The African Enterprise (Creator Convention, Beethoven, Chanel N°5, Instant Replay.)
Hi friends,
Happy New Month.
A lot has been said about the origins of April fool's day, but one of the most fascinating is that it was once used as a day to mock people who celebrated New Year's eve on days other than January 1st. At the time, most European towns celebrated New year's day on 25th March, with celebrations ending on the 1st of April. While this may not have been the actual reason for the prank day, I'm sure it was quite an ordeal.
Over the last while, I’ve been thinking about conventions in creative work, and how creators can choose to ignore them to better personalize their work. It's the dream of every creator to succeed in distributing their work, so there's a craving for best practices. While there may be best practices that could help in making and distributing creative work, how and when do artists begin to give themselves the freedom to let loose?
This bias for convention was the case even in seventeenth-century french playwriting. Playwriters were inclined to follow Aristotle's three dramatic unities: a play should focus on one main plot, take place in a single location, and within a single day. But this convention was intentionally ignored by Shakespeare hence Hamlet leaves Denmark for England in one act and returns several weeks later in the next act.
So, what does adopting a similar posture mean for creators today? Let me know what you think. I'm counting on your feedback.
Coolest things I learned this week
Muss es Sein? Es Muss Sein.
There is one question that always lingers at the back of the minds of creators: How will my work be received? Even for the most adept of them, and the most serial, it’s a question that, inevitably, is being asked constantly through the process.
In Runaway species, David Eagleman and Anthony Brandtwrite that "new work is evaluated in a cultural context, so the reception of any invention depends on what's come before and how close or far it is from that lineage." And how we receive any new work or invention is based on a decision to either "cleave tightly to community standard or wander further afield; we see the sweet spot between familiarity and novelty."
An example of an audience pouring cold water on a new, original work is Ludwig van Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. In 1826, already deaf, he composed Grosse Fuge - The Great Fuge. He was nervous about how the audience would perceive a movement to the end of a full-length quartet that was adventurous, new, so complex that one critic described it as " incomprehensible as Chinese" and " a confusion of Babel." Beethoven was so disappointed by the reception that he called the audience in Vienna "cattle and asses."
So how do contemporary creators answer a question that even Beethoven struggled with? First, it is worth noting that this Gross Fuge is now regarded as one of his greatest achievements. So, over time, perhaps what is acceptable in the cultural context changed a fair bit; but at the time, he was advised to make a new finale and he did.
But in the replacement work, which premiered in 1828, he posed what I would take as an answer to this question in creation.
In the 16th string quartet, which I'm listening to right now despite having no deference for Classical Music, Beethoven asked the question:
Muss es Sein? (Must it be?)
And with a faster main theme of the movement, he answered:
Es Muss Sein. (It must be!")
The whole movement is titled: "Der Schwer gefabte entschulb" (The Difficult Decision).
This question and the answer have been said to express the ‘sense of inevitability’ that characterizes his style of creation.
Perhaps, a lesson there is that at the end of the day, no matter how far afield an idea or a creation may be at any time, the world may as well be headed in that direction. If you have enough conviction to believe it must be, then it must be. I wrote about the importance of conviction in making this all-important decision.
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Chanel N°5
One of the most striking features of the Chanel brand is the slogan "To be irreplaceable, one must be different." Nothing exemplifies this slogan like the N°5 perfume which is still one of the world's most iconic and popular perfumes despite being more than 90 years old.
How the perfume was brought to life is as beguiling as the perfume (read Price!) itself.
In 1920, perfume designer Ernest Beaux mixed dozens of natural essences. Rose, Jasmine, Bergamot, Lemon, vanilla, Sandalwood, and synthetic scents called aldehydes, were all parts of the hodgepodge Ernest Beaux put together. He arranged numbered bottles with different recipes and asked Coco Chanel to pick her favorite. After sampling all of them, she chose the fifth bottle - and Voila!, the world's most popular perfume.
While making the so-called hodgepodge was harder than the stories make it seem, the process of blending that has produced a perfume still popular 90 years later lacks no lustre.
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Instant Replay
As a huge sports fan, I cannot imagine life without instant replay. Maybe those who had to watch games in periods before instant replay never had distractions like the mobile phone that could cost the opportunity to witness a defining passage of play.
I remember the last time my team, Manchester United, last won anything - the Europa League final (Yes, I remember!). Before Mkhitaryan scored, I stepped out to take a call but came back to Jubilant scenes. It was a sucker punch to miss such a decisive moment in a huge game, but thanks to instant replay, I saw that passage of play, and I saw how Mkhi turned his body to guide the ball into the net.
This experience-saver didn't always exist. At one point, it was impossible to break continuous action like live sports programs because videotape equipment was difficult to use.
But at one Army-Navy football game in 1963, the game broadcast director Tony Verna broke temporal flow and invented instant replay. He first figured out a way to put audio markers on the tape so he could covertly cue the start of each play from the studio. Doing this alone took several dozen tries.
Finally, after a key score by Army in the fourth quarter of the game, Verna rewound the tape to the correct spot and replayed the touchdown on live TV for the first time ever.
As the touchdown was replaying Live, the television announcer had to explain "This is not live! Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!" What a surprise it must have been for the people watching. Even more so because Tony Verna never spilled that he was going to try instant replay and only told his crew that morning because he was nervous he could screw up a game trying something new.
That’s it for this week.
If you have any thoughts or questions, hit reply and we can have a chat. And if you enjoyed it, share it with friends.
Till next week,
Kelvin