Genius and Craft

Many years ago, when I was working at the National Theatre, I met a very charming man , Bill Byers, who died about ten years ago. Bill had been contracted to orchestrate a rather disastrous new musical, "Jean Seberg". He was at that time the doyen of American arrangers, dividing his time between Hollywood movies and Broadway shows. As a fairly busy arranger myself at the time. I was humbled, not only by his skill. but by his craft. I would write fast and rely on my ever loyal copyists to correct my mistakes - my main guy reckoned he could tell how late I'd worked the night before and whether I had resorted to the brandy bottle. Bill wrote faster, in ink and never made mistakes.

This may be music biz trivia, but Bill was, in his way, a genius. Maybe he wasn't a genius in the way that Mozart or Bach were, but they shared with him an extraordinary concentration and craftsmanship which was a crucial part of their genius - look at facsimiles of their manuscripts, hardly a crossing out, music flowing as fast as the pen could. The craft and art were inseparable in the same way that Picasso could draw conventionally faster than most men could talk and Shakespeare somehow managed to write hundreds of thousands of words with scarcely a dud phrase.

Have spell checks, movie writing and music composing software blunted this art and craft symbiosis? I hope not, because I can't help thinking that you can't have one without the other.