Re: Composition & Improvisation- the fatal moment of playback

[Trevor Van Eyck <vaneyck@sympatico.ca>]

    There's definitely something about being "too close" to the memory 
of having created it.

    When I listen back to older things I've recorded, I can barely 
remember being the person who recorded them... I'm curious "how did I 
get that sound"? Could I ever reproduce that accident? That mood?

    I wonder if this distance helps with appreciating the music as a 
whole rather than micro-managing every detail as though I were still 
playing it (in the moment of listening) rather than simply listening!

    I saw an interview some years back with Trent Reznor where he said 
that he felt the band had played the show of their career at Woodstock 
'94. He felt exhilaration as he left the stage. (paraphrasing) Then he 
saw the video of their performance and revised his opinion to say "we 
were terrible, we didn't play that well".

    So it seems that the "pros" suffer from the same thing!

TREVOR.

Mech wrote:
> At 7:50 AM -0700 9/1/09, tEd ® KiLLiAn wrote:
>> On Sep 1, 2009, at 6:58 AM, Warren Sirota wrote:
>>
>>> I don't figure I'm usually qualified to judge my own work, improvised
>>> or not, until I haven't listened to a piece for a year.
>>
>> I'm with you on that one Warren.
>>
>> If not a whole year . . . at least a few weeks or months.
>>
>> It's extremely rare for me to like much of anything I've done 
>> immediately afterwards.
>>
>> But I think I'll stop there before my comments begin to meander down 
>> some psycho-depressive rabbit hole.
>
> Oh don't stop on our account.  I'm right there with you both -- 110%!!!
>
> I nearly-pathologically *despise* anything I've done if I critique it 
> right after finishing it. But if I walk away for some period of time 
> and give myself a chance to forget about it completely, I'll often 
> come back and realize there's some pretty interesting stuff in there.
>
> That exact thing happened a few nights ago.  I tripped over a folder 
> filled with a bunch of half-finished Live files.  I'd only bothered to 
> save them in the first place because "these suck, but I've put in so 
> frickin' many hours that I might as well have something to show for 
> it". Listening back, I was actually quite fascinated at some of the 
> arrangements ("wow, how the hell did i do that?").
>
> Just keep me far away from the "delete" key until then.  ;)
>
>     --m.