Songs from Home
I’m writing this while listening to jazz pianist Fred Hersch’s latest release Songs from Home. The set opens with a slow, lovely version of “Wouldn't It Be Loverly”* from My Fair Lady. Hersch is a master, so it’s no surprise his version is emotionally and rhythmically nuanced. But there’s something else going on in the performances on this release. We are listening in on Hersch playing at home.
Our relationship to “home” is changing. Many of us have spent most of this year at home, working and learning alongside partners, our children, extended family members, and housemates. There’s been a lot written about the challenges of working from home: staying organized, prioritizing, managing your time, work-life balance, dealing with interruptions, and more... This article is about something else: how our homes shape our creative lives and work.
In his book How Music Works, David Byrne writes that early in his career he realized “the same music placed in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning.” He adds, “context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.” Where we create, the tools we use, and how/where we expect others to engage with our work change the art we produce.
About a month into the first wave of the Spring 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, Broadway.com hosted an online birthday celebration for Steven Sondheim. The live concert, scheduled for late March, was canceled when the New York theaters shut down earlier in the month. Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration (a benefit for Artists Striving to End Poverty) gathered a “starry line-up of Broadway favorites” who toasted Sondheim by performing their favorite Sondheim songs from their homes. These Broadway stars, performers trained to sing in front of large audiences, were now singing in their living rooms, bedrooms, stairwells, and closets for an unseen audience of one and one and one and one. Sondheim’s work, which often deals with loss and disillusionment, has a different resonance when it’s removed from the stage. These are intimate recitals: the cadences and melodic intonations a little closer to speech than song, the emotional expression a little more personal.
Home is a place of refuge, ritual, and renewal. It’s the place you return to when you need a modicum of control over your life, when you need the calming effect of familiarity: familiar surroundings, people, food, and ways things are done. Opening your home to others is an invitation to intimacy. You invite new friends into your home hoping that spending time in relaxed conversation and breaking bread together will deepen your growing friendship. You are opening the doors to a deeper understanding of your authentic self—and in doing so are willingly making yourself vulnerable. This act of trust is transformative. It’s the framework, the bond, that friendship is built on.
What’s true for friendships is also true for creative ideas. You have to open your mind, spirit, and heart to welcome the half-formed, sometimes incoherent thoughts and ideas that spark new creative work. You have to enter into relaxed conversation with those ideas—hear what they have to say. And just like we are our most authentic selves at home, we are most confident and receptive to new ideas in the spaces we’ve formed for our creative work and play: our journals, morning pages, sketchbooks, studios, and personal workspaces.
The pandemic has changed how we think about home and live at home. We are more reluctant to open our home to others. More reluctant to trust. Most of us have less control over what happens in our home than we used to—external forces now dictate who is at home, what happens in the house during the day, and how the space in the house is used.
The changing nature of our lives at home can make it difficult to sustain a creative practice. While you may not be able to maintain a formal studio or office space at home right now, you can establish and maintain a creative practice. Get up early and write or sketch. Send the family out for a walk so you can play your instrument or dance in the living room. Find new ways to welcome your creative ideas and thoughts. Converse with them. And most importantly, be kind to yourself and don’t judge yourself or your work. These are difficult times.
Creative work at home often has another dimension—flaws. When work is produced at home (especially live recordings) the environment often injects itself into the work in a way that’s not evident in work developed in a professional studio. You may hear some street noise or a minor mistake in a recording, or see the family pet appear for a moment in a video, or notice a smudge in a painting that looks suspiciously like a child’s fingerprint. The patina of perfection is missing, and what’s revealed is our humanity.
Songs From Home closes with a lovely rendition of Paul McCartney’s “When I'm Sixty Four.”* It’s a playful, energetic performance recorded weeks before Hersch’s 64th birthday; it’s a homemade gift—to his future self and to us.
* Link to ad-supported YouTube audio. You can click “Skip ad” after a few seconds to jump to the song.