The Hidden Potential of a Composer’s Environment

Hello composer!

Have you ever thought about the hidden potential of your environment?

Have you ever thought about the ways in which the physical space around you is actually shaping your creative decisions? Let's talk about how you can engineer your environment as a composer so that it’s easier to compose without distractions.

For years, I've been fascinated with this idea of how the environment and the physical space around me influences my music. I'm always looking for ways to remove barriers to my creativity, and the environment can actually possess a significant number of barriers. I'm actually kind of a lazy person sometimes, so if I'm able to optimize the space around me so that I can make good decisions and have good habits, then I don't really need to rely on discipline. My space is actually just supporting my creativity, and it's making it easier for me to do hard things. 

There are a lot of ways that you can think about the environment. You can think about it socially, economically, emotionally. You can think about it in terms of education and what kinds of resources you have access to in your environment. But for today, I'm just going to focus on the physical environment, because it's the one that we have the most control over.

As composers, we need a place to work. We need a place for our creativity to thrive. And if you can carve out a space in your home specifically for your creativity, for creating music, then it's going to be a lot easier for you to maintain momentum as a composer.

Now, just to give you a sense of how important and how much influence the environment has, think about the last time you organized your space or you organized your house and the feeling of satisfaction that you had afterwards, and the feeling of relief that having a clean space provides. Do you remember the last time you did that?

When I’ve done this, I feel like the energy in the space that I'm in is cleaner and more conducive to positive thinking, which in turn leads to more creativity. I think it has to do with the fact that there are less things in the environment that are vying for your attention, sort of like an arcade. Imagine a hectic arcade, where every single video game is calling out to you with its music.

I guess that's kind of what the internet is like nowadays, right?

That's what can happen in our physical spaces, not just in a digital space where there are things lying around that are suggesting you take action on them, like that pile of mail that's been accumulating for the last five days, or the dishes that you haven't washed in a couple of days… these things, they accumulate and they are taxing on our mind and indirectly on our creativity, because we're sort of getting fatigued by the environment.

So if you can have a clean and organized environment, it's going to be a lot easier for you to focus on the things that really matter without distractions.

David Lynch talks about the importance of the workspace, and he uses the example of a woodworker. A woodworker needs a workshop, right? They need to have access to wood. They need to have access to tools to work with wood, and they need a space where it's safe for them to do it. They wouldn't want to have this workshop in their bedroom, right? They'd get sawdust everywhere and that'd be horrible. So they need a specific space for it where it's not going to contaminate the other spaces for other kinds of activities.

It's the same thing with music, and it's the same thing with creativity and with composition. That's something that you have to think about: what are the tools that you need in order to be creative in order for your creativity to thrive? Make a list!

If you realize that there are tools that you're missing, what are they and how can you get them? For a lot of musicians and for a lot of composers, it can be very simple. It doesn't have to be high tech, right? You can have your instrument, a pencil, and some paper. That's it. That's really what you need.

In my workspace, the tools for creativity are concentrated into one place. I put all of these things nearby each other so that they can reinforce and strengthen one another. That's intentional. If they were scattered and all over the place, for example, if my cello was away in a closet, if the piano was in another part of the room, if my desk was in another place, if all my paper was at the bottom of a bookshelf and hard to find, or if my pencils were all in my backpack, then there would be all of these little barriers to being creative, right? I would have to go find the paper, go grab the pencils, go grab the cello. All of these different things, which create layers of resistance.

What we want to do is remove layers of resistance, so if the cello is out, if the paper’s on the desk, if I already have pencils, if I have my piano out and I can touch it and it makes a sound because it’s always on (or acoustic), then it's a lot easier to get into the creative space. 

Going back to this idea of the environment suggesting you take action on certain things, we talked about it in a negative sense, like when you have a messy house or a messy kitchen or mail accumulating, or whatever the case may be, these things can in some ways negatively impact our creativity because they are drawing us away from it, but we could leverage the power of that tendency, and the way that our minds sort of respond to stimuli in our environment for the good of our compositions.

Here are some things that you could do that would positively stimulate you to be more creative. The more concentrated your workspace can be, and the more tools you have at your disposal to be creative that are actually useful, the more likely it is that you are going to be successful in bringing your ideas to life.

Another thing that you can do is you can leave your work visible in your workspace. If you're working like I do on paper, it's really easy to actually have paper on your desk. In sight in mind. It's the opposite of the “out of sight, out of mind” principle. And that's going to help you to access your ideas quicker.

Jacob Collier offers a famous example of this idea. His room, like his whole album In My Room, is the perfect encapsulation of this idea of an engineered environment that's conducive for creativity. Everything is within arm's reach or steps away.

He has his drum set, he has his piano, he has his melodica, he has his microphones, his DAW, and a ton of other instruments. He has everything he needs to create. That's why it's such a powerful tool that we can use as composers.

To go back to David Lynch, and this actually ties into consistency, which I’ll talk about in a different blog, he talks about this idea of a fisherman keeping his hook in the water. The idea is basically that if you keep your hook in the water, eventually you're going to catch a fish.

In this case, the water is our workspace. If you go to your workspace and you do it every day, the chances are significantly higher that you're going to catch a fish there, and significantly higher that you're going to catch bigger fish, right? As time progresses, you'll become more efficient and you'll become more skilled as a “fisherman” of your ideas.

So, if your space is optimized, it's easy to access, you have your work in a visible place, everything's within arm's reach, and you're doing it consistently, you're going to get better and better, and you're going to get results faster. 

That's what I recommend.

That's the power of the environment.

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Happy composing!

If you’re serious about composing, check out my FREE on-demand composition masterclass by visiting https://www.mathew-arrellin.com/free-class