Creativity in the Time of Coronavirus

This past Saturday jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg sent out an electronic mail announcement of a project he had launched under shelter-in-place conditions. Beginning on March 19, he decided that he would record a new song every day. He invoked the “use what you’ve got” strategy, describing the resources at his disposal as “clarinets, a synthesizer I can’t figure out, and rudimentary recording ability.” He has been uploading tracks to a Bandcamp Web page on a day-by-day basis from which those visiting can listen to individual tracks and/or name their own price for downloading the entirety. The title of the album is PLAGUE DIARY, and Goldberg has even provided it with a cover consisting of a photograph of his parents Al and Judy:

The strategy behind this project may be familiar to those following this site. At the beginning of this past February, I wrote about Goldberg’s From the Granary album. Readers may recall that the eleven tracks on this album could be viewed as a “laboratory notebook” in which Goldberg documented different approaches to creating solo music for clarinet. Each track involved “live” capture from a microphone going into digital storage. Goldberg never disclosed how the tracks were subsequently named.

This time the naming is more straightforward. The title of each track is simply the date on which it was created. However, when I decided to download all the tracks that had been accumulated by April 6, I found that one of them (April 2) also included a dedication: “For George Marsh.” The lyric nature of this particular track suggests that Goldberg may have been thinking about the drummer that played in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra during the early days of recorded jazz at the beginning of the last century; but that suggestions can not be anything more than a working hypothesis!

More interesting for me, however, has been the relationship between Goldberg and his synthesizer. Those of us with even the most rudimentary knowledge of such gear will probably be aware of Goldberg’s “learning curve.” If there is an “overall narrative” to the tracks he has recorded, it may have less to do with the diversity of his “inventiones” (to again appropriate the noun used by Johann Sebastian Bach) and more with the emergence of how Goldberg comes to adopt the different features that his synthesizer affords.

When I wrote about From the Granary, I concluded by speculating on the process by which “invention skills” migrate from Goldberg’s mind through his instrument and then into the mind of the attentive listener. Most of us will never get beyond the most rudimentary approach to mastering such invention skills. On the other hand we all have the capacity to grow and refine continuously our capacities for attentive listening. These “pages” from Goldberg’s “diary” serve as a valuable resource for such an objective.