozart to Duke Ellington and the Beatles. A great example of this process is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. That first four-note “da-da-da-dah” motif establishes his intent. He then lives up to the promise and goes through a bevy of variations before arriving at its conclusive, final statement.

Moreover, this process isn’t limited to composers. We touched on the sculptor but what about the painter, architect, author, or choreographer? And countless movie actors complain that their best scenes end up on the cutting room floor. Well, the director and editor would probably argue that it was not so much about the quality of acting as the scenes not being relevant to the core idea of the film.

And this sometimes precarious failure/success balance isn’t exclusive to the arts. One can find it in almost any aspect of life. Business, government, law, medicine and science to name a few. How many different filaments did Edison try before he found the one to sustain a light bulb? Even sports. In baseball, batters are considered successful if they get base hits a third of the time. As basketball great Michael Jordan famously stated, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games and missed the winning shot 26 times. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed”.

Miles Davis, a great innovator and musical force, believed that mistakes were an important part of the music. They could lead you down a new path if you are listening openly. He felt that the note(s) you played after the mistake determined whether it was a mistake or not. In fact, improvisation is kind of like the art of stringing together a succession of mistakes to create logical passages.

I have a closet full of sketchbooks at home that have all sorts of unfinished (and finished) works. Discarded because of their irrelevancy. But I save them because, while they may not have worked out in one piece, they might fit beautifully in another someday. Like many modern composers today, I work on a computer notation program. I might orchestrate an entire passage before I realize that it doesn’t have any business being there. So, it gets pushed to the back of the score. It might get used at some point or maybe portions of it will be salvaged to create new material based upon the original idea.

So, at the end of the piece, I generally have a great deal of unwanted notes, chords rhythms, rests, dynamics, and articulations. And that, is a testament to my success.