The elusive concept of creativity has fascinated me for some time now, and it still continues to do so. Regardless of our differing interests or occupations, creativity will always be an integral part of our experience as living, thinking beings. I guess it has a particularly strong grip on me as a musician and an apprentice composer: I often feel that I'm on the hunt for this mysterious creative force, much like Steve Zissou's quest for the Jaguar Shark of lore. Though I am not on a vengeful, destructive quest for my subject, I find that the closer I get to catching a glimpse of it, the more spellbound and inspired I become.
One conversation that my dear friend Thomas and I have had in the past deals with the notion of creativity as an act of discovery rather than direct creation. To borrow Mr. Richie's analogy, the process of writing a piece of music (or painting a picture, or writing a novel, or [insert creative act here]), is akin to shining a flashlight in the dark, illuminating objects,
items, and places that have been there all along, just waiting to be discovered. To put it another way: it is a bit like archaeology, and the archaeologist (composer) is carefully chiseling and excavating to uncover some relic that has been buried in time, unbeknownst to anyone in the present age. The artist's dedication and hard work yields a boon which he brings up to the surface to share with his fellow man. In this sense, he is not the originator of his find -- it existed long before he arrived -- but he has the unique responsibility of presenting it to all mankind as the one who discovered the buried treasure.
This interpretation of the creative act has heavily influenced my approach to the arts. It certainly creates its own series of questions regarding our capacity to act, think, will, and create, but I will discuss these (read: my) doubts later. In spite of my reservations, this viewpoint has oftentimes had a liberating effect on me: I can distinctly recall having this initial conversation with Thomas in the west-campus parking deck of Samford just days before my first major composition project was due. The pressure of deadlines and grades vs. creative freedom was building, and I was trying to construct an ending to a piece that was wide-open but due in a matter of hours. Following our discussion, I felt like a burden had been lifted -- I returned to the piece with an attitude of
finding the ending to the piece rather than
creating one. The piece, entitled
For Poets, was completed on time and was performed that spring by a piano trio of close friends, and my interest in composition grew quite rapidly as a result.
In the months that followed, an interesting situation presented itself: after a modestly-successful foray into "classical" composition, how did I follow it up? I had sketches and fragments of ideas, but nothing was taking shape quite like the piano trio had. I found myself trying to approach writing with some sort of preset formula to yield results, but to no avail. Disparate themes and chord progressions piled up on separate sheets of manuscript paper, each one set aside for a separate project. Fearing that the Muse had departed, I tried to recall what my thought-process was as I wrote a cohesive work, but I was astounded when I realized that my mind
could not go back there. For instance, if you held me at gunpoint and demanded me to recreate the firings and backfirings taking place in my brain as my hands wrote down measure 37's piano part, I couldn't give you an honest answer. I just couldn't do it. It was as if the mental-path that I followed when writing
For Poets had vanished at some point after I left it; or, to quote from Sting, one of "the banks of chaos in my mind" had frozen my account, leaving me locked out and possessing only the spare change of my last withdrawal as a souvenir.
I bring up this dilemma because I feel that it bolsters the aforementioned viewpoint a good bit. How so? Well, look at it this way: when you solve a math problem, there is a thoughtful, methodical, organized process that occurs in your mind. You would not typically come up with new ways of finding the perimeter of a square every time -- you would simply plug numbers into a given formula or method, and come up with an answer. This thought-process is something you can consciously return to, allowing you to analyze and isolate variables, correct them if you were wrong, and repeat in the future for the same results. In the creative process, the step-by-step formula gives way to freer forms of thought and action, making it far less likely to obtain the same product by repeating one method over and over again.
In the music I've written, I can go back to it and mark the chords up and down with corresponding Roman numerals
a la music theory; I can show you the over-arching formal structure; I can maybe even attempt to explain some of my emotive purpose behind it all -- but I simply cannot logically show you (or myself, for that matter)
exactly how those notes got there. In the end, it is a mystery, a vaguely-familiar state of mind that is perhaps akin to an out-of-body experience, or those moments when you're lying there somewhere in between consciousness and dream.
The strangeness of the creative state leads me to wonder
how in control we really are over our capacity to write, say, think, or do something new. I'm definitely not the first to question this creative capacity...let me share some examples from other artists:
"Creativity is a gift. It doesn’t come through if the air is cluttered." - John Lennon
In the case of the Beatles, John Lennon commented on how he oftentimