Identity

In this category, I discuss all artistic identity related topics.

Read more about the article The Golden Circle Tool For Artists

The Golden Circle Tool For Artists

One of my true joys is translating great business concepts to the reality of being an artist. This blog is one of those creative endeavours that resulted in an empowering tool that can enrich the life of any musician. The aim of this article is to help you make better career decisions and connect more deeply with others by implementing the Golden Circle model by Simon Sinek. When utilised to its full potential, it will drastically transform your perspective on why you do what you do.  Are you ready for some mind-expansion? Are you ready to answer the question: why do you do make music?

The Source

For an initial understanding of the ‘Golden Circle’ concept, please watch this 5-minute video from Simon Sinek. In it, he uses a company – Apple – as an example, but trust me, this concept works just as well for artists. Just think differently 😉

What Is The Golden Circle?

The Golden Circle is nothing more than a tool. A way to discover and live a more fulfilled life. A life with deeper connections with other people – be it fellow musicians, fans, press or music industry professionals. Using the Golden Circle will make you think about your identity on a more fundamental level. It explores your “why”, “how” and “what” and aligns them more strongly together. It visualizes your actions, approach and inner drives and results in a simple and clear overview of who you are. It also puts the right thing at the centre of everything you do as an artist: your purpose. After all, it is why you do what you do that matters most. In the words of Simon Sinek: “Most of us live our lives by accident. Fulfilment comes when we live our lives on purpose. Knowing your WHY provides a filter through which you can make decisions, every day, to act with purpose.“

Now that this tool is explained in more detail, it is time to focus on each of the three segments and relate them to being an artist. Counter to Sinek’s approach though, let’s start with your “what”, since that is the most straight-forward one.

What’s Your What?

All artists know what they are. They describe their “what”, usually by focussing on four different elements of their identity:

  • What they are. “I am a singer and vocal teacher.” In other words, your career(s) and how you want to identify or label yourself.
  • What they do. “I sing, compose and perform.” These are your main activities as an artist and, as a human being, your behaviour in general.
  • What they create. “I create cinematic jazz, albums and teaching methods.” This is both your music description, the vehicles for your expression (songs, artwork), your connected products (album, EP, other merch) and services (workshops).
  • What they accomplish. “I won the Thelonious Monk Competition and headlined North Sea Jazz Festival.” These are usually your most important career highlights, like important reviews, awards, venues played and so on.

What you are, do, create and accomplish. Sounds like your standard biography, doesn’t it? However, as a modern-day artist the conventional is your starting point. The magic, individual expression and deeper connections with others lie beyond its borders. Authentic creation and communication need more than tangible labels; it needs your humanity. So, let’s take Simon’s extended hand and dive one level deeper into his Golden Circle model.

What’s Your How?

All artists can describe their “what”, however, fewer artists are able to express their “how”. Your “how” is what makes you more you. It is what sets you apart in the mind of others and is what gives your art and identity colour.

There is a lot that shapes your “how”. In short, your “how” is the approach to what you do. The way you do what you do. Let’s highlight here three ways to gain more clarity on your “how”.

The first I want to highlight are your core values. The motives underneath your clearly visible actions (your what). See part I of a blog post on this subject here. When formulated as guiding principles it becomes clear that living in line with your “how” takes discipline and effort.In my experience with coaching artists and guiding them in their process of discovering their core values. Sometimes, one of your values can be the main-direction for your purpose – the one that seems to tie them all together. It’s often an easier process to start with finding your “how” then your “why”.

Secondly, your artistic vision. Formulating your artistic vision is a great exercise for gaining clarity on what you are about as an artist. The famous example in the arts for describing your artistic vision is of course the creation of an art manifesto.

Thirdly, seeing beyond the genre description and understanding your type of music as a cultural phenonema. Jazz is more than music. It is a way of life built on principles such as openness, improvisation, and freedom. Approach Jazz – or any other genre for that matter – instead as a culture with its own principles and traditions. Which ones are important to you? What is Jazz to you? That is your third “how”.

What’s Your Why?

