I am continuing to listen to Dr. Goldberg’s Teaching Company series on “Listening to Great Music”. Of course, he has difficulty saying too many nice things about the music of Mozart. What I found interesting is that he was very sickly all his life, and that he died at age 36 or so, of causes that are still undetermined. But he virtually every disease that you could get in his day and age along the way, including smallpox, which permanently disfigured his face.
He had major father issues. His father was very demanding, and in the end he had to run away from him. I wonder if his musical output, prodigious at substantially all times after perhaps age 20, was his version of escape. I wonder if he learned to use his will to create beautiful places he could not find in his own life.
As I see it, you can use will for creativity. Will, per se, does not create, but what you can do is clear a figurative, imaginative space, and wait patiently for it to be populated, with ideas that seep up from the ground. The trick is keeping the space pristine long enough for this to happen. This is something, I feel, that Mozart did well. In his own words he “wrote music like cows piss”. It did not feel hard to him, but I wonder if that was because that exercise of his will was habitual, and necessary to maintain any semblance of psychological equilibrium
Random musings. Time for bed.