Communicating in a networked world
Yesterday I had to answer my phone.
Does that sound odd? First of all, what’s a phone for if you don’t answer it? But second, who answers the phone any more, given the overwhelming volume of spam calls we receive every day?
You’re probably thinking “Why is he even asking this? When was the last time I answered a phone call?”
I just wanted to document this quote, which I heard for the first time today, but it’s a thought that has crossed my mind in many guises over my entire career.
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” — Chuck Close
I refer to (music) composition as “design and engineering” which reflects my experience that ideas are the easy part, but the hard part is then designing and building the product. I say “product” here quite intentionally. As an engineer, I spent many years building software products. In software, the idea may be subtle and tricky, but it’s still the easy part compared to the design and then the hard work of building — which is where the real time is spent.
And to a great extent, if you’ve studied and trained and understand how to use the tools available to you, and if you just show up and start working on your product, you usually (already) have what you need to accomplish your goal.
So for years I did this in software. And then in 2015 I started doing it in music.
Yeah, yeah, sometimes I get inspired and I write and write furiously late into the night. The endorphins tell me it was a great work. And frequently I then put aside my product, take a rest, then pick it up later on and yeegads(!) it sounds terrible to me. (Inspiration can be delusional.) And then there’s just lots more work to do. But that work is required to achieve the payoff. And if I do the work, the piece becomes so much better!
In my days in software I’d have people pitch me software ideas many times a year. My reaction was frequently, “Well, that’s a nice idea, but have you written the program?” I guess I was a bit brash, but many times I’d continue “Your idea is nice, but it probably represents less than 10% of a product, which requires hundreds if not thousands of hours of engineering.”
Another thing I’m fond of saying is “When you have a novel idea, you can bet that 8,000 people got up this morning and had that same idea; then 80 of them did something about it, like pulling together a team; then 8 of them will bring your product to market within the same two weeks.” That’s kind of hard for an inspired ideas person to hear, but it represents the harsh truth of the world of commercial software. Ideas come from lots of experience, and from creative responses, but they’re seldom completely unique.
Chuck Close is quoted in Inside the Painter’s Studio, a book by Joe Fig. A review of this book goes on to say “Inside an art gallery, it is easy to forget that the paintings there are the end products of a process involving not only creative inspiration, but also plenty of physical and logistical details.”
Those of us who do this kind of design and engineering, understand and appreciate the fundamental truth of this statement.
Our house doesn’t exactly have a basement, and the closest thing to it is a space officially designated “crawlspace” beneath the kitchen, but with a high ceiling — where we store a lot of stuff that doesn’t have an otherwise-designated storage location. Like old vinyl records. Like two old Macintosh computers (one is a Mac Classic). Like boxes that we received that we think maybe we’ll use again (but honestly we won’t). Like 300 plastic forks and knives from a picnic years ago. And dozens of ethernet cables, wall-wart power supplies, telephone cords (what’s a telephone cord anyway?), and even a few little electronic gizmos that are entirely unopened and unused, which I never saw before, and can’t guess why we have them in the first place.
There’s a T.I. Speak-&-Spell device from 1980. And among the buried treasure — actual physical copies of many of our DesignWare products for personal computers in the 1980s. I also found a box of goodies from a company I helped form that went bust in 1997. And another box of desk goodies from Knowledge Universe Interactive Studio, 1999. And two boxes of Leapfrog toys from year 2000. Most of these still function.
But also, in cleaning that space today, I found this on the floor. From historical documents it appears to be vintage 1980-1985. I remember the old punched-out tokens, but this one doesn’t have the “Y” punchout. I don’t know it’s provenance, although I was in New York many times in the early 1980s, working with publishers and media companies. So it may have been in my pocket upon return to San Francisco from one of those trips. But, of course, it never made it into a final turnstyle, and never will again, as the MetroCard entirely took over as the currency for transit fares in 2003.
I’ll add this token to my storehouse of RFID cards (which includes a paper MetroCard from 2018).
And this token is still “GOOD FOR ONE FARE” on the memory train!
A couple of time in the last months I’ve received what I consider to be a high compliment to a composer. Following a recording session or a concert, I’ve overheard one of the musicians humming or singing one of the melodies from my composition. I love it.
The next step after that is to hear someone humming your melody while walking down the street.
And extending that, the ultimate compliment might be when it becomes someone’s ringtone?
Hey I put some video up after our June 2nd concert and yesterday I noticed there’s a copyright claim filed against one of my videos. Sony thinks they own the “song.” Yes, they refer to everything as a song. Pretty funny that they think they own my song, considering everything is new music in the clip. What did I discover that made me double over laughing? Here (below) is the portion of my recording they say is theirs…