fertile doubts

yesterday I coined the term in describing a recurring phenomenon in writing music.

I was sitting in my favourite pizza joint in Helsinki, where I had taken my Estonian composer colleagues after a night at the Musica nova festival.

Musica nova saw many ebullient discussions about how composers, as well as other frequent listeners of the festival, position themselves with what they heard here and now. Many of them were quite short from my part, since I had a busy week simultaneously workshopping and planning a choral percussion concerto with video, due for premiere in September. This week as been a Composing week with a big C. I never felt like I had sat the evening until its closing arguments. I was more engaged in internal mushroom-picking.

it seems that I have been under the charm of the fertility of doubt especially poignantly this week.

sitting down for pizza with like-minded practicioners of a shy yet voyeuristic craft – with observers in introspect – acted as a reminder of what composing means for me.

composing is for me a conveyor belt meandering it's way slowly through a whole arcade of doubts of different sizes and colours. it's an activity that happens in a forest ecosystem of doubt.

the main attribute of doubt in this vein for me is, however, fertility.

a fertile kind of doubt is like a question that opens up to more questions, perhaps questions that appear to be further down the line – being the living proof that one has indeed gone further down the line.

I find myself welcoming this spawning of doubt, the gradual distribution of doubtful humidity, as an act of prospecting for interesting compositional questions.

fertile doubt is an occurrence of the leaf-litter – it's not a determined flyer occupying the space between moss and canopy

opening up to the fertility of doubt is a discreet practice, one that is done in silence and in a forehead-wrinkling state of quietude.

trusting the fertility of doubt is a act of turning the tables on melancholy.

I always have the vegan Pinato.