We create work in an environment that we can’t control. Surrendering to that is part of the creative process. It’s what helps make the art work.
When Jeff Buckley was doing the rounds of the New York bars and cafés, singing jazz standards, he found that songs that sounded fine in other cafés just didn’t work in one place. In that café they had him stand near the dishwasher. The machine hummed in B flat. When Buckley transposed songs to the same or complimentary key, it sounded better.
There’s a bootleg recording of his last show in Sydney where you can hear that he’s trying to do something similar with the air conditioner. You can find it on YouTube, and it’s possibly the only live recording of All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun.
When Jerry Lewis was working with Martin Scorsese on King of Comedy he suggested changing his characters name be Jerry. There were parts of the script that would be shot in the street. He knew people would approach him and if the character’s name was the same as his then he could work it into the scene.
When Andy Warhol decided to write a novel he carried a tape recorder around with him for an evening and had the tapes transcribed to make up A: a novel. The transcriptions came back and Warhol realised that the typists had misheard some of the conversations. Instead of correcting them, Warhol embraced it and left the ‘mistakes’ in the text. It’s highly experimental and there’s been no confirmed attempts to read the whole thing.
Work is never created in a vacuum. And if we try to do that, then that’s a mistake. The audience will never engage with the work in a vacuum. The book, or novel, or song, or film… is relative to everything around us. Sometimes that environment presents a problem.
It is worth finding a way to work with that environment, using it as an inspiring obstacle instead of fighting against it.