The GrowlersWorld Interviews

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The GrowlersWorld Interviews are an ongoing quest, bringing you closer to successful and creative people in all walks of life.

Rawle Austin presents...

A conversation with Jonathan FeBland - The Creative Explosion

Jonathan FeBland is The Creative Explosion. Possessor of a multitude of talents he is blazing his way through the creative landscape and forging new ground as he goes. I asked him a few questions with the express purpose of determining what makes The Creative Explosion tick… And so, without further ado, the interview begins. Rawle Austin: How did your creative streak first develop and what did you do to nurture it? Jonathan FeBland: I think we all start out by being creative when we are young but it is the goal of education and society to stamp out that creative streak and turn us all into robots.

I chose not to be an automaton and played with my creative side until I could claim the title Artist.

RA: Who initially inspired your creativity and why?

JF: I started composing at the age of 16. This was partly due to listening to a lot of music broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in the mid 1970’s.

I listened to a great deal of contemporary serious music (Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Berio etc.) and thought either this is some kind of joke or I can do it better.

At the time, I only wanted to write this kind of serious music (which I now realise is the most universally detested type of music ever written and furthermore has actually brought the whole art of composition into disrepute).

In 1976 I did not think that I would try to be creative in numerous different fields, I was just focusing on learning the art of composition in the hope that one day I might have one single work published (in real print as sheet music).

This goal was achieved in 1985 when I signed my first publishing contract with Universal Edition.

Getting back to the specific question, my creativity was first inspired by a desire to outdo those composers I heard receiving radio broadcasts.

RA: Who inspires you now and why? JF: I don’t need or require or look to find inspiration from other artists. So the answer is, nobody specifically inspires me. The reason for this is that I motivate myself by wishing to complete my work to the best of my abilities. RA: Which new creative areas would you most like to enter and why?

JF: I have not yet tried sculpture or film-making and am attracted to both of these. I’d also like to increase my computer skills and be able to tinker around with the various photographs that I’ve taken.

Finally, if I had access to the equipment, I’d like to produce a series of video podcasts. I first had the idea for something like this towards the end of 2002 (I suddenly had a brainwave to produce 100 short videos ranging from educational/intellectual through to humour).

RA: What advice would you give to someone eager to develop their creative muscles?

JF: Study work that you admire in great depth.

I’d also recommend a couple of early works of Edward de Bono – The Happiness Purpose and Lateral Thinking. The Last Chapter of Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works is also worth examining.

I am not aware of a book title such as How to be Creative, so maybe I’ll tackle that subject one day!

RA: From your experience, how would you describe the State of Creativity (music, photography and poetry) of the Nation at the moment?

JF: If you are an artist, you cannot just look at what is going on in your own country, your arena is the world.

There are certainly plenty of people who are earning money working in creative fields. Whether their work is going to stand the test of time however, is another matter altogether.

RA: Music is clearly your foremost passion; can you describe how you approach composing? JF: I will give as my example the piece I have been working on most recently. I sat down at my Piano in about May 2002 and started developing ideas for a brand new Jazz Symphony. The composition was going to be scored for large (90-piece) orchestra and run for about 15 minutes.

As I started work on the new piece, I improvised on the piano until suitable ideas were formed. As each new idea was generated, I notated it down into a manuscript book in a sketch format which could (just about) be played on the piano.

(Remember that eventually the work was going to be for a massive orchestra so that it wasn’t always easy to get one’s fingers around the notes!)

After accumulating ideas for about 7 months, I could actually play the Jazz Symphony on the Piano all the way through and in fact, I made a solo Piano recording of it at the time which I still have here on cassette.

Once the work got to that stage, I decided to number all of the major sections of the composition and (somehow magically) the number turned out to be 33.

The full title of my work was born – Jazz Symphony in 33 Grooves!

Then came the incredible process of orchestrating the entire work. This was done using Sibelius software (the world’s leading engraving programme) and took me another 10 months.

At that point, I made the score available at Sibelius Music where I have my own page ~ http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/cgi-bin/user_page.pl?url=febland

Since March 2004 I have been tinkering with the scoring, dynamics (loudness/volume), orchestration, instrumentation, phrasing (smooth, detached etc), counterpoint (little extra added melodic lines), special effects (plucking strings, muted brass etc) and so on and so forth. As of today, June, 2006, it is about 98% finished – it requires maybe another 100 hours work. My approach? Hard work, graft, slog, grind, doggedness plus inspiration!

RA: Which Classical period do you lean towards and why?

JF: I am obviously aware of the History of Art, but I tend to favour supreme individual artists rather than ‘periods’ as you put it. You cannot but fail to learn something every time you study a Beethoven score, for example.

RA: How does your muse get in the mood for writing poetry?

JF: Good question. Poetry is not a normal mode of speech (or writing) and unless you specifically sit down with the intention of penning something that either a) rhymes or b) has a poetic format of some description or other, it is unusual to suddenly receive poetic inspiration.

One way it can happen is if I suddenly hear a prose phrase that I think I might be able to turn into a poem.

I’ll drop everything else and try to explore the poetic idea before returning to whatever else it was I was working on. I’m having fun with my novel, as the hero (Doctor Fish) is a kind of poet manqué.

RA: Which artist would you most like to meet in the fields of music, poetry and photography?

JF: Sadly, no one living. In those particular fields, I would have liked to have met Beethoven, T.S.Eliot and Eadweard Muybridge.

RA: What is the mark of a good poem, in your opinion?

JF: Something of it has to stick in the mind - a line, an image or an idea. If you can still remember (something of) the poem a year or two after having read it, it was a successful piece of work.

RA: Can you describe how the internet has impacted your work? JF: From 1976 to 1996 I worked away at my various projects often without having even the tiniest outlet for them. Now I am able to self-publish my work at many different sites around the internet. Arts Professionals (as well as many ordinary members of the public) can quickly get in touch with me and things are certainly starting to click.

Just taking the music side of my output, performances have taken place in Australia, Venezuela, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Ireland (to my knowledge) since 2000 and I seem to link up with a valuable new contact regularly every few months.

RA: Where do you see yourself, creatively, in 5 years?

JF: I hope I am still driven to produce more work. Once the Jazz Symphony is finished, I hope to focus on my new novel Doctor Fish Indoor Triathlete Extraordinaire.

I also have some ideas for miniature compositions for piano solo and also for flute & piano and clarinet & piano.

I have considered turning Doctor Fish into an Opera once the novel is finished, but only half-heartedly. My real love is for instrumental small forces (chamber music).

RA: How do you feel the advent of blogging affected accessibility to creative outlets?

JF: Blogging is definitely a good idea. I have been involved with various different online diaries since before 2000.

At that stage they were mostly diaries/journals that sort of thing. Blogging seems to be much more wide-ranging.

It is important to the writer of a blog to receive feedback though. Prior to http://znethru.blog.co.uk/ where I am quite heavily involved now, I was using another facility and received precisely zero feedbacks to 25 well-crafted pieces of writing – this almost put me off for life!

RA: And finally, what do you want the world to know about Jonathan Socrates FeBland?

JF: That I only changed my name twice before it became what it is today!

Learn more about Jonathan FeBland, The Creative Explosion, at his website.

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