Category: Creativity

Creativity, Music, Personal Development, Visual Design

An Experiment in Engagement

Posted on by rudiseitz

“Marketing is the final extension of your art.”

This quote is from Derek Sivers, in Your Music And People.

The way an artist discusses their art, distributes it, and promotes it — all of this is a continuation of the creative act.

If I take Sivers’ point seriously, what does it mean for my own efforts at sharing my music? If I really think of marketing as an expression of my creativity, rather than as a chore, what would a “creative” marketing effort for my album Meteorite look like? And what would I do if money and time were no object?

It’s taken me a year of personal change and family tragedy to come to answer. I’ll save the backstory for elsewhere and jump to the vision I’ve arrived at.

To be clear, this isn’t a vision of how I’d handle the nuts and bolts of PR, like how I’d grow my mailing list, what I’d post on social media, how I’d reach out to journalists, etc. I don’t need a vision for that, I need a schedule. What I’m presenting here is a vision for how my album, or really any album, could be more engaging, to more people… how, to some extent, it could be set up to market itself.

The vision is that the album is more than what I’ve made. My music is the inner core. Around it, there’s a whole sphere of music and art — made by other artists — that connects to it and plays off of it. That will be true if I succeed. Imagine this:

Along with a great album cover, there’s a portfolio of visual art that goes with the album. Maybe there’s enough art for a gallery exhibit, or a small book. There’s enough art that an interested viewer can spend as much time looking at the album as they can spend listening to it. Each piece of art has a story about how it connects to the music. Each track in the album has its own illustration, and there other artworks that depict musical processes, moods, common themes at play. There are many connections among the artworks and you can see some artists responding to work by others.

Along with music in the album – 35 compositions written by me and performed by my collaborator on clavichord – there’s other music surrounding the album, music that connects to it, echoes it, reinterprets it. Other musicians have taken themes and fragments from the album and created their own remixes. Maybe there’s an EDM track where you can groove to one of my tunes against a dance beat. Or maybe there’s a fantasy or a fugue that a classical composer has built from one of my canon themes.

Along with the music there’s also choreography. You can see videos of dancers moving to the music. Maybe there are animations. Photographs. Maybe there’s some poetry too.

The idea is that the album would be more than just my music, my creativity – it would be a larger constellation, including work by other artists, work that plays off of mine and engages it in a kind of counterpoint. Each piece of art or music in this larger sphere could serve as an entry point, helping a listener get interested in my own material, but it would go both ways: my material, my project could help a listener discover another artist.

To achieve this, I’d basically be taking my PR budget and not spending it on conventional PR but investing it in artists. I’d take any advertising funds and use them instead as a commission fund. I’d hire other creators to make something that expresses their own creativity while connecting in some way to my material, using a fragment or idea from my material and developing it in a new way. I might define how this should be done and provide detailed feedback along the way, or leave it all to the artist — each piece would be different. Along with commissions, some of these projects could be structured as collaborations.

This is not to say that all these artists would be a big group of friends or that they’d all even have to know about each other and be on board with the larger vision I’m presenting here. In some cases, I might simply hire someone to make a piece that I want made, without their needing to be aware of the larger context; in other cases, the artist could become a co-creator with me in this larger outreach experiment.

How would any of this help with marketing or promotion? A few ways:

  • Each artwork in the larger sphere is a chance to “reach” a new listener or viewer who might respond to its particular style
  • Listeners and viewers who encounter the project would have a whole universe of interrelated art to explore
  • Each artist involved in the project might share it with people they know, because their work is part of it
  • People might take an interest in the project because it’s an unconventional way of doing outreach and they want to know if it works

The main point is that art is powerful. That’s why I make art. But the particulars of style and format can limit the size of an audience. Not everyone responds to canons on clavichord or even knows what those things are. The question is, if you were to bring the full power of art, music, and dance to bear in translating and amplifying those canons on clavichord, would all that power be sufficient to gain a wider audience, well beyond the small group of people who already like this sort of thing? I can only believe the answer is yes.

Am I really able to do something like this? Is it pie in the sky?

Earlier I wrote: “What would I do if money and time were no object?” I believe that a good way to lead one’s life is to ask that question, write down the answer, and then find a way to do that thing anyway, even if money is an object and time is an object.

My answer is, if money and time were no object, I’d do what I just wrote about. I’d commission artists to make stuff. That’s because the only thing more exciting to me that creating new stuff is supporting, inspiring, or encouraging other people to create new stuff, especially if it’s stuff we both like and stuff that helps us both.

