Composer's block

[calimac]

There was an article in The New Yorker last week about writer's block, and how some writers are as famous, or more so, for not writing as they are for anything they've written. Some writers stop writing altogether. Others, like Coleridge, can turn out ancillary work (in his case, criticism) or hackwork well enough, but not what they consider their proper work (in Coleridge's case, poetry). Others, like Ralph Ellison (or, unmentioned in the article, J.R.R. Tolkien) spend years or even decades on massive projects that they can never see whole or quite bring to completion.

Then there are the opposite kind of writers, like Hugo or Trollope, for whom the words just pour out endlessly. This reminded me of Saint-Saëns' remark that he produced music as an apple tree produces apples. This caused me to wonder why, if writer's block is so common, composer's block appears to be so rare.

It's not just that there are composers like Mozart and Schubert, so prolific and so talented (more so than Saint-Saëns on both counts) that each could have taken over the repertoire entirely if he hadn't died unpardonably young. It's that composer's block doesn't even show up when one might expect it. Tchaikovsky struggled with his emotions, but he rarely had trouble writing the music down. Beethoven struggled mightily with writing the music, but he was successful at getting it out. I can only think offhand of three apparent serious cases of composer's block in classical history, and two are only apparent:

1. Arthur Sullivan thought (wrongly) that he was prostituting his art by churning out operettas instead of writing serious work. But he was forced into spending his time on this not from block, but because operetta better paid the bills for his extravagent lifestyle.

2. Alexander Scriabin devoted his last years to a massive and probably unproducable multi-media project that he never finished. But his death is what stopped him; who knows what he might have done had he lived? And he continued writing other works.

3. Jean Sibelius. Here, at last, is a composer famous for not writing. About the age of 60 he just stopped, and spent his last 30 years not publishing; nor were any manuscripts found after his death. Sibelius appears to have been one of those gruesome victims of his own success: his music was so popular in the 1920s and 30s, and so extravagently praised, that he may have thought no new work could live up to his reputation. This is probably why the Eighth Symphony he'd been promising for a few years never appeared. It may have been what caused his block to set in. He seems to have finished it and then destroyed it: one of the greatest losses in musical history. I read somewhere that the funeral music for organ that he quickly produced on commission in 1931 probably is an arrangement from the symphony, so I'd love to hear it, but it doesn't seem currently to be available on record.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Very interesting! I never thought about this before, but it's certainly true that composers generally don't have trouble the way writers do. I remember being amazed while reading Ned Rorem's biographies because he would drink heavily and indulge in rough trade all night long, then wake up and compose the next day without fail. Astonishing stamina. Never seemed to lose his creative flow.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I forgot to mention alcohol, an ingredient in many writer's blocks. Alfred Bester drank to forget, and it worked: he forget everything he once knew, or that had happened since 1958.

Sibelius was a notable alcoholic among composers, but I never heard that it had anything to do with his block. So was Mussorgsky, and in his case it might have had something to do with his composing not being the world's most fluent.

[milwaukeesfs.livejournal.com]

There are others. Gioachino Rossini didn't compose from 1837 to 1855, partly due to ill health. I think perhaps that composing major music--symphonies and operas--is so difficult, takes so long, and has such a limited publication that it's probably more remarkable when someone IS writing such music than when they are not.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I forgot about Rossini, partly because I thought he began the Péchés earlier than he did; also because I thought he was simply retired rather than blocked. He did write some works during the interval, I find on checking, notably some sacred works commissioned by the Pope in the late 1840s.