Losing Your Voice (And Not Wanting to Find It Again)

In my creative writing class last semester, we often talked about developing one's voice. The mission was to find a unique style, a single patented window on the world that would be identifiable in everything one wrote.  Looking at an artist's aesthetic as something that is meant to be narrowed and refined and distilled until nothing else is like it seems to be the prevailing view in our culture; we think of Monet holed up at Giverny (while his country was engulfed in World War I) or Thoreau scribbling in his cabin (a brisk walk from Concord), honing their talents, divining inspirations like biblical prophets.

 I think there is much to be said for this approach, but of course nothing happens in a vacuum. In addition, there is also something to be said to trying to let go of an accepted, comfortable notion of what one's voice is. Speaking with his first cousin once-removed Ira Glass, composer Phillip Glass (whose 75th birthday was this past Tuesday) said that he seeks to lose the voice he has made for himself—having developed an identifiable, trademark Phillip Glass style, he now tries to sound less and less like Phillip Glass. “It's not how do you find your voice but how to get rid of it,” he said. “Getting the voice isn't hard, it's getting rid of the damn thing.”

Glass described his movement from a style he was initially drawn to—minimalism, a style that was partly a rebellion against the modernist tradition dominating at the time—to something new, pulled by his desire to expand, not define, his voice.

I learned that the only hope of shaking free of your own description of music was to place yourself in such an untenable position that you had to figure out something new ... Had I started perhaps with the romantic music I would've ended up writing minimal music. But I started writing minimal music, so I end up writing romantic music. Basically, whatever point I started was, I left that point.

And perhaps, it is really even appropriate to speak of one's voice as something that is identifiable in one's entire body of work? Voice, perhaps, is a term better suited for describing the character of the author that comes through in a single piece. Compare Beethoven's First Symphony to the bizarre, dissonant scherzos of his later career and try to locate the voice that was the same in both periods. You might find something to link them, but maybe it is more helpful to talk about what changed.