Trailing Off

Many great composers had serious problems with self-confidence. Paul Dukas, who composed The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, later gaining public renown from its use in Disney’s Fantasia, wrote a considerable amount of music, but he destroyed most of it rather than publish something that, to him, was less than perfect. Anton Bruckner, who composed some of the most grandiose romantic works in the canon, did not seem to trust his own preferences and often revised his work repeatedly to conform to the recommendations of other musicians. To this day some of his works do not have a standard version.

Other times, the composers have some great ideas, but they lose steam as the work nears its end. The first two movements of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique are both very “pathetic,” meaning they are full of pathos, but the last movement does not match the emotion of the first two. It seems as if Beethoven had used up all the inspiration he had for the first two movements, and by the third he was just tired, trying to spit something out to complete the required three movement form.

I only work in essays, and at that I am a mere amateur, but I suffer from both of these problems in conjunction. As a writer, it is easy for me to get excited about a topic. Almost anything can hold my interest for awhile, which I think is fairly obvious from the variety of topics I discuss in this blog. I love coming up with bizarre ways to approach a topic, starting somewhere off in the bleachers beyond left field, slowly meandering my way through the crowds, stopping for a hot dog, eventually entering the field over the home team’s dugout, and then puttering my way to home plate, where my topic awaits me. The pursuit of a good introduction is one of my passions.

Unfortunately, the pursuit of a better conclusion is where I should really be focusing. I often feel like a song-writer who has come up with a catchy chorus. You hear it one day on the radio and find it at least agreeable, so you keep listening. After awhile you realize the song should be coming to an end soon or it will pass into the realm of lost novelty, and right on cue, it begins to quiet down. But it’s not leading up to any cadence, any semblance of finality. No, the writer got so caught up in his catchy chorus that he forgot to figure out how to end the song. Luckily, in our studio era, there is an easy way to hide this error – just keep playing that catchy chorus and slowly fade the music out.

So what do those bands do when they have a concert? They obviously can’t just fade out at the end. Rather than face the deafening silence, the bands (or perhaps their more pragmatic producers) come up with some contrived ending that’s forced in where it was never intended to be. They have a quick pause followed by a final ringing chord, or they have a ridiculous build up where the drummer goes berserk until the crowd is roaring. Either way, the band has been forced to awkwardly cauterize their idea, effectively terminating the song but stealing away some of its vitality.

I commiserate with them. When you are pouring all your creative energies into an idea, sometimes you are just too sapped to figure out how to wrap it up. You would rather it hang around, ringing in your ears until everything in the world is better. Nearly every time I write I face this problem, but no amount of interest early on can mask the lack of a conclusion.

Thus I am forced to try. Some of the time I realize that I just told a story with no point whatsoever. Other times I have a point but I’m too bashful to make it forcefully. Like Bruckner I am overly concerned with what others will think. Still other times I know my purpose and write it plainly, but then I come across as pompous and moralizing. And all the while I would rather be back in the first part of the essay, writing another exaggerated story of my duel with a tiny spider. I become frustrated and start looking for excuses to procrastinate. Eventually, after the excitement has left me entirely, I abruptly end the story.