After the tangible “what” and the artistic, personal and spiritual “how” we end at the heart of the Golden Circle: your Why. This is where the gold is to be found (forgive me the pun). Why? (Okay, enough now). In my experience, most people struggle to articulate their purpose. Ask an artist, why they create art, and often the answer stays with words like passion and feeling compelled, or sentences such as “I don’t know, I just have too.” However, being an artist is such a journey of self-discovery that it simply is impossible at some point to not answer this mother of all questions.

So, what is your why? Your why is your purpose. It is that thing that drives and inspires you. It represents your dreams and goals. It is your shining North Star that guides you when times are dark. And, as Simon Sinek highlights in his video and book Start With Why: your “why” is what will draw people closer to you. People that can help you and artists that would love to create new music with you. But most of all, it will pinpoint you towards the people you can help and serve through your art: your audience. As Miles Davis said: Jazz is social music. Your “why” puts the social in your music and career. It is the change you’re trying to make in society at large and the individual listener at Smalls (jazz joke).

So, perhaps it is about time you answer that most dreaded question of all:

Why do you make music? And maybe in addition: why should anybody care?

What’s Your Why Statement?

Turn your answer into a Why Statement in which you mention your contribution and how that contribution serves a higher purpose – the impact. You can use three criteria for that:

  • No ‘what’;
  • Simplicity;
  • It serves a greater purpose than yourself.

For inspiration, below two great examples, and mine:

Simon Sinek: “To inspire people to do the things that inspire them so that, together, we can change our world.“

Spotify: “To inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to live of their art and a billion people to enjoy it and to be inspired by it.”

Pieter Schoonderwoerd: “To empower artists to create more great music and built thriving careers so that they can enrich the world with their gifts.“

Need more information? Read this article with great tips on formulating your very own why-statement.

Together these three elements look like

If the Golden Circle would be a tree

Instead of it being a circle, let’s try to picture the Golden Circle as a large apple tree, to stay close to Sinek’s original Apple example. Let’s start at the bottom.

The roots of the apple tree represent your DNA (upbringing and genetics), your culture, religion, society and so forth. They are the macro-factors that shape all of us and were out of our control at birth and the early stages of life. The trunk of the tree is your “why” (your purpose) out from which your “how” and “what” grow. The branches are your “how” (values, artistic vision) and the apples are your “what” (careers, activities, creations, accomplishment). So when your actions are aligned with your “why” and “how”, your apple tree doesn’t grow bananas. It means that your “what” will feel natural to you and to others.

Is your tree bearing the right fruits?

Using The Golden Circle

Some fundamental thoughts on utilising the Golden Circle to its utmost potential:

  • The more you live from your Why the more it becomes a habit.
  • Your Why is meaningless when it only lives on paper. It is when practised in reality that it becomes alive; you have to live your why.
  • Integrating the Golden Circle in your life & career will make you more YOU. Apply it to your everyday. Are you applying for a dream job? Does your CV start with why? And, does your album cover express your how’s?
  • Use your Golden circle like a compass when making important decisions – does option A bring you closer to your Why?
  • Choose environments (institutions, workplaces, colleagues, friends, relationships) that align with your Why & How. Ex. You are a rebel – your core values are an open mind, experiment, and unconventional. The phone rings and you get a job offer to teach at a highly conservative music school – would you take it? When analyzed through your How and Why: the impact of the environment will be that to perform at your best will be impossible… So, when you get offers that steer you away from your purpose, you can express that and communicate the environment you need: I say yes, but on the condition that: “I want to bring artistic experimentation into the curriculum.” If the necessary conditions (changes) are not possible, you can politely say no.

This is where the word credibility comes in and why artists worry about that. It takes years to built credibility (= trust) but a second to lose it. So, walk your talk. Integrate it into your daily life and test opportunities and important decisions again and again with your Golden Circle.

A Challenge For Deeper Connections

Challenge: if you feel inspired by this concept, commit to articulating your own Why, and please share it with others. Do you notice the difference?

Hopefully, this article inspires you to use the Golden Circle model and live according to it. Let it be a powerful tool for your career decisions, but also in how you describe yourself and your music. Be purposeful, personal and artistic.

