Anneloes Wolters

What makes music so Beautiful?

A question started my quest to understand music better and ignited the desire to be a composer. I work in a scientific way: I ask questions, I write a hypothesis, I do experiments, I fail and learn. My moments of genius are usually found during the ‘failing’ part of experiments, as probably are yours. Success doesn’t teach you anything, ‘failure’ does.

In music there is no such thing as ‘failure’, there is only playfulness. You play music, right? You don’t work music.

When a child draws a car without a steering wheel, you don’t go over and draw the missing wheel, you go over and wonder, now that the car can only drive straight ahead, how that will be? Where it will go? The fun of sharing ideas outweighs getting the drawing right.

Creativity also means you might not try again or correct, but change direction with a project in an unexpected way at any given moment. That’s why open minded and intelligent artists pivot a lot and are perceived as ‘unreliable’.

I feel that there is a lot of weight on musicians to play exactly what has been notated. But since sheet-music is an abstraction of what I hear in my inner ear, there is always room for personal interpretation by musicians. They have to playfully fill the blanks that the abstraction left us with. Notation is never perfect, though a performance can be that.

I think there is a balance between quantity and quality: You have to produce a lot to get good results, but you also have to contemplate in between, finding and asking yourself the right questions. The music written is sometimes even only a by product of my experiments.

To learn the craft and keep moving forward, you need teachers (see below). You will learn to listen and hear your own story. In the end your own music will teach you what to do next.

A composer best listens and is honest. I find the last part the hardest, because music can influence choices in both art and life. It’s not that an escapist artists can’t be ‘truthful’, it’s that the layer of phantasy makes writing the most difficult darkness doable. That is, for me, the Map of Miracles presents everything I can but also, I have to imagine to be true to myself. Places you are not allowed to go, things you are not allowed to ventilate, frustrate any creative process.

The plus side is that fresh, new insights, change the sound of your oeuvre while your music develops in an understandable continuous flow.

For now, I think the Beauty of Music is us, Creating Beauty together in Harmony. I think the brilliant moments are those in which we share creativity. The moment that we create together, as one organism, helps us connect and share during the emotional journey that music can be.

Musical genius is the result of a particular educated creative process, that starts without the idea of a result. I think that everybody can have genius moments in their fields of expertise. Be it through talent and/or hard work.

The notion of personal genius, a person being genius, creativity connected to only one person, is of no use to our democratic, inclusive, society. It’s of no importance to be the next ‘Bach’, it’s important we feel heard and listened to. That there is music that expresses you and me and us, instead of ‘Bach’. It is my goal be open minded to all arts and in the end become so personal, that my story is universally understood. I think great composers learned how to do that by themselves and our challenge is to take that to a more inclusive, integrated level.

Since Music is something that comes from ourselves to help us express ourselves, we can always improve. This is why I like the idea of Kitsch: Art is a creative improvement of reality. Be it more beautiful or more clear or more focused.

Since reality often feels like a lottery and has many redundant aspects, I make art to escape that. There is always something to do, because I can always improve the reality of art. A composer, or any artist, is never ‘finished’. But luckily, most pieces of art within an Oeuvre are.