I recently saw an interview with the late film director Sidney Lumet, in which he made the following statement—”All good work is self-revelation.” He was speaking in the context of discussing how he grew from being an actor himself to a notable director of such films as Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and 12 Angry Men. For my part, I see his point in the number of films he made that almost use his beloved New York City as a character itself, but I am less sure about the connection he was apparently trying to make between his having been a stage actor and his reputation for bringing the best performances out of the actors in his films, mainly because I know so very little about the art of acting itself. As usual, however, I am more interested in what the quoted thought means to me in terms of my experience than in winkling out what Mr. Lumet may or may not have meant. After all, as my friend Rob Haskins recently pointed out, all work is self-revelation.

While that may be true, I find that I am not so very interested in  all  aspects of self-revelation. There are, for instance, those pieces or works of art which are self-consciously revealing—where the artist sets out to show something about himself, or to make a focused point. As my friend Rob (the Oracle) has also pointed out, composers are often the least qualified to talk about their own work in a meaningful way (a philosophy that fits very well, as it turns out, with my reluctance to write programme notes for my own works), and I think that I am always a bit suspicious of what artists say that they meant to do. I think, for instance, of the stated intentions of composers like John Cage, who wanted to remove the ego of the composer from music by making it more a matter of chance, and—in my opinion, at least—ended by making the presence of the composer more palpable than ever by imposing processes far outside of the realm of performance and interpretation. We also have the backward-progressing musicology of Schoenberg and Berg as examples, as well. Are these things self-revelation? Of course they are, but I am not sure that this is the sort of self-revelation that Lument meant.

Having walked about for weeks now carrying this idea in my head, with the thought surfacing now and then like a distracted manatee, I have come to the conclusion that what is most interesting, at least to me, is that self-revelation which one is unconscious of making. This extends, of course, to the patterns and preoccupations that show themselves in one’s work, most often when one is not conscious of them. Putting this in terms of my own work (which I should know best, although I am not certain that is true) I think of Der Singende Wald, which, loaded with its fraught references to the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis, was perceived by one acquaintance as being also a tragic love story, of a sort, because of the dialogue between the two solo violins. Had I thought of that when I wrote the piece, it would definitely be self-revelatory; as it is (since the thought had not occurred to me) it’s a completely new and mysterious revelation altogether.

I think, also, of Los Fantasmas de la Plaza Mayor, recently completed (and lauded so memorably as recounted in the blog entry immediately preceding this one). I have long been aware of a certain tendency in my orchestral music—a few motifs will crop up now and then. I think particularly of the use of ersatz birdsong and the presence of bells in so many of my works (a handful, really, but by percentage, it’s quite a lot). I admit that I consciously used bells in Fantasmas as being a natural part of daily life in Madrid, but I did think, for awhile, that I had managed to get away without the bird references. Imagine, then, my shock, when I found that they were still there, in spite of my efforts to keep them out; apparently bird song is my King Charles’ head, as it were.

The lesson that I’ve carried away from all of this thinking is that the self-revelation I most enjoy is that I discover on my own; I’m afraid I instinctively distrust that which any artist says I must accept, but those things I uncover for myself are the true artists’ voices, and speak far more eloquently than any programme note ever could.