On Genius

As I get older, I find my perspective on genius changing. I've long loathed how “genius” is often used as a lazy catch-all term to explain away all the hard work, sacrifice, perseverance, and technical understanding of great artists throughout history. People use it as a simple one word explanation for everything they don't understand about art and artistic process, satisfied to be absolved of any responsibility to create themselves. Relegating the creation of art to a select few who are “blessed by the divine” leaves us with a dull, colorless society, where no one knows how to tell stories anymore and the acquisition of wealth and status are the highest values.

You want to know the secret? It's really not that complicated. You learn how to make art by copying other artists. You copy, and you copy, and you copy, and you change a little bit here and there to suit your personal taste, and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, but you learned something in the process. And after a while you have all this great art swirling around in your head in a big stew, and it just sits there percolating, day after day.

And one day you write something good and no one can identify exactly what came from where anymore, not even you. Then you just keep on doing that. Study, copy, persist. It’s that simple. The difficulty mostly comes from continuing to devote the necessary time to this process while figuring out how to pay the bills. Hence why civilized societies subsidize artists instead of billionaire warmongers.

So what makes some art greater than others? A lot of time it's just the persistence. You can achieve a lot just by doing the same thing day after day, as many of us who are now midlife and have spent twenty years in our industries can attest. But also, there is knowledge, intelligence, taste. Is the combination of these factors genius? Maybe.

But lately, as I sit here watching the powers that be manufacture new existential threats (AI, the dissolution of democracy, pandemics) to compete with the old ones that were already nigh unsolvable (climate change, nuclear proliferation), I have a new thought regarding the nature of genius. Maybe the genius of the composers that have accompanied me through my life and career was in putting their hope into their art day after day, when everything pointed to the contrary. I sit down with these centuries-old scores and I hear the artists choosing beauty over destruction. Education over ignorance. Forgiveness over revenge. Loyalty over lust. And strength, real strength of the kind that is willing to take actual risks, the risks of humiliation, poverty, even physical harm - for the sake of an idea. This instead of the cowardice of quivering behind meaningless titles and the endless accumulation of material goods in a vain attempt to fill a hole that will not be filled.

I hear all this in the music of my idols that has been with me since childhood, and the most remarkable thing is that they didn't do it just once. For most people, once would be enough, to say something with true meaning like that. Instead, they said it over and over, every day in their work, with every piece they wrote. Sometimes the message came through more clearly than others, sometimes it was convoluted or half-baked, but they did it enough times that it's clear what their intentions were. They poured their lives into this pursuit, day after day, and sometimes it killed them.

And for what? 

Well, I can only speak from my own experience: As a composer, I write for myself. I write to create the world that I would like to see, that doesn’t exist yet. This is what brings me comfort. I don't know if my idols had the same intention. But I can say what effect their work has had on me, and the effect is not dissimilar to religion. Just to know that throughout history, there have always been other souls who fought the good fight, who stood up for what they believed in, who endured all the slings and arrows and petty injustices that come with being a human in this world, and they did not give in. They may have bent, they may have wavered, they may even have succumbed to depression and host of other mental and physical illnesses. But before they shuffled off the mortal coil, they left us the legacies of lives well-lived, uncompromised.

That’s what genius means to me now. Dedication to art and ideals through all the trials and tribulations we face. Steadfast determination. Unshakeable resolve. If you want to tell me that’s the definition of the word, well, I won’t argue with you.

This post was not written by AI.