Fred Hersch's Dream

Last night Michael and I went to a concert that featured the pianist Fred Hersch. It was a marvelous concert. I was particularly impressed by a story that Hersch told about the dream that inspired his "Dream of Monk," which you can hear him play with Esperanza Spalding here.

He told the audience about finding himself in a small cage, too small to fit in comfortably, and then seeing Thelonius Monk in another cage that was too small for him to fit in. A guard came in with some manuscript paper, and told them both that the first person to write a tune would be set free. Hersch scribbled out a tune as quickly as he could, and handed it to the guard. Then he saw that Monk hadn't written anything.

When writing the tune inspired by this dream, Hersch used a kitchen timer to give himself the kind of time constraint that he had while dreaming about writing it.

Interesting.

My armchair psychologist's take on this dream would be that the thing that most composers want most when faced with writing something is a set of constraints. A cage that you write your way out of is such a great visual image of this need. And it is a need. The world of pitches, harmonies, registers, tempo, meter, dynamics, instruments, voices, and timbre is vaster than vast. And finding a path through the possibilities for a creative person with some kind of an abstract feeling to express is really difficult without a good set of guidelines. I imagine that this is the case for any kind of creative person doing any kind of creative thing.

The telling thing for me is that Hersch saw Monk, one of his heroes, as not being productive in a cage.

Perhaps it was because Hersch was looking for perameters in order to begin the song he wanted to write (inspired by the title of Monk's Dream). Perhaps it was because Hersch used Monk as his "cage" in real life (given the musical language of the song), and believed (at least in his unconscious mind) that Monk didn't benefit from any kind of artificial constraint when he wrote.

I wonder what kind of dreams Thelonious Monk had?