There is a fleeting moment in Bright Star, Jane Campion’s quietly powerful film chronicling the last year or so of John Keats’ life, when the poet reports that two people wrote glowing reviews of his new collection of poems. They were both friends of his, he is careful to mention. Then there were a handful of mixed appraisals and “four hostile” notices. Someone listening to this account, trying to be encouraging, asks Keats if that means it’s selling well then, and there is an awkward silence.
It was an eerily familiar set of events, a conversation I’ve seen play out among well-meaning strangers to the new music community in multiple scenarios. Now, of course, the people in the movie theater knew going in that Keats would die young, feeling like a failure, but that eventually he would come to be respected as one of the great poets of the Romantic age (and if they didn’t already know it, it would be pointed out to them before the closing credits). But it got me thinking about the divide between the composers I know today who are hoping for a similar immortality/recognition of their genius after the fact, and those not expecting anything of the sort. It’s not a hard and fast line, of course, but there’s a break around maybe age 35. I wonder if as people age and start sensing their own mortality they necessarily change their tune on hoped-for success past death, or if it’s an external societal thing–a shift we might attribute to the digital age. Along with our shrinking hope for the scope of potential fame, has the ephemerality of “content” made us skeptical about the lifeline of our art?
I wonder if instead it might be more productive for an artist to – instead of wondering if they’ll achieve some kind of recognition after they’ve passed – take time to advocate for and somehow help preserve another artist’s work that inspires them but (for whatever reason) doesn’t seem to be on the radar of the people in their respective field?
Maybe for every “success” we experience, we could give something back in return? And when we’re gone, the cycle can continue.
I have been greatly helped by a book called “The War of Art,” by Steven Pressfield. One idea from it is that the artist’s job is to do the work as well as possible. Period. “The Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor.” Stern stuff, but it has helped me to avoid getting distracted.
I don’t think he means not to engage with the world, or to ignore the business side of one’s art. But in this view, the point of composing is the composing itself. The work’s reception and its future reputation are out of the composer’s hands.