I trained in music rather than art. In school they had two programs that we referred to as ‘jazz and classical’ or ‘commercial and legit’. You can already imagine the digs that were traded. I was in the legit program, though it never really conferred that quality on me.
I was never a classical musician in spirit, and came to the whole thing through composition. One day in university I become a classroom pariah. During a debate on the topic ‘What Is Music?’, we generally agreed on the proposition that ‘Music is organized sound’. Where I stepped on the dead limb was my insistence on a certain subordinate clause: “… whether organized by humans or not”.
Eyes rolled impatiently, professor and student alike. And for some reason I just couldn’t let go of it. I went on and on about it.
The subset of their belief was if there was therefore no such thing as ‘music of the spheres’, could animals be capable of music? There was wobbly support for that idea, but is was demoted to moot point because the songs were supposedly instinctual rather than unique messages.
However the topic was tackled, humans had to be the only true musicians.
I focused a lot of energy on music with the goal of becoming a famous musician. I’m not sure what that was all about. I know I wanted to be able to express ideas in an insightful way and have people receive that communication. But I realized later it was the journey of being a musician that was more important than the goal of fame, money or influence, none of which I attained. I did get girls, mind you.
Photography in some of its forms is seen to select and record the world, rather than present a message. In the sense that we ‘compose’ a photograph by selecting a point of view, the medium can be considered ‘Art’. I wonder if my school friends would have accepted that dry leaves under an autumn tree is art without a selected point of view.
But there is an ineffable difference between a photograph and a work of art. I want my photography to move clearly over that line. For all our interest in capturing the human condition in its raw form, artists are pushed partly by the desire to live the life of creating art, and artworks are more byproducts than products.
Of course we need to focus on the product to make our communication known, to cross that line between the banal and extraordinary. But for the work to cross that line, we have to cross it ourselves.