I didn’t quite know all this about myself until recently. I’ve been finding it out. I began learning it from another project that I started in 2022 (still ongoing) to actually buy music from independent musicians. And I’ve learned it from some mentoring that I do at my day job, totally unrelated to music.

As I write these words, I’ve commissioned three pieces of visual art for Meteorite and am starting to collaborate with a friend on the first EDM track based on material from the album. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, making my album felt pretty amazing but doing these commissions and collaborations has felt, well, equally amazing. So I’m going to figure out how to keep doing this, in whatever ways I can, with the resources that I do have available.

Commissioned art as of 2/25/2022: Meteorite Impact, Magic Mirror, The Garden and the Cosmos

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Creativity, Music, Visual Design

The Garden and the Cosmos

Posted on by rudiseitz

This image by calligrapher and illustrator Svetlana Molodchenko, made with watercolor and gold paint on paper, is two things. It’s work of art made from ancient symbols. And it’s a cover for a musical album, a collection of 35 canons composed by Rudi Seitz, titled Meteorite.

“Looking at Svetlana Molodchenko’s artwork is like stepping back to a long-lost era of finery and grandeur – a Renaissance painting, a medieval cathedral or perhaps even an Ancient Greek villa. Rich in detail but with a light touch, there’s a sense of craft and luxury in everything she draws. The viewer plunges into another world, where past, present and future merge.”

Album Cover:

As a cover, the image includes many references to the contents of the album. The rosette is a reference to the sound hole of a clavichord. The double ouroboros represents the two voices of a musical canon, engaged in an infinite cycle. The birds, the comet, and the multi-colored stone stand for the three largest compositions in the album: the birds refer to Birdsong, the comet refers to Meteorite, and the multi-colored stone refers to Ammolite. Considered together, the eight gems could represent one octave of a diatonic scale; they also refer to the naming scheme used in the album, where canons get their titles from gems and minerals.

Artwork:

Independent from its purpose as an album cover, this image is a self-contained artwork. As such, it can be interpreted in whatever way the viewer finds most appropriate, but here is one interpretation:

The songbirds and botanical pattern we see in the periphery of the image, against a background of gold, represent the living world – they are things we might find in a garden, possibly the Garden of Eden. But the serpents we behold in this garden are not free-roaming symbols of sin or temptation; rather, they form an ouroboros, a symbol that traces back to ancient Egyptian iconography. These serpents are living beings, members of the garden, but the fantastical way they consume each other, and in turn give rise to each other — an eternal cycle of renewal — sets them apart from the ordinary world. Viewed by itself, an ouroboros might bring to mind the discomfort of an animal being devoured, but when an ouroboros is used as a frame around another image, it takes on the character of what lies inside. Here, the ouroboros encloses a rosette, the geometric pattern we might see in a Gothic cathedral window. As the only man-made element here, the rosette represents an expression of reverence through the pursuit of symmetry and balance. The multifaceted gems embedded on the rosette echo its geometry. These are not gems of ostentation; rather, they are bearers of color and possibility, showing the different components of the white light we see in the stars. If the “outside” of the ouroboros in this image represents the living world, the “inside” represents inanimate beauty, mathematical perfection, and the heavens. The ouroboros itself is a transition between these two worlds. In a highly symmetrical design, the eye might might seek exceptions to the perfect order. Asymmetry can be found in the arrangement of the stars, the comet tail, and the blending of colors in the top stone. Taken as a whole, the image depicts a window for gazing at the cosmos, and represents the way art — and music! — can be such a window, such a device for contemplating the infinite.

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Creativity, Music

How to organize the tracks in your album

Posted on by rudiseitz

Are you a musician planning to release an album but struggling to put your tracks into a coherent sequence? Are you planning a live concert but feeling unsure how to organize the program? Here are some tips that might help.

These tips come from my own experience as I put together an album of new music I’ve composed over the past five years. I’ve got 35 tracks with a playing time of 93 minutes. My mastering engineer requires a track order before he’ll begin work on the project. Each track needs to have a number — 1, 2, 3, 4… — and the engineer needs the tracks ASAP. Here’s why the problem is impossible:

  • There are too many options. If you have 35 items like I do, the number of ways you can organize them is 10,333,147,966,386,144,929,666,651,337,523,200,000,000.
  • Each option is time-consuming to evaluate. Listening to the material in any particular order takes a 93-minute investment which is emotionally exhausting.
  • My reactions change each time I listen. I might like a certain transition between two tracks the first time I hear it and not like it the second time.
  • If I listen to a certain order too many times, I start to memorize it. Then it’s hard to tell whether I like it because it’s effective or just because it’s familiar. Familiarity is confounding.
  • I’ve dedicated years of my life to creating this material, so the stakes are high. A bad order means that my tracks will compete with each other rather than elevating each other. Some pieces will not have a context in which they can shine.
  • Each piece was conceived on its own, without thought to how it might fit in a sequence. The pieces all have different styles and moods. I had no plan for how they were supposed to fit together.

