The Trouble with August, or Comprehending the Incomprehensible

On a recent trip home, I watched with my family the 2007 film August Rush. August Rush is, as Roger Ebert describes it, "a very free modern adaptation of elements from Oliver Twist" involving Evan Taylor, the long lost son of a solo cellist and an Irish rock star. Evan begins a search for his parents, and through a series of trials and tribulations, realizes his prodigious talent as a guitarist and composer, and takes the stage name August Rush. The story culminates in young August conducting the New York Philharmonic in his first symphony, while his parents reunite in the audience and immediately recognize their long lost boy, who has finally found his parents.

At the end of the movie, I was the one person in the room who didn't have an ear-to-ear smile on my face. I absolutely respect the ability of others to get lost in the film's unabashed optimism and sentimentality, but for reasons I couldn't immediately describe, I hated that movie.

On further deliberation, I realized that what turned me off was the sheer number of inconsistencies between August's experience as a musician and my own. I can overlook the extremely implausible good luck he encounters (an 8-year-old with months of musical training is conducting the NY Phil? Wow, can I go next?), because clearly the movie demands acceptance of that aspect on its terms. But what got to me further was writer Nick Castle's portrayal of the little guy's creative process. I couldn't bring myself to identify with August; because while he papers walls with musical sketches minutes after first encountering a piano, I toil for months before feeling good enough about an idea to write it down, and perhaps never feel good about the finished product. I don't know if there's been a composer since Mozart who worked as fast and carefree as August Rush, and if there has been, he probably wasn't very good. Try as I might, I couldn't envision such a character as being close to realistic, and the skepticism hit too close to home for me to enjoy watching it.

Of course, sharing these opinions with others brought several accusations forward: I was being elitist, I was being too intellectual, and perhaps most hurtful, I was jealous. Apparently composers aren't supposed to feel so possessive of the creative process. Of course, I should have expected such a reaction; composers told their public for a good part of the twentieth century that art music wasn't for them. Only recently have we almost universally begun to consider accessibility a valid artistic concern. There's a lingering distrust of complex new music, and we as an artistic community are trying to come down to earth, partially through demystifying the creative process. Even John Corigliano implicates composers as far back as Wagner for coveting incomprehensibility:

God became the composer. If you go to any church, the one thing you know is that you don't understand God. You can't understand God. So, all of a sudden, this virtue of incomprehensibility sprung up. "I am incomprehensible because my message is so much more complex and morally stronger than the message of those people who were just speaking to you that you can understand. Therefore, you shouldn't understand me..." [they created] the egocentric idea of the artist-god and the audience-worshipper—the non-communication that that means—and bathed us in this until finally the audience was alienated by this and left...

And in many ways, I agree. Obviously composers are not gods, and art should express ideas intelligible and enlightening to non-artists. But while I will expect a motivated, curious audience to understand my music, I will never expect them to understand my creative process. The way in which I write music is extremely personal, and I only have a very limited understanding of it, so how could I expect (or want) to enlighten the audience to it? Any possible explanation I could give would misrepresent, even cheapen, the work that composing takes.

But perhaps that demystification is what audiences are looking for. Maybe that's why people loved August; his creative process was totally exposed. We could tell exactly where his music came from, and we could share in the elation he obviously felt during the creative process. We could watch him compose and we could say, "that's exactly how it works." Maybe that's one of the reasons people loved Amadeus and Copying Beethoven, two works (like August Rush) written by non-musicians. And meanwhile, as the new music community tries desperately to make itself relevant, that kind of full disclosure is doing wonders to humanize and endear composers to the audience.

In all honesty, though, I don't feel prepared to deliver on that full disclosure. It would be foolish of me to think I can completely explain how I compose, and it would be presumptuous to speak about that process on behalf of any composer but myself. And even if I could define my musical mode d'emploi for an audience member, my guess is that they would be disappointed to find out how unromantic (read: unlike August's) it really is. Maybe the reason I disliked August Rush so much lies somewhere in there: it's setting an expectation for what composers are like that I can't hope to meet. And if an August Rush fan goes to a concert of new music hoping to meet seven grown-up Evan Taylors, will they leave with anything but a sense of disappointment and betrayal, no matter what the music is like?

Just what should expected of a composer? Should he/she be prepared to divulge every aspect of the very personal compositional process? Is it elitist to take issue with Hollywood's presumptions about it? And is it even more elitist to suggest that, perhaps, there is a mystery inherent in composition that will never be penetrated (not even by the artist)? Possibly the answer is "yes," and I really am jealous of August's success... but I couldn't write as much about that.