The Relevance of Craft

I was recently orchestrating a project for a composer who approached music in a very different way than I would do. The score was a small ensemble with quite a bit of electronics but also a few acoustic instruments. And they picked each sound and instrument during the production as if one picks a synth patch for its sound alone. While this is a perfectly valuable approach, it posed a quite drastic problem at the moment when it was decided to record the acoustic instruments with real players. This approach of picking instruments purely for their sound and then writing for the samples caused a lot of unidiomatic and partially unexecutable passages. Some parts were in unfortunate registers, some parts would have needed more hands than standard humans come with and some parts were simply not playable. And the limitation of the samples narrowed down the idiomatic use of the full potential of the instruments even further.

I don't want to imply that the composer did lack the craft of writing for these instruments but at least they simply didn't bother to take it into consideration when writing for them.

And this more or less illustrates what I want to talk about today. And the more you think about it the deeper this rabbit hole becomes. I could simply end this post with "Know your shit!" and be done with it but this wouldn't even scratch the surface.

In the last couple of weeks I was having quite a few discussions with friends and colleagues about this topic, most of them working roughly in the field of "commercial art" and no matter which art form they worked in, almost all of them were frustrated about the fundamental lack or decline of craft in their branch in recent times. And at least for film music, I would personally agree that there generally is a considerable lack of craft causing the art form to gradually dumb down.

But then again the question is whether craft is relevant. Hans Zimmer once said that his style was defined by his limitations. This pretty much sums up an artistic approach that has become more common and more relevant in recent times and which definitely needs to be taken into account when talking about craft. Entire branches of pop culture have been defined by the lack of craft, most notably punk music and if it weren't for this lack of craft, punk music would probably not have this raw, direct and "unrefined" quality.

Not relying on craft forces you to come up with creative solutions and allows you to think in ways that someone with a more trained background would never get to by being "blocked" in their way of thinking. I can clearly observe this with myself. The academic training that I went through engrained some "modes of thinking" into my understanding of music that I sometimes feel to be radically challenged when listening to or working on music by composers who didn't go through this academic training. And quite often while admiring the radical creativity of certain ideas, I have to admit to myself that I would have never gotten to their solution when posed with the same musical problem, just because my academically informed view on it wouldn't have allowed me to do that.

So it can't be denied that knowing the craft can be a burden. Everything you do, everything you write is filtered through it and the end result sometimes is too refined and lacks the creative immediacy that a composer without all this "mental ballast" would come up with. 

Additionally, entire art forms have become way more penetrable for people who didn't go through formal academic training. Today, you can write and produce (orchestral) music without ever needing to attend any formal training, you can shoot and edit movies on your mobile, you can create digital art without ever needing to academically learn any of the fundamentals of it. And more importantly, you can move up the career ladder from these starting points. There are some high profile media composers in the business who got to this point without ever learning the fundamental elements of their craft in an academic way. There are no more threshholds you need to overcome like there used to be. In order to write and create music you don't need to go through an academic training in order to be able to notate and communicate to musicians how to perform your ideas. These things that were essential before don't exist anymore. Before the digital age you simply couldn't become a media composer if you didn't have at least some formal educational background.

So in the end I'm absolutely sure that Hans Zimmer would sound very different if he had a similar formal education like for instance John Williams but he got to his level of success without needing to get any formal training, so it seems like the traditional definition of craft is not relevant.

But personally, I see some sort of arrogance and ignorance in celebrating one's own lack of craft as creative source as it is seen with some creatives. It is supposed to come along as humble but actually it could als be seen as arrogance to imply that your own creativity beats century old tested and proven concepts. And it is ignorance to simply not care to invest energy into absorbing the craft.

In my opinion, the general assumption that creativity without craft can produce more compelling end results than the same creativity with craft is highly disputable. In my opinion, craft doesn't take away from creativity but adds to it. 

And of course we could start another discussion here that the lack or presence of musical craft has no influence on commercial success which is true when you look at for instance a lot of the current chart topping pop songs. But then again, you could also ask the question which of those songs will actually pass the test of time. I don't think it is just a generational thing that there are massively more pop songs from the pre 2000 era that everybody knows and loves and which are constant evergreens while almost none of the current music survives longer than a few weeks. No matter how much you like that particular period but for instance just the vast amount of 80s songs that are still part of current pop culture is staggering. The same goes for movies.

It basically boils down to one thing: any art form stands on the shoulders of what preceded it. The lack of knowledge or ignorance to learn about this doesn't make you a more creative or better musician. It simply makes you a one or two trick pony.

Personally, I think that it has become en vouge in the industry to spin one's own lazyness to invest time and energy into mastering the art form as "I don't want to spoil my creativity with learning all these rules" as if ignorance was a treasure to keep.

Of course none of this is going to change any time soon and the grumpy (old?) man on Patreon whining about the decline of the craft and clinging to boring old Mozart stuff is just so outdated and last century. And yet I stick to my point about the test of time. Just to be clear here, craft does not equal formal academic training. I know a lot of incredible composers with insane craft who learned all this over alternative ways like self study or private lessons etc. And I know composers who went through academic training and write absolutely uninspired music.

From a purely practical standpoint, it is absolutely fine to ignore all that as long as you are the only one working on your music. But as soon as you need to communicate or translate your ideas to other musicians, the lack of craft can become highly problematic.

With this project that I was talking about at the beginning, I managed to defuse all the really big problems in the orchestration phase so only mildly annoying and unidiomatic parts made it through to the musicians. And yes, the music was nice and worked well for the project. But I wonder how much better it might have been if the composer actually had used the full potential of the brilliant musicians who studied their instruments for many years to master THEIR craft.