But as I write this post, I’m in good shape. My track order is mostly finalized and I’m ready to send it to my mastering engineer next week. An impossible problem became possible for me, thanks to these ideas:

  1. Think of a story that you want to convey with the tracks. I’m grateful to @alexgardner for offering this suggestion when I reached out for help on Twitter. At first, I thought that my tracks were so heterogeneous that they couldn’t fit into any unified narrative. What I realized is that the narrative doesn’t have to be evident to the listener. It can be a “secret” story — one that’s known only to me — one whose only purpose is to help me wrap my mind around the problem.
  2. Make a list of track attributes. I’m grateful to @gahlord for this suggestion, also via Twitter. I created a spreadsheet listing the starting and ending note of each track and a brief description indicating bright/dark, fast/slow, and long/short.
  3. Decide on a goal for the ordering. In my case, the goal is to sustain a sense of variety throughout the album so that each track can be experienced fresh. I decided that variety and contrast are more important to me than grouping tracks by theme or emphasizing similarities between them. My desired shape is “fractal” rather than “linear.”
  4. Pick a middle piece — one to go right in the center of the album. Then go through each of the remaining pieces and ask if it should come before your middle piece, or after your middle piece. This lets you break the problem in half.
  5. Next, choose your first and last pieces. Now you’ve got: Opening -> Middle -> Ending.
  6. Next, distribute your biggest pieces. What are the longest, densest, or most important pieces remaining? Pick the top two and put one in each half of the album. Now you’ve got Opening -> Big Piece #1 -> Middle -> Big Piece #2 -> Ending.
  7. Try to make contrasting pairs — two tracks that are very different, but that also sound good together and flow well, one into the next.
  8. Now try to identify twins — two tracks that are very similar. Experiment with placing twins before and after a contrasting pair, as if to form a ring around it. So if A and B are a contrasting pair, while X and Y are twins, you’d have something like X -> A -> B -> Y.
  9. Make a provisional commitment. Choose an order as quickly as you can, and then rename all your tracks according to that order, using filenames like 01_MySong, 02_MyOtherSong, 03_MyOtherOtherSong. This gives you a reference point to measure future changes against.
  10. Now see if you can improve your provisional order by swapping pieces, so for example, the piece in slot 5 and the piece in slot 11 might trade places.
  11. Make short clips out of all your pieces. Each clip should consist of the opening 3 seconds plus the closing 3 seconds of the piece. Once you’ve made these clips, you can put them in any order you’re considering and listen to the whole playlist in a minute or two. This is a way to quickly preview an order without having to listen to all the material over again.
  12. Once you’ve arrived at an order you feel good about, review each track and use your intuition to determine whether the track is “happy” in its current position. Does the track get along with its neighbors? Does it sound better in their company than it would sound all by itself? If you find any tracks that aren’t “happy” move those ones, but leave everything else where it is.

These ideas worked for me — maybe they’ll work for you too?

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Creativity, Personal Development

Why would you seek an audience?

Posted on by rudiseitz

If you’re an artist who makes things to please your own eye or your own ear, why would you seek an audience? If you create a piece of art for the satisfaction it brings you, and if that satisfaction is experienced by you, hasn’t the art’s purpose then been fulfilled? Assuming it’s hard work to cultivate a following for your art, why would you invest in that?

My need to answer this question is pressing. I’m a musician gearing up to release new work this year. I’ve sworn that I won’t let my music go into a void, not this time. But my energy fades whenever I think of self-promotion. I’m an introvert. Marketing has never been my thing. I hope that knowing my reasons for wanting more listeners will help me stay motivated to connect with them. If you’re an artist facing a similar question, I hope you might gain something from the thinking I’ll share.

But if you’re aiming to earn income from your art, I have nothing to add to what you already know. A larger audience means more income, so it’s obvious why you’d want more viewers or listeners. And if your art carries a social or political message, a larger audience means more impact, a better chance to advance your cause. If your art is meant to communicate something specific to someone specific, it can’t function in an empty room. And if your creative process relies on feedback beyond what your own eyes and ears can provide, a larger audience might help you do better work. And if you’re seeking validation and prestige, a larger audience means more of that. These situations are clear: you need an audience.

