The Creative Map
 I was listening to some Vaughan Williams that V had put on the cd player. The fifth, I think it was, and I was noticing how often it reminded me of 'The Lark Ascending' - written som twenty years earlier in his career. I got to thinking how much easier it is earlier in one's creative life to produce something new and original.

The more work one produces, the more one maps the area inhabited by one's creativity. Even if one constantly pushes the borders outwards, there will always remain the area within which ones ideas lie - and the works one makes from those ideas will necessarily sit closer and closer together. 

Is this why rock stars look at writing opera or symphonies? Why painters write novels, why sculptors direct plays - to push those borders farther still?

When I began writing songs they were in a very gentle folk idiom, and over time they pushed out to colonise rock and to a degree, jazz/blues. They thrived in the no-mans'-land that lies beyond and around all of those. Once in a while I write something that I feel occupies a space all its own, but very often I can look at a new song and tell you who its closest neighbours are.

Of course unless one actually says everything there is to say in a song, there is usually good reason to revisit a subject over the years and find new things to say - or new ways to say it. That's fine - sometimes I feel I've said things better second time round, perhaps because I've had more experience to bring to the situation.

I still live in hope of finding that virgin field into which I can plump down a brand new song that has no close neighbours or immediate predecessors at all. Even a few hundred songs in, that can still happen...

So Vaughan Williams revisited some of the themes and ideas in his sublime 'Lark', discernible in his later symphony. Not self-plagiarism, just... looking again with older and perhaps wiser eyes at what one said then, and making a few further comments?