Cycles of inspiration

I think one of the most valuable exercises for creatives is to be actively exposed to potential new influences. Sometimes I feel musicians underestimate the value of being connected to other mediums of expression. For instance, when I was studying at Berklee, people just wanted to get rid of the liberal arts credits as soon as possible, so they would take whichever class was the easiest regardless of whether they found it interesting or not to just get a passing grade. It’s a totally fair posture for many reasons, including that sometimes graduating fast is the first priority (tuition is expensive y’all). But there are several reasons why you might want to take advantage of the opportunity to learn things outside your craft. The first and most obvious is to take a break from your work. After spending 90% of your day working on music, doing something completely unrelated will do wonders for your mental health. It will give you an energy boost and, you never know, you might find inspiration for said work in those unexpected places.

As a film scoring major, I felt like we weren’t talking enough about storytelling in our classes. It’s alarming because story is everything when writing music for films. So I decided to declare a minor in English Literature. I really like literature. I grew up surrounded by it, and I’m the artist that I am today because of it. When I had my first literature class I felt like I had found something about myself that I had abandoned a long time ago. It felt so good to reconnect with it and look at the things I read from a more profound perspective. That journey of self discovery helped me define my voice as a storyteller with my music.

For the minor I studied film and drama, science fiction, poetry and children’s literature. Each of these classes gave me a valuable creative experience. With my film and drama class, I was able to understand better the art of storytelling through the director’s perspective. I was now able to appreciate a project by the technical aspects: camera angles, photography, color, editing, script, etc. The process of writing music for film is very abstract, but when you let the visuals talk to you, you establish a connection that will help you shape the sound in general. When I studied science fiction, I found new ways to express my concerns about the future. I discovered new concepts, and suddenly had a rush of inspiration from the ‘what if’s’ that bombarded my mind during my existential crises. With poetry I became aware of the beauty of language, and I now pay more attention to the lyrics I write. With children’s literature I realized that we take so many things for granted when they are labeled as ‘for children’. The things that once inspired us as kids, when revisited in a later age, take a whole different meaning, and that awareness of self-growth and evolution helps you find new themes to bring into your art.

There was one class in particular that was about making music inspired by works of visual art. It was such a fun class. We made weekly visits to the Museum of Fine Arts, where the professor did an amazing job on guiding us through the exhibitions explaining the evolution of visual arts through different time periods. He taught us how to observe and appreciate art by discussing many technical aspects. Then we went home, picked a piece of art and wrote music for it to perform it during our next class. One thing we noticed was that almost everyone brought a narrative piece. We made a short musical journey about the story we thought was going on in the paintings we chose. It’s not wrong, but we realized we were completely missing the point of the exercise. We needed to express color, shape, texture, through music. In other words, not creating a story, but transforming into sound what was already there in the first place. This blew our minds and made us look at music through a whole different dimension. We’re always told that harmony and form in music is a journey through tension and resolution; in other words: a story. This time we were NOT doing this at all. Sure the pieces came out quite experimental, but that experience felt like having a real conversation with the work of art you chose. Suddenly you were taking in things like the brush strokes, perspective, light, negative space...it was like meditating.

As a closing thought, I want to mention a conversation I had with illustrator Indra Fonseca and musician/audio engineer Andres Ponce. We were talking about Andres’s work throughout different mediums. We discussed how we as artists are trying to express a specific message and how we can never actually put the whole thing into a single piece. That’s probably part of our artistic journey: trying over and over again to get closer to portraying that message in its entirety. Working different mediums gives you a chance to erase boundaries. For instance, working with visuals will help you say what you can’t fully portray in music, and vice versa. I guess that’s why I like multidisciplinary projects so much. Each area complements each other. They inspire one another and this creates a wonderful creative cycle.

Monica Lyrae
Composer, Songwriter, and Jack of All Trades (master of none)