putting technique before the horse

As a music student at Juilliard, composer David Lang was told by a professor to "write some melodies." As Lang later recalled in a conversation with fellow composer Steve Reich:

[My teacher] went into my music notebook and drew it in pencil: "Write a melody that goes like this, down, another that goes up, and a third that goes straight."

Simple enough, but Lang balked: "I don't think I have enough technique."

"You'll never have enough technique," the teacher replied. "Get to work."

In their conversation, Lang (67) and Reich (88) subsequently agree that they have yet to acquire "enough technique." They manage.

This collection of fascinating-for-any-creator conversations between Reich and other composers (Eno, Serra, Sondheim, etc.) was inspired by an earlier book of conversations between Robert Craft and the composer Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky:

I've ... learned to distrust the future. If I have an idea, it's crucial to work it out now, while it still makes sense in my head, rather than jot a half-baked notion down to be resolved later. With this stuff, there is no later. Get it right, right now.

In other words, express your idea with whatever technique you possess—or let it die. Some ideas have staying power, but most lose their luster if you don't act on them. Not because they didn't have "potential" but because you inevitably leave something crucial out when you jot them down, some meaningful essence that stays in your head until the idea is made real. That's the piece that fades if you let the idea sit too long in a notebook.

Recently, I saw an exhibition of the work of sculptor Thomas Schütte at MoMA (closing January 18).

From a placard:

Art is hard work. It can be heavy and exacting, both physically and intellectually. Among the challenges artists face are technical failures or long periods of inertia. "If I'm stuck, I don't spend my weeks in misery," Schütte has resolved. "I change direction, switching between problems, media, or scale."

In short: momentum. To keep new ideas flowing, act on them. Make them real quickly and imperfectly. If your level of technique fails you, switch up your approach rather than lose that spark. (The only way you really level up your technique is by pushing up against its limits.)

Constraints help—Schütte's a master of these. For a series of modeling-clay sculptures, he allowed himself an hour each. Like it or not, here we go.

What can you do to turn your idea into a concrete reality in an hour? Prioritize the impulse over perfect execution.

"If it's not an experiment," Schütte writes, "why bother?"Any new work is an experiment. How can any experiment be executed perfectly? What you're about to write hasn't ever been written before, right? That means no one's ever read it. Therefore, you have no way of knowing for certain how it should be received, let alone how it will. How can you perfect your approach to making something no one's ever made before?

You'll never have enough technique. Get to work.