Thoughts on "Love Brings Out The Best" for Solo Marimba - Life Reset

I am not a natural player. Everything I've accomplished in music has been through hard work and sacrifice. It doesn't come easy to me. I've had to embrace music as a lifestyle sometimes when I haven't wanted to. This aspect of my relationship with music has often caused very destructive behavior. Sometimes after working on a project for weeks I will get frustrated and want to throw the whole thing away. In hindsight, there is usually nothing wrong with the project. I simply was too close to it and I lost all perspective. When I started writing music I spent years going through a pattern of never finishing projects and "starting over." I came to lovingly call this process (or anti process) "life reset."

It's important to give some background on how this happened.

I was classically trained in the art of performance. I never learned how to write music...only to interpret. I could easily transition this whole article into a discussion about my thoughts and feelings surrounding this gigantic problem in our college/conservatory education structure but I will stay on topic.

Throughout my training I always felt like something was missing. I never felt truly comfortable behind my instrument. I never felt like I was performing music. Even so, Juilliard is an amazing place and I was always kept busy. As a result I never had to fully face these feelings. It was only when I graduated and began trying to make a career in the real world that I started to feel real pressure. There was true emptiness. Something was missing. Through a series of experiments and starts and stops, I eventually started creating my own music.

It's important to keep in mind that this didn't happen in a straight line. I achieved much success early on going the traditional route. I would become busy in my career and like at Juilliard, I wouldn't always have to face things in the short term. Either way time passed and ultimately all paths would always lead me back to the familiar emptiness and I would start being creative again.

Musically, I never had any trouble coming up with ideas. Going back to this concept of "life reset," it was finishing the ideas that gave me problems. I still hadn't yet learned the most valuable lesson in art and creativity, that one's work is never finished and there is no final form. Art is merely a snapshot of a captured moment. Immediately following that moment, things have already changed. The tormented artist cliche is nothing more than a person trying catch moments and chase their own tail. Most people may not even be aware of this aspect of life but the true artist is all too aware.

As a trained performer I was truly unfamiliar with the creative process and thus the pattern of "life reset" became a routine part of my existence. I wanted nothing more than to create music and share my voice with the world but I couldn't. It seemed like no matter how hard I worked and how great my ideas were, I could never quite cross the threshold of letting go and releasing my music. I would work and work, get frustrated, melt down, and start something new. As this process played itself out again and again I found myself unable to keep up with the creative process. It was truly destroying my creativity. It was truly destroying me. As a result of this destructive cycle, over a 5 year period I developed a large body of work that had almost never been heard. The old adage "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it does it make a sound?" seems to apply here.

What's worse than all of this is that I had actually convinced myself that what I was doing was a good thing. That somehow, I was just improving my work and getting it to the point where it was "ready." Unfortunately, it would never be ready. I was stuck in an infinitely torturous cycle.

Around this time I met my future wife Danna Pero. She had the quote pictured by Austrian Poet Rainer Maria Rilke framed and displayed in her cottage in Croton. We still have it in our house today.  She strongly urged me to absorb the meaning.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The message would ultimately resonate with me but not without resistance on my part. I had spent so many years focusing a metaphorical magnifying glass on my work and caught in my destructive cycle that I had become convinced that working in that way was a part of who I was. I would latch on to creative ideas and not allow them to breathe. I thought that by doing that I was controlling the process. In reality I was strangling it. Any suggestion otherwise was for hippies and phony spiritual beings.

As time passed I eventually began to see the truth. My own focus was merely self hatred disguised as standard seeking. If I could learn to let things go from time to time (and love myself enough to do it) I could get some distance and perspective, come back to them fresh and finish the job...at least as much as finishing any sort of art is possible. I began working in a different way. If I became frustrated or if I couldn't finish an idea, I would relax my thoughts and let it go. The main difference here is that I would trust that the answer would reveal itself to me. I would trust the universe and live my way into the answer instead of forcing it.

This is essence of "Love Brings Out The Best." In order to trust the universe and trust that answers will come without being forced, one must learn to love themselves. Trust is nearly impossible without love. It didn't happen overnight but when I stopped holding on to things and began to trust, I was finally able to start releasing music.

Trust the universe and don't force things

"Love Brings Out The Best" is a meditation on the principles that finally allowed me to turn the corner. The slow melody at the beginning is a churning of change. The explosive ending is a full release of unshackled passion. FINALLY!!!

Copies of Love Brings Out The Best for solo marimba by Simon Boyar may be purchased here.