But what if you’re making art for art’s sake, what’s your reason then for seeking an audience? What if you’ve been laboring on your own for years – as a “nobody” as Emily Dickinson would put it – to do something that’s really hard but really rewarding? And what if you’re doing this for the joy of it – not to please anyone else, but just yourself? Not to profit from it, not to further a social cause through it, but just to experience the pleasure and fascination that it brings you? What if achieving an aesthetic ideal is more important to you than any practical outcome? What if you do your best work in solitude? And what if you vow to keep pursuing this ideal no matter what – no matter whether there’s a market for it, no matter whether anyone ever praises your product or asks you for more of it? If this is you, why would you care whether your audience consists of one or one million people? 

In my case, I compose music in a particular format called canon. I’ve been doing this since 2014. A two-minute canon can take me two months to write. Each piece brings me immeasurable joy to create and behold. I feel blessed that I’ve had the opportunity to study music year after year, starting pretty young, and ultimately to create the kind of music I want to create. I’m further blessed to have a collaborator who has performed and recorded my works. My music has been enjoyed by a handful of people who know me personally, and a tiny few who have somehow discovered me online. Why isn’t that enough for me?

Why do I feel – as I prepare to release ninety minutes of new work this year – that more people must hear it? Why have I vowed that this time, I won’t let it be ignored? I won’t simply put it online and hope that people find it. I won’t just email a dozen reviewers and shrug when no one replies. This time, I’ll do the work necessary to bring my music to those who are poised to enjoy it, and I’ll do the work necessary to expand that circle. But if I wrote the music for myself and experienced the pleasure I was seeking from that act of creation, why does any of this matter?

I used to think of this question in terms of the intrinsic value of the work itself. I believe the work is unique, and exciting, and that it makes a contribution within its particular niche, so the world needs it. If I keep the material to myself by not sufficiently promoting it, then it will go to waste. This would be a disservice to the music and to the world. 

I’ve never been happy with this reasoning because it focuses on a negative outcome – the music going to waste – which leads to a burden – I must save the music from oblivion. Furthermore, the world is already full of music. Beautiful music is hard to make, but humanity has been making it for centuries, and it’s not a scarce resource. No one person will ever get to know more than a tiny fraction of the great music that’s available; ditto for visual art and literature. This will be controversial but I’ll say that while humanity needs art, it doesn’t need any particular piece of art – there are no “essential” works –  including anything I make or anything you make. The world could benefit from what we make, surely, but the possibility of benefiting from something is different from needing it.

So I’ve tried to identify other motivations for pursuing an audience, motivations that don’t rely on the assumption of need. Let’s suppose that I’m doing something optional and unnecessary. Why might I still want more people to hear and appreciate it, and why would I be willing to put in the hard work to achieve that goal?

My first answer is simply that I want others to experience the same joy that the music has given me. As for why this is so, I believe that joy is expansive: when we find joy in a certain thing, we want others to feel that same joy, from that same thing. And when others feel that joy, our own is magnified. This is just how joy, the emotion, works – it makes us yearn for connection, kinship.

Second, I want to share my knowledge. For me, knowledge is similar to joy in that when I’ve learned something useful I want to convey it to someone else. I’ve had to learn many things to be able to write the music I write. I’ve had to find ways to surmount countless musical challenges, creative challenges, and personal challenges. If someone’s totally new to canons and counterpoint, I want to welcome them into this part of the musical universe. But if someone knows about these things already, I want to see if I can offer them some bit of new insight that may help or inspire them in their own journey.

Third, I want to grow through interaction and collaboration. I know I can write more of the music I’ve been writing, and within that domain there are endless possibilities I want to explore. But I’m ready to branch out. Someone could recommend an album that might change my life. Someone could ask a question that opens a new musical direction for me. Someone could teach me a new technique for composing or a new way of listening. Someone could become a new collaborator and together we could make something great.  I want to grow not only in the ways I’ve planned for myself already, but in the ways I can’t predict, haven’t even conceived. But none of this can happen if my music stays with me in a bubble.

So I want a larger audience because I want to share my joy, I want to share my knowledge, and I want to grow. To be clear, this is not my argument for why anyone should listen to my music; this is not where I say what’s in it for them. This article is about me; it’s my explanation of why having an audience is important to me. It’s a “note to self” that I’ll return to when I must choose how to spend my time: composing new work or reaching out to new listeners.

If you’re an artist facing a similar choice, maybe some of these reasons apply to you too?

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