This is RPG-ology #76: Derivative, for March 2024.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Derivative, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
I sit by the computer unwinding before bed, strains of Dvorak washing through me. Sometimes when music is playing, I hear the intricate interrelationships, the way it is structured in fundamental ways. I can hear the instrumentation in detail, the interplay of rhythms and counterparts, even little things like the individual use of the left and right hands on the piano keyboard. I don’t always hear it; sometimes I just hear a song. But as the select Slavonian Dances end and the CD returns to the first movement of The New World Symphony, I realize that if I kept listening tonight I could learn to write a symphony which, although constructed of original themes, had all the flavor and depth and interest of Dvorak’s Ninth. Well, I think it would, anyway. But then, it would be terribly derivative; anyone with any sense of music would recognize the influences. And then I wonder, can anything be both derivative and truly great at the same time? And before I respond with of course not, my mind turns to John Williams.
I am not intending to insult John Williams. Somewhere here I have a symphonic recording of his Star Wars music, and if I’m not mistaken the Indiana Jones theme played by my pager is one of his. But I have more than once heard it said by film directors that Williams is brilliant for this reason: you can pick any piece of music and tell him that you want something for a particular scene that has that same feeling, and he will produce for you an original work that conveys the same emotion and presence and excitement as the sample. Every once in a while as I listen to his work, I hear echoes of great symphonies and ballets and other orchestral works of the masters of earlier generations, and I wonder whether I have recognized the piece he was using for his inspiration. I have even wondered whether, if I knew what works were the samples given him, I could see how he does it, how he derives his original work from that.
Decades ago I had the good fortune to sing in a choir conducted by Abraham Kaplan, and to hear him speak of his life and his thoughts. Kaplan is perhaps one of the lesser known great musicians of the past century. He was the director of choral music at Julliard, and the warm-up conductor for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra–that is, whenever the orchestra was going to be working with a guest conductor, he would spend some time introducing them to the nuances of style they should expect. Each summer, he and I spent one week at the same music camp, at the end of which he would conduct the camp chorus and orchestra in a concert of some major work–Mozart’s Requiem, Haydn’s Creation, and Mendelsohn’s Elijah are the three I recall. But, as I say, he also took time during the week to tell us something of himself.
Thus I heard him relating thoughts about the song cycle he composed, shortly after it was published. He told of his fear. As soon as he had accepted the invitation to write something, he realized that with his extensive knowledge of the repertoire it would be very difficult for him not to copy something he knew, even if only unconsciously. Thus in writing his first piece, So the Sun Stood Still, he set it in the very unusual and somewhat awkward seven-four time–creating a very choppy sound. But he relaxed, and by the time he penned Sing Unto the Lord he permitted his setting to be influenced by music he knew.
Inspiration, influence, homage, plagiarism, stolen, parodied, copied, variations, based, borrowed–in one way or another, each of these words suggests that our ideas come from somewhere–or someone–else. In a sense, they must. Although we long ago took issue with Hume’s assertion that we cannot create anything that is not comprised of pieces of things we know, there is a sense in which our experience limits us. Very little of what we create is truly original; even the original bits are supported by the work of others. Kaplan did not reinvent music from the ground up; neither did Dvorak. Even Bach, on whose work we base most of what we call music theory, the so-called rules of construction, built on Praetorius and others before him.
More than one critic has praised Multiverser for being something new and different. Breton Stron called it “unlike anything ever made”, echoing earlier assertions that it was “unlike anything I’ve seen before” from Justin Bacon. Yet Justin Bacon also said he saw the influences of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Fudge. I could name other influences–the single-roll hit and damage system, although unique in its application, was suggested by a similar system in the Zebulon’s Guide to the Galaxy supplement for Star Frontiers; and believe it or not, the notion that magic works by the expectations of the user owes something to a treatise on tort law I wrote in the mid eighties. Something old, something new, something borrowed–it sounds like a recipe for creativity. Arguably, one cannot create something entirely new without starting from the work of others; and if you strive for it to be best, you will sometimes have to admit that someone has already done something good from which you have learned to do better.
That symphony which we call The New World Symphony is properly called Symphony Number Nine in E-Minor: From the New World. Dvorak visited America, traveling to many places listening to the music we sang. He did not write any of the themes in his work; rather, he took the melodies of our Appalachian folk songs and spirituals and hymns and drinking songs, and built his symphony around those ideas. So in a sense, the great work itself is derivative–it takes the ideas of others and builds on them with the genius that brings them together.
Don’t be afraid to draw ideas from others. Not all of the great ideas nor even all of the necessary ideas for your game or your world or your character will be your own. You will build the best creations by drawing the best bits from the best sources, and hopefully bringing to it some few ideas which make it complete and, in some sense, new. Derivative may be an ugly word in the world of creativity, but in truth all of our work bears something of that stain and something of that glory. It is all derived from the work of others through the genius of our own creative redaction. That is a necessary part of the process.
[Next week, something different.]
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