One of the most self-destructive things you can do as a composer is being afraid to write clichés. While there are limitless musical possibilities, if you’ve absorbed any influences at all you will inevitably find yourself coming up with something that’s been done before. In fact, if you’re drawn towards particular ways of expressing certain ideas or feelings or sounds, it’s only natural that other composers will have as well. If you don’t let yourself do this and do this often, what’s the point of having influence? You might as well lock yourself in a 5-by-5 cell and pray for musical amnesia.

So we’ve got to be comfortable writing clichés. Not only is the universe of musical language abundant with them, but one of the most common self-criticisms we make is to say “I can’t write this. It’s been done before.” As I wrote in another article, we need to be free to write terrible music. Similarly, we need to be free to write clichés as well. The trick is to know how to handle them. I identify four basic strategies.

The first strategy is to avoid them at all costs. Good luck. If you find something that hasn’t been done before you’re not listening closely enough or you need to get out more often. If you manage to convince yourself that you’re doing something 100% original, your ego will always be at the mercy of finding out later on that yes, it’s been done before. Keep this up and you’ll stop being curious about the world to protect your self-image. It’s a terrible way to live. Don’t do it.

The second strategy is unfortunately common, and is to try to use the cliché “correctly.” This ultimately means using the cliché with all of its other typically associated clichés, ending up with your marginally personal expression of shopworn boilerplate music. Although this is a post about being OK with clichés, I’m not OK with the approach, unless they are paying me a lot of money and the coffee is flowing.

The most common successful strategy is to try to use your cliché with other clichés that it’s not commonly associated with. Essentially you’re looking for a way to subvert the meaning of the cliché by changing its context. I like this approach, and this is essentially what is done by most people who get credit for “expanding the boundaries of music.” The only problem is that it’s always a race against time. Eventually, any original combination of clichés that catches on will be imitated to the point that it’s no longer original.
Also, anyone with a critical ear is going to eventually figure out where your ideas came from, and what the thinking behind it is. Once they figure out that you’re just putting together an unlikely yet successful combination of clichés they will lump you in with everyone else who has the same approach, even if your music sounds totally different. Again, this isn’t the biggest problem in the world. Just be aware that you’re trading a sonic cliché for a conceptual one. There are worse problems to have.

Whereas the approach mentioned above is additive the fourth and final approach to cliché I will mention in this article is subtractive. Instead of mixing your cliché with other clichés to achieve a novel combination, you remove anything and everything that isn’t derived from your cliché. Reduce your music to the very essence of one cliché and strive to make your music contain nothing that is not that cliché. As you go through this process you will develop a deeper and deeper understanding of your cliché, and eventually, if your go all the way, you find come out on the other side with something that is truly original. Traveling inwards, understanding the cliché and all its expressions, its variations, its history, its tendencies, its shortcomings, you transcend it. You personalize it until it becomes universal.

Naturally, this is my favorite approach. The only downside is that it’s really hard, and most of the time you’ll come up short. But you’ll also come up with a lot of beautiful failures along the way.

So to drive this point home, what better way is there to end an article on clichés then with a paraphrased quote by John Fitzgerald Kennedy? “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

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.

As musicians and artists, we can be pretty neurotic when it comes to the issue of voice. “Am I finding my voice? What is my voice? Do I even have a voice?” We’re always looking for a way to get that artistic edge.

Some people describe an inward journey. “Find your muse. Write from that place. Whether it is a place of contentment, or pain, or hope, find it and write in it.” And this is fine if the emotions you access don’t interfere with your ability to do work, but it may not be very healthy to visit the dark recesses of your soul every time to want to create, nor, on the other end of the emotional spectrum, very practical to conjure jubilant exaltation as part of your artistic routine.

Other people take an analytical approach. “Who are you? What makes you unique? What do you need to say?” But this can lead to a kind of scripted self-awareness that can impede real creativity. “I’m quirky, so my music should be quirky. And this is not quirky. I like it, but it’s not me. Should I let myself write it?”

Many more think it’s a matter of being as different as possible. “Look at what everyone else is doing, and DON’T DO THAT.” And this works as long as you don’t know your field very well. But as you absorb influences it’s only a matter of time before you realize it’s all been done before, and you’ll risk getting blocked. Or even worse, out of fear of realizing you’re not as original as you’d like to think you are, you’ll give up being curious about what’s out there. You’ll give up growth and learning.

I spent years wrestling with these kinds of questions before coming to the realization that the question “how do I find my voice” is somewhat flawed. Forget analyzing the deeper implications of your artistic choices. Forget writing manifestos to explain your ideas. It doesn’t matter. There’s things you do and there’s things you don’t do, and that’s because either you like them or you don’t.

I realized there’s no use climbing to the top of the mountain and sitting in meditative repose until the moment of inspiration strikes, and then, in a burst of creative energy, trying to document my newly discovered Jaredness in music. When the euphoria wears off, it’s still just going to be me and whatever I’m working on, and I’ll still have to apply my skills and my attitudes towards the material at hand.

And the truth is that our natural uniqueness comes across in our work through what we choose to do or choose not to do. This truly is the essence of one’s voice. There’s no need for analysis or reflection except to ask “Do I really like this, or am I doing this out of habit or fear?”

Instead of thinking about voice like it’s the culmination of a mystical journey or looking at where the crowd is and running in the opposite direction, why don’t you imagine that it’s like developing a photograph of yourself? The subject matter is a given: it’s you. And it’s your job to make sure the photograph comes out as clear as possible. It’s only when your photograph is blurry that it looks like all the other blurry photographs. But clear photographs are as unique as the people who took them.

So in a sense all work is autobiographical. If we are honest, we can only say about the world what we believe to be true. But this approach requires bravery. You have to believe that you are a unique and beautiful person, even if you can’t say why. You have no manifesto or ideology to hide behind when people criticize your work, no grand reason why people should like what you do.

It requires a commitment to the process. It requires looking at every relationship, from the big picture to the smallest detail, and asking the same basic questions. What’s working? What’s not working? What can I add to make this better? What can I subtract to make this better?

You can’t let fear trick you into doing something you don’t like because you think it will make you more unique. It will never work. The people we hail as visionaries were simply honest with themselves about what they liked and didn’t like. They knew a lot of music and understood what it meant to have a personal relationship with every detail. And they worked over those details in their music until there was nothing they didn’t like.

It’s more important to be genuine than to be original. You have no idea what makes you unique. It’s unknowable, unless you know everything. But you do know what you like, and there’s no limit to the sensitivity you can develop between the relationships of the details of your work. As you become sensitive to more relationships, your task is to form opinions about them free from habit or fear. This is the process of developing your photograph to an ever finer resolution.

And eventually your photograph will be so crisp, so clear that people will say that you have a voice. They will say that you climbed the mountain. They will say that you stand out from the crowd. But you never moved. You never changed. You just got better than anyone else at saying “this is cool.”