Notes on Solitude
Sometime during the fall I intend on doing a series on the mechanics of studying the Word. While many of our preachers tell us to get alone with God (e.g., one of our recent posts), they don’t tell us what to do once we get there. While you will probably see this again in the series, I thought this little story about Beethoven and his approach to his work would be a good teaser.
It worked for Beethoven, too … Although he was not physically fit, Beethoven would start each day with the same ritual: a morning walk during which he would scribble into a pocket sketchbook the first rough notes of whatever musical idea inevitably entered his head. Having done that, having limbered up his mind and transported himself into his version of a trance zone during the walk, he would return to his room and get to work. (Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit (Simon & Schuster: New York) at 19)
A perfect archive also gives you more material to call on, to use as a spark for invention. Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well organized. He saved everthing in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.
For anyone who reads music, the sketchbooks literally record the progress of his invention. He would scribble his rough, unformed ideas in his pocket notebook and then leave them there, unused, in a state of suspension, but at least captured with pencil on paper. A few months later, in a bigger, more permanent notebook, you can find him picking up that idea again, but he’s not just copying the musical idea into another notebook. He might take an original three-note motif and push it to its next stage by dropping one of the notes a half tone and doubling it. Then he’d let the idea sit there for another six months. It would reappear in a third notebook, again not copied but further improved, perhaps inverted this time and ready to be used in a piano sonata.
He never puts the ideas back exactly the same. He always moves them forward, and by doing so, he re-energizes them.
The notebooks are remarkable for many reasons. Beethoven was a volatile and restless personality, always demanding a change of scene. In the thirty-two years he lived in and around Vienna, he never bought a home and move more than forty times. I suspect that’s why he needed the elaborate system of notebooks. With all the turmoil in his personal life, the notebooks anchored the one part of his life that mattered: composing. As long as he had his ideas captured on paper, his creativity would never waver. In fact, it got stronger. (Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit (Simon & Schuster: New York) at 83)