Sublime

what Nadia Boulanger taught me: “Your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being.”

helpful to remember that when you throw away an old playbook, you still get to keep the skills you learned along the way. These hard-earned abilities transcend rules. They’re yours to keep. Imagine what can arise when you overlay an entirely new set of materials and instructions over your accumulated expertise.

think mystery, not mastery.

“The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing

three themes seem to spiral out, educating me as they emerged. First, again, that the flow is always a function of fragments, fluid sequences are made of small steps. Separate, discrete actions learned by effort and then put together give not just the illusion of unity but the fact of mastery.

In creating art, the sum total of the parts often defies expectation. Theory and practice don’t always line up.