Art is Long, Life is Short, Music Ends
May 17 2010

The long domino chains people take days to set up for the 60-second thrill of seeing them flatten one another in a snake of a sequence...

The musician's life. We spend hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, lifetimes- plus dollars, many dollars -to make seconds, minutes, hours of music.

Take J. S. Bach or Miles Davis. Bach. One of the most prolific composers the world has known. He lived 85 years. No distractions- no TV, no PSP, no raves to go to. (Bach had some distractions: he fathered 20 children.) Composed non-stop. He died, some say, composing. And what? 200 hours of music. 300 hours max.That took him 70 years.

Miles. Popular and prolific. Recorded from 1945 until 1991. Composed and played throughout. And what? There can't be more than 150 hours of music.

No one would mistake the Pianobabbler for a mathematician, but by my reckoning, those guys didn't make more than 3 to 4 hours of music a year. A year.

I know if I include performances, improvisations, impromptu coffee house concertos and party playing, I end up with much more music. Still, take the absolute, highest total of music they made. It would still fill only a fraction of the time in their lifetimes.

Music is a triumph over time. The extraction of matter from the immaterial. Sound from silence. Being from nothingness. Creation. Invention. Birth.

Music is high labour, low yield.

The Pianobabbler is releasing a new CD, his 7th. It offers about 50 minutes of music. The release concert looms a few weeks away. It will last about two hours.

From the instant he began the recording project, to the first note of the concert, the Pianobabbler will have spent scores of hours composing, arranging, practising alone, then with the trio, recording, editing, mixing, having it mastered, artwork, liner notes, web site, publicist, booking, and, and, and. Scores of hours. Maybe 200- the lifetime output of Bach and Miles.

All for this 2 hour concert, and a 50 minute CD.

Of course, I’ve done this all hoping it will lead to bookings and performances. The Pianobabbler belongs to the music | business. From the music, he expects business. So he does the business to make music. Many hours of music.

This always pricks the mind, though: that the music is finite. We have only so much music in us. No more. Whether that quantity be 10 hours, 100, or 1,000, the music at some point ends. I would rank the principle as a universal rule: Music ends.

We see the effects of this rule all around. Many concerts today present older artists recreating past tunes, with no hint of recent creation. Sibelius and Rossini stopped composing decades before they died. Charlie Parker died at 30 but, as his putative successor Phil Woods remarked, Bird had said everything musically he had to say.

You may point to this or that musician who made music until their dying day. Created and renewed their art without end. In some cases- Mozart and Jeff Buckley come to mind -death at an early age served as the agent of the music’s seeming infinititude. In the other, rare, cases, providence overcame the rule.

For the most part, though, the rule rules: Music ends.

Young musicians would do well to bear the rule in mind. They may find wisdom in pacing their output. Exhausting it early on would weigh far more sadly than producing a little less. Better to have something to say in one’s 30s and 40s, than too much in one’s 20s.

So, the Pianobabbler patiently awaits his CD release concert, secure in the knowledge that he will have more music to make for years to come. Hours and hours of it. Until he doesn’t.

Art is long, life is short, music ends.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

The Pianobabbler is a RonDavisMusic production. The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly at pianobabber.com. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the link, above right. And follow us on Twitter.

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