Pieter Schoonderwoerd

Your Jazz Career

Three great resources on this topic are two books by Simon Sinek and the podcast:

In a previous blog post, I wrote passionately about how to create your very own art manifesto (your “how”). Read it here. Another tool for formulating your “how”, are two blog posts about discovering your core values. Read the first part here.

Find an empowering ebook on developing your artistic vision and writing a compelling artist biography here.

I’ve been coaching and educating jazz artists for years to achieve their creative and professional ambitions. If you are a high-performing artist and interested in transformative career coaching, you can read more about it here.

Be More Of You. Be Creative!

Continue ReadingThe Golden Circle Tool For Artists
Read more about the article A Value-driven Music Career (Part II)

A Value-driven Music Career (Part II)

This blog post is part two about discovering and practising your core values. They truly are the closest thing we all have as real superpowers. In part one, I discussed why your values matter and how you can discover your core values. In this article, now that you have formulated your core values, how do you let these values do their magic? How do you integrate them into your music and career? How do you activate your very own superpowers? Let’s find out by together analyzing two real-world artists: Pharoah Sanders and Vulfpeck.

A Value-driven Performance

One of the giants of the saxophone is tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. An artist heavily inspired by the avant-garde of the ’60s and spiritual artists such as his mentors Sun Ra and John Coltrane. If you are not familiar with the music of Pharoah, I recommend listening to his album Karma (1969). That says it all.

Now that I got you to listen to his music, which values come to mind? Which themes fuel it? Listen and feel the music. Let it speak to you and take a moment to write five words down that embody the spirit of the music. … Got them?

Karma album cover

Secondly, you can read this great article for a deeper understanding of who Pharoah Sanders is. Does this article change some of the values you wrote down?

All right, it’s time to share my personal analysis of what Pharoah represents in his core. In my humble opinion, the five core values of Pharoah are Spirituality, Freedom, Love, Openness and Healing. Do some of them match yours? If yes, then we’re on to something.

A Spiritual Performance

The next question is: how do you infuse your art (what you do) with your values? Pharoah did this beautifully in a performance I witnessed some years ago at Le Guess Who? Festival in 2017.

Pharoah believes in our cosmic unity, in how we are all connected by our shared humanity. Pharoah integrated his core spirituality (faith) on stage in his interaction with the audience. He asked all of us to sing a chant with him and the band: “The creator has a master plan/ Peace and happiness to all the land,”. Another time it was “The power of God.” Here is a video with a short impression of that performance. We all sang it together, like a mantra, and for a powerful moment, we were all one. One single entity connected through this shared experience. We all felt loved and healed by this transformative experience. An inspiring example of how to infuse your performance and interaction with your audience with more of you.

Thank you, Pharoah.

One final remark on this. This is a prime example of the difference between being authentic and using a gimmick. A gimmick is simply copying a technique you’ve seen someone else execute. It is ‘outer-based’ and not grounded on our own distinct worldview. If I would copy Pharoah on stage, it would be a gimmick, when Pharoah does this it is authentic. Why? Because it truly reflects who he is and what he believes in.

We all have to find our own ways of expressing ourselves. Let Pharoah inspire you to dig deeper and be creative in finding yours.

Value-driven Branding

Humans are complex. It is truly impossible to express your full personality to another person. Ask yourself, does your partner after 6 years of relationship truly know everything there is to know about you? Of course not. What does that mean for your promotion and other communications as a professional artist? It requires you to focus on the essentials. What are the core elements of who you are, your artistic vision and what you stand for? What fuels your music and all other communication with people? This is where your core values serve as a beacon of light. They create a greater sense of self as an artist. That is what authentic branding is: an infusing of your true self in all your communication with others. Easier said then done, you might think at this point. Time to analyse the second artist in a more broad manner: Vulfpeck. With Pharoah the focus was on his music (album Karma) and his performance. With Vulfpeck we’ll dive into promotion: sharing/spreading your music.

Vulfpeck: authentic branding done right

Please take time to analyse the below three media. Based upon this, what do you think the five core values of Vulfpeck are? Try to not read further, it is important that you start seeing how everything is connected yourself.

Branding is communicating your identity through words (cg. language – biography, song titles, newsletters) and image (cg. photo, video, artwork, style). All these aspects tell your audience a story about who your are. Let’s find out together what fuels Vulpecks story.

The Cory Values Of Vulfpeck

In the video, several elements come forward. You see them play live, the lyrics are – in my personal view of course – funny (humour), the video is retro, it is all of them together and you can sense they enjoy hanging-out (friendship, community) and, most importantly, the music is funky. Now check the other videos. Do you see how they are all connected? Or, as a marketeer would say, on brand?

Next up, their website. I laughed (humour) the first time I saw it! Perfect. Such a daring concept in these hyper-visual times: a purely text-based, old-school (retro) and minimal design. Minimal in a way, just like their music, that it only features the essentials. Does that make it funky too? You tell me. And what is the first content featured on the website? Correct, a live video.

You Are What You Write

And, finally, their biography on Allmusic. Humour is a subtle and personal thing, but I see it in the first sentence “Vulfpeck is a primarily instrumental, Los Angeles-based band inspired by the classic R&B rhythms recorded by the Funk Brothers, the Meters, and quite possibly Booker T. & the MG’s.” Of course, it also fueled their concept for Sleepify and track names as ‘Zzzzzzzzzz’. Personality and purpose infused marketing was seldom done better. How does your personality impact your language? How do your core values influence your ‘tone-of-voice’ and the words you use? What is your artistic vocabulary?

All Communication Is An Opportunity For Authentic Self-Expression

Below one more example of how they are truly authentic and business savvy in their communication. Check their Facebook Page for a second.

Do you see how the artwork/photo is again retro and funny? And did you notice that “Live Shows” is right next to their “Startpagina”? When your core values are crystal clear so become these kinds of decisions. When “Live” is what you are all about, then you will use every opportunity available to express that. The same with your other four values. It starts a natural process that will organically grow into a more distinct identity in everything you do.

Furthermore, besides it being consistent with them wanting to present themselves as a great live-act, it is also strategically smart. Why? Because most artists earn their income, and merchandise sales for that matter, with performing live. So the savvy artist finds a way to build their brand around being an amazing live-artist. Did you notice how all of their videos, photos and artwork inhabit these core values? It becomes a system, a way of doing things, that flows naturally out of you. All it needs to do that is clarity on your concept of Self.

Really? Can I infuse my values in Everything I Do?

For those doubters that still separate ‘the business side of music’ from their creativity and purpose, a final gift. And, by whom greater then Sun Ra himself as a extraterrestial example of making even the most mundane of all ‘business’ tools distinctly yours. Below Sun Ra’s business card. Who else then Sun Ra could have possibly come up with this and pull it off with credibility? If interested, read more on it here.

Hopefully, this article inspires you to implement your own values with more purpose in everything you do. They can be a force of creativity and more personal expression if you let them. It’s all up to you.

Pieter Schoonderwoerd

Your Jazz Career

A great resource on branding for artists, and everybody else that wants to create work that matters, is: Purple Cow – by Seth Godin. A book on how to be remarkable. Are you worth making a remark about?

Find an empowering ebook on developing your artistic vision and writing a compelling artist biography here.

I’ve been coaching and educating jazz artists for years to achieve their creative and professional ambitions. If you are a high-performing artist and interested in transformative career coaching, you can read more about it here.

Be More Of You. Be Creative!

Continue ReadingA Value-driven Music Career (Part II)
Read more about the article A Value-driven Music Career (part I)

A Value-driven Music Career (part I)

This blog post is about you activating your superpowers. You don’t need to swallow some external red pill Matrix-style or take one more masterclass. No, in fact, it’s all there already inside of you. Just quietly working its magic in the background. I’m talking about your values. Your very own, deeply personal, heartfelt, purposeful and homegrown values. Do you want to fill your career with more meaning? Then bring your values to the surface and build your music career firmly upon this shockproof inner compass. Ask yourself, what else will point you towards True North?

Are you ready? You might want to find your shovel because it will require you to dig deep.

Where Did I Lose The Way?

We all start with a deep love for music and a desire to honour it by trying our best to become better at it. To express the ideas that come to us as directly as possible. Then something happens that blows us off course.

One cause can be the mechanics of Higher Music Education: the institutionalising effect of going through a system of music education. A possible effect of evaluating/judging musical performances by students is that it creates musicians that are rooted in outer-referenced values. As a young musician we probably all asked our teachers:

“How was my performance?”
“Did you like what I just played?”
“How should I play this part?”

However, do this long enough and it creates a system of looking for approval outside of yourself. I’ve seen many artists lose touch with the sublime and joy of being a musician this way…

This article is about re-centrering yourself. The key to that is re-connecting yourself to your deepest values. Artistic expression and career development based upon your own rules and by your own definition of success, instead of those by others.

As Oscar Wilde said: “Be yourself: everybody else is already taken.“

Why Not Start With The Beginning?

Let’s start with providing some context and dust off this millennia-old Roman concept. What are values again? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, values are “the beliefs people have, especially about what is right and wrong and what is most important in life, that control their behaviour.” This means that values are not things we collect, they are a practice. They are things we do. You don’t have courage. You practice it. Every day a little. The same for values as freedom, compassion, generosity, wisdom, love or humility. They exist in our behaviour. The seed lies in our intentions, in our heart and mind, but it grows into a blooming flower in our actions. As the Stoic philosopher Seneca stated: “Works not words.” Living according to your deepest values is what constitutes personal integrity. It is what it means to live an authentic life.

So, how does this concept translate to the reality of being a professional musician?

Music Is An Expression Of Your Humanity

Herbie Hancock said about jazz: “The conduit is being human and manifesting that humanity in everything that you do.” (Source: National Geographic) In that way, jazz can be seen as an expression of our humanity. Ask yourself, without a firm belief in values as Equality and Freedom, would Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” or Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” exist? For them, striving for equal human rights naturally meant integrating these core values into their art. Could John Coltrane’s ‘Alabama’ or his seminal album A Love Supreme have been created without deepfelt principles as Hope, Love and Compassion? I don’t think so. In fact, those very principles are what makes art deeply human. It’s why certain songs and albums stand the test of time and others don’t. Classics in literature, standards in jazz, they all share a timeless quality based upon more than aesthetics and stylistic elements.

So what is music?
It is art.
It is spirit.
It is character. Your character.

And what shapes your character at its core? You guessed it.

Your authentic character – your human spirit expressed through creativity – is what will attract other people to you and your art. Your values are what resonates with people. Expressing them more clearly is the higher goal. Music is the tool you use as a note-smith to do that.

In Coltrane’s own words: “Music is an expression of higher ideals … brotherhood is there; and I believe with brotherhood, there would be no poverty … there would be no war … I know that there are bad forces, forces put here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be a force which is truly for good.”

Our Values Are Us

Our decisions and actions flow from our values and in this way our
values help to define us; they are part of our identity. Our exploration
and discovery of our principles is therefore a discovery of self. Your values are the foundation you built your career on. This insight prompted one of my favourite writers – David Foster Wallace – to say the following:

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.“

What do you choose to worship? On what foundation are you building your music career? What fuels your artistic fire?

Discovering Your Core Values

The question worth exploring for you is which values lay at your core as a human being? To answer this question, it’s good to keep in mind this advice from Scott Jeffrey:

“Values aren’t selected; they’re discovered. We don’t choose our values. Our values reveal themselves to us.”

That means your values are already there in your behaviour. In past choices, current loves, dreams dreamt and fears overcome. You just have to make them concrete by finding the right words. This is why I call our values our superpowers. When clear, they shine the light guiding your steps forward. Suddenly, seemingly difficult choices become crystal clear, of course, THIS is how I should interact with the audience on stage, this is how I sell my albums, formulate my contract, distribute my music and so on. When you know your values you can live in accord with them. They are like a beacon reminding you what is important to you. When in doubt about a decision, test it against your values.

It’s time. Are you ready for some deep self-exploration?

Three Ways To Discover Your Core Values

In my eBook Write Your Biography, I provide musicians with three ways to find their own personal values based upon a ‘whole-person’ approach. The goal is to find five core values that represent your full-personality. Remember: they don’t have to be sexy, they have to be you.

1) Your DNA
For starters, think about your family, culture, talents, spirituality, artistic taste, dreams, ambitions, and causes you care about. How do these make you the person you are? How did your parents raise you? Which moments
in your life did you learn from most? Which five words are at the essence of your personality? Write them down and integrate them into your bio either literally or in spirit.

2) Artists that inspire you
Analyze the story, message, feeling, and spirit of your favourite artists. Why do you love them? Are there themes that surface when you compare your favourite artists? What do you feel when listening to Lizz Wright or Pharoah Sanders? What fuels their art?

3) Your own music until now
Analyze your own work until this point. Which values do they express? Are they representative of who you are right now? If not, what do you need to change in your art to make it more YOU?

Don’t Evaluate And Create At The Same Time

Start out by a free-flow writing exercise. Don’t judge the words that come to mind. As a stream-of-consciousness exercise just write your thoughts down. Try to find the right words to describe your inner beliefs. A distinct set of values that truly represent you requires precision. Dig deep. Is Honesty the right word, or is it Integrity? Is it Friendship or Community? Is it Adventure or Curiosity?

In addition, think in different categories to avoid having too similar values from the same ‘domain’. As Scott Jeffrey writes: “If you have a group of values that include honesty, transparency, integrity, candour, directness, and truth, select a word that best represents the group.” You need contrast between your five core values for them to truly represent your full personality.

I. Can’t. Find. The. Right. Words. HELP!

I have been there, and so has every single person I’ve coached. Don’t worry. Finding the precise word that embodies your beliefs is hard work. Give it time. Be patient. Revisit them over the course of a few months and test them again and again. Do they still resonate and ignite your fire? Then you’re on to something. Polish them as if they are five rough diamonds. Because they really are.

Values Are Not Static

Values are not static. As you grow and develop as a human being, so do your values transform. Your five core values might be different a year from now. Designing your career from the inside-out is also a life-long process. Keep your inner compass pointing True North. Check-in upon your values from time to time. Are they still your most important principles on life, art and what your music is for?

Activate your own superpowers and create more great music! Looking forward to hearing it!

Upcoming: Part II

Please do and keep your eyes open for my next upcoming blog post A Value-driven Music Career (part II). Here I will illustrate how to use these values in your art and career design by analyzing purposeful artists like Christian Scott, Pharoah Sanders and Vulfpeck.

Pieter Schoonderwoerd

Your Jazz Career

Need some inspiration? Check this great article by Scott Jeffrey listing 200 values to expand your vocabulary. Do you need more exercises to pinpoint your exact five core values?
For seven inspiring exercises on finding your core values, please visit this website.

Great resources on living a value-based life and how to use these for your life- and career design are:

The Gifts of Imperfection – Brené Brown (values are a practice)
A Man’s Search For Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl (being proactive vs reactive)
Maria Popova on The Shortness of Life by Seneca (productivity vs presence)

Find an empowering ebook on developing your artistic vision and writing a compelling artist biography here.

I’ve been coaching and educating jazz artists for years to achieve their creative and professional ambitions. If you are a high-performing artist and interested in transformative career coaching, you can read more about it here.

Be More Of You. Be Creative!

Continue ReadingA Value-driven Music Career (part I)
Read more about the article Your Music Needs An Art Manifesto

Your Music Needs An Art Manifesto

This is not a blog post.

This is an invitation for an adventure in artistic expression. This is about you creating your own art manifesto. After all, to start a movement you first have to move yourself.

Is Something Missing?

Don’t you enjoy talking about your creative work?
Do you have trouble figuring out where to go artistically with your next album?
Does your artist biography read a tat dry and impersonal?
Does your grant application need a punch?
Did your last interview with that great jazz magazine miss artistic flavor?

There is a way to infuse your art and communication about it with more personality and purpose that’s not used in Jazz: the Art Manifesto. To see the first-ever art manifesto click on it. It truly still is worth the read!

Free Art Out Of Its Music Box

As an artist, you express your humanity through your chosen medium; music. You work relentlessly on further mastering your craft to convey your message ever more eloquently, fluently, and with increasing precision. You strive for that state of flow where you seem nothing more than a humble vessel for the Muses. You create great art, outspoken, personal, and deeply human. Great! So, what’s next?

After creating art comes spreading your art. You need to communicate it to others using other media. You will have to write and speak about your art. In my experience though, few musicians stay artists when they start typing. They lock up their inner poet and unleash their inner – often even outsourced – marketing manager. Not only the produced content suffers from this, but also the artist herself will enjoy the process of communicating about her art less.

Sounds familiar? Then ask yourself: why does your art stop with music? Why doesn’t it include language? Does your artistry have limits? Why not set your art free beyond music and let it breathe life into all your communication with others?

This blog post is a battle cry for your inner poet. Karl Marx talked about ‘the poetry of the revolution’ – the forms and the phrases that would make it sing – I want you to find the ‘poetry of your music’. Your own specific, personal, colorful, purposeful, quirky, and inflammatory poetry. We’re talking about artistic vocabulary. Purposeful language that expresses your artistic vision, personality, and your purpose with your art.

Are you with me?

What Is An Art Manifesto?

An art manifesto is a statement of your artistic vision. It is a core set of beliefs about art. It is a battle cry for your inner artist. It spells out what you stand for. It’s what you want to change in the world through your art. It holds the conviction of artists’ ideas and the power to spread them. An art manifesto has two main goals. The first is to define and criticize a paradigm in contemporary art or culture; the second is to define a set of aesthetic values to counter this paradigm.

An Unfamiliar Artform

Art manifestos are mainly associated with fine arts and movements like Surrealism, Dadaism, or Futurism. Few musicians know that from 1910 till now, also many composers published manifestos of their own. From Classical Music (Pratella), Punk (Bikini Kill), Indie-Pop (The Knife), Ambient Music (Brian Eno), Black-Metal (Liturgy) to Funk (Mono Neon). So, you might ask, what about Jazz? Well, it’s rare, but We Insist recently published a powerful manifesto on Jazz and its revolutionary role in society. A quote: “The music of this country, Jazz, narrates this struggle for justice and Black Liberation throughout the United States and the Global South. By this definition, Jazz is an intrinsically collaborative revolutionary act and discourse. There is currently little respect for this revolutionary orientation in academic jazz programs or spaces, the record industry, media, or arts organizations.“

The act of thinking about your art and its possible meaning of transformation for others is essential if you want your art to connect. It is essential if you want to bring about change: be it emotional, spiritual, political, societal, physical, or musical. Therefore, this article is a call-to-action to add your revolutionary voice to the choir and sing your gospel of Love and Change. You just still have to write its text.

Below, another example by Funk artist and bassist Mono Neon.

Art Manifesto

Steal Like An Artist

Some more inspiring examples for further exploration are:

  • The Art of Noise (1913, Russolo). Basically, the foundation for experimental electronic music before it was even invented. A quote: “We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.“
  • The Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1911, Busoni).
  • The Stuckist Manifesto (1999): “Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist. Stuckism is the quest for authenticity. By removing the mask of cleverness and admitting where we are, the Stuckist allows him/herself uncensored expression. Painting is the medium of self-discovery. It engages the person fully with a process of action, emotion, thought and vision, revealing all of these with intimate and unforgiving breadth and detail.”

Why Write One Yourself?

When you create your own art manifesto you can clarify your beliefs about music and where you stand. It gives words to the intentions behind your art. Instincts, feelings, intentions, values, even your whole identity can stay vague when not concisely described in words. The right words that make your text sing. The exercise of writing it will challenge your own assumptions and force you to formulate your artistic position in the current Zeitgeist. If you let it, it can be a daily reminder about what art is all about for you. In addition, learning how to explain your creative motives can be a useful skill when promoting yourself.

The Art Of Manifestoing

We all have heard of Marx & Engels and their Communist Manifesto, but it wasn’t until ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism‘ was splashed on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909 that the arts embraced this new medium. It was the beginning of ‘manifestoing’. Every serious artist needed a manifesto. Art didn’t need a gallery, it needed a movement. It was a chance to take a stand, burn the tradition and proclaim your art as the phoenix rising from the ashes of meaningless, unreal, and dead art.

How do you write a manifesto?

To manifesto is to perform. I recommend any artist to see this as an extension of their artistic expression; as a piece of art in itself. There is therefore not one way of creating your art manifesto. There are countless variations, but some essential elements can be named.

Manifestos typically consist of two parts: a poetic battle cry that puts your vision in words and rallies the troops, and a list of principles formulated as statements. The introduction of The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, the frontrunner of the Avant-Garde movement in Europe, still speaks to my heart – and the hearts of many – a century later:

“It is from Italy that we hurl at the whole world this utterly violent, inflammatory manifesto of ours, with which we today are founding ‘Futurism’ because we wish to free our country from the stinking canker of its professors, archaeologists, tour guides and antiquarians. For far too long Italy has been a marketplace for junk dealers. We want our country free from the endless number of museums that everywhere cover her like countless graveyards. Museums, graveyards! … They’re the same thing, really, because of their grim profusion of corpses that no one remembers.”

How is that for a start? It clearly shows the ‘poetry of the revolution’ in action.

Your Manifesto Needs Statements

Your principles about music are the ‘policies’ that a political manifesto would describe. In these principles, you lay out the groundwork of your vision on music (and its role in society). Just like the ten commandments in the Bible. To illustrate the second part – principles – below you’ll find the first four principles from the “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians” (1910, Pratella):

  1. “To convince young composers to desert schools, conservatories and musical academies, and to consider free study as the only means of regeneration.
  2. To combat the venal and ignorant critics with assiduous contempt, liberating the public from the pernicious effects of their writings.
  3. To found with this aim in view a musical review that will be independent and resolutely opposed to the criteria of conservatory professors and to those of the debased public.
  4. To abstain from participating in any competition with the customary closed envelopes and related admission charges, denouncing all mystifications publicly, and unmasking the incompetence of juries, which are generally composed of fools and impotents.”

There still is truth in these statements today about Higher Music Education conserving tradition instead of moving music and individual expression forward. Or the role of music critics that sometimes just don’t get the music or even times we live in because they’re stuck in an almost religiously fanatic and narrow definition of what ‘real’ jazz is.

Your Kind Of Manifesto

Traditionally, the success of an art manifesto depended on its violence and its precision (l’accusation précise, l’insulte bien définie) combined with humor and theatrics. It requires style, courage and a rebellious spirit. You cannot be generic and safe. Furthermore, you will have to find a balance in defining yourself against (mainstream, predecessors) and in defining yourself for. A bit like long live and down with.

My tips for writing your own, besides reading inspiring examples, is to have clarity on your values. Are you all about freedom, spirituality, adventure, and curiosity? Infuse your art manifesto with them. Ask yourself what these values mean for your live performance, your compositions, your collaborations, band interplay, or album artwork. Below an example of Wynton Marsalis:

“Jazz calls us to engage with our national identity. It gives expression to the beauty of democracy and of personal freedom and of choosing to embrace the humanity of all types of people. It really is what American democracy is supposed to be.“

I think his ‘mission statement’ comes alive in his music and in how he speaks about it on stage and in the media. Wynton clearly tries to embody his values in his art.

Make It Personal

Make it personal. Make it reflect who you are and what your art is all about. Yes, ‘steal like an artist’ as Austin Kleon would say, but do it your way. And be pppppppplayful, play with words like with notes. Imagine a different future, a different sound, free of conventions and ego. Let your music and your manifesto take you forward. Let it never be finished and never be perfect. Create your art manifesto NOW!

Jazz or the revolution, that is the question.

Pieter Schoonderwoerd

Your Jazz Career

A great resource on Art Manifestos is the book: “100 Artist’s Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists” selected by Alex Danchev.

Find an empowering ebook on developing your artistic vision and writing a compelling artist biography here.

I’ve been coaching and educating jazz artists for years to achieve their creative and professional ambitions. If you are a high-performing artist and interested in transformative career coaching, you can read more about it here.

Be More Of You. Be Creative!

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