Last week, I went to a dress rehearsal for Enno Poppe’s musical composition Strom. The piece sounded like an orchestra tuning its strings, or a child’s first concert: discordant, uncomfortable, and strange. (Listen to a small sample of it here.)
Poppe created the piece by stretching single intervals — the difference between a note and the one next to it — into multiple sub-intervals and having instruments playing in different tempos, all at the same time. The outcome was noise, but the process? Extremely intentional.
Doing something intentionally can be really challenging. Sure, you may think that kids’ art is simple, but have you ever tried emulating it? Or made ugly art? There is so much value in the paying attention, like pulling something apart to see how it’s made.
Sometimes, the process is the most important aspect. The outcome can be made more interesting by the process, and in fact be defined by it. And even if the outcome is a dud, often you’ll learn a lot during the process.