Tell me, are you hungry? Thirsty? Hot? Cold? Angry? Depressed? Need a nap? If so, take care of it. But if this isn’t the case, we can say your brain is functioning normally, which doesn’t say much about the way we use our brains. “Wouldn’t it be great,” we ask, “if there was some switch we could flip to get our brains to endlessly churn out brilliant ideas?” Let me tell you, it’s the wrong question.

When you “don’t have any ideas” it’s not that you can’t think of anything to write. What’s going on is that you can’t accept anything you’ve written. Your mind is coming up with all sorts of ideas, dismissing them, and instantly forgetting the whole process. And it’s doing this so quickly and so effectively the only thing you notice is your sense of frustration.

If you examine your mind closely, you’ll observe a flurry of mental activity that goes nowhere. Your brain is working at full capacity, but you haven’t read the owner’s manual.

On days when you’re really stuck, accept the fact that your brain isn’t going to like anything you come up with. Go ahead and flip the script. Think of the worst, most terrible idea you can possibly imagine and write it down. And then dare your brain to judge it. What you need to do is pretend you’re an Olympian athlete and your event is Horrible Music Sprinting.

Now your brain is cornered. It wants to be uncooperative, but since you’ve asked it to hate your music, it can only like it. Inevitably your brain will say “well, that wasn’t too bad.” And you’ll say “boo yah” and you’re off to the races. As you tinker with your mediocre idea you’ll gradually fall in love with it.

Just remember you can’t begin this process until you’ve settled on something long enough to let your imagination pour over it. And to do that, you have to give yourself permission to suck. And that’s all there is to it. “What’s the secret of writing great music?” you ask. Write terrible music instead.

When I reflect on my influences, I don’t think it’s just that I imitate things I like, even though that’s a huge part of it. Oftentimes, there are things that I feel the need to react to, even if the reactions don’t sound anything at all like the influence, or are even reacting against it.

In my view, an influence is something I am drawn to time and time again which shapes the way I perceive my own work. The process of studying influence isn’t always about copying the sound of another artist, but sometimes can be about trying to understand which elements of the artist’s work are changing the way I value my own. If this means aping somebody else, so be it. But sometimes the study of influence means readjusting the way my own tendencies compliment one another. It’s sort of like saying “Wow, I love how well this composer’s tendency A and tendency B work together. Wouldn’t it be great if I had the same synergy between my tendency C and tendency D!”

For example, when I got into Arvo Pärt, it would have been far too easy to write a bunch Tintinnabuli compositions and say “Look, I’ve been influenced!” For me it was understanding that the simplicity of the Pärt’s Tintinnabuli technique matches the simplicity of his melodic construction in a way that’s highly personal to him. And it also had something to do with the power of oblique motion, the idea that any line at any moment can rest on a single pitch and through inaction color all the lines around it.

But the most important thing to realize is that the diatonic scale and the diatonic triad hold some kind of deep, personal meaning for Arvo Pärt. So then the question becomes, what sonorities have that kind of resonance with me? And that brings me into the world of Webern and the world of Bartók, because the sonorities which they tend to favor capture my imagination in a profound way. And being aware of the power of oblique motion ended up being the key to understanding Bartók’s use of harmony in a piece like “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste.” So in a way Arvo Pärt’s simplicity helped me understand Béla Bartók’s complexity. Actually, it helped me find the simplicity within Béla Bartók’s apparent complexity.

And to top it off, I noticed that both Bartók and Pärt have a very similar approach to the way they assign function to contrapuntal strands. Whereas Pärt is more explicit about the segregation of roles between the melodic lines and the harmonic Tintinnabuli lines, Bartók’s lines would change roles as a passage unfolds. But the principle was the same. At any given moment, there were foreground lines attracting the attention of the listener, and background lines connecting the registral gaps in between the foreground lines, and generating beautiful sonorities in the process. And with both composers, the harmonic orientation comes from the way the individuals lines unfold through registral space over time. And that brought me to the real lesson, which is that any sonority can sound utterly gorgeous if you can make sense of the melodies that brought it into being.

And then I do some reading, and some studying, and some listening, and realize it all comes back to Pérotin anyway, and the Western world has been in pitiful decline since 1250 or thereabouts. So thank God for Africa, but that’s a post for another day.

Be wary of any urge to achieve of intellectual, conceptual, mathematical symmetry. It does not work! Follow the sound instead. The urge to systematize comes from a fear of decision making. Do not abdicate responsibility. Embrace the struggle and pour yourself into your work.