One of the major problems everyone has, but especially found in young artists, is a lack of respect for simplicity. Simplicity’s complexity is not perceived: simplicity is beguiling because, in truth, there is no such thing as true simplicity in the arts. In writing, simplicity is used to refer to writers who use a smaller lexicon, a subset of the language’s grammar and a subset of themes. Yet amongst these writers there are still to be found great writers and poor writers for it is the use one makes of one’s tools that defines the quality of one’s art. Of course, a great artist using more sophisticated tools can produce more interesting works, but first one must gain mastery of one’s material. To gain this mastery requires a level of dedication few people ever muster in their lives.
In drumming, simple is used to describe music with less complex beats and music that is slower in tempo, but this disparagement of such music is based on forgetting so many other factors: precision of timing, precision of dynamics and so on. Generally the drummers who talk a great deal about disliking music that isn’t technical have little to no technique at all: all they understand is hitting many drums and hitting them quickly. They seldom hit them well, though.
Indeed, Thelonius Monk, a truly great musician, once said the wisest words of all:
Simple ain’t easy.1
These thoughts really are even more general as they describe one of the essential balance points in human life: the balance between the range of our experiences and the depth of them. As a musician, being able to play many beats is useless if one plays none of them well. As a writer, one generally does better to reread the same books many times than to read many books once. As a person, having seen many things is worthless if one has not understood at all those things one has seen.
Our disrespect for simplicity is generally a piece of confusion and ignorance.
- Thelonious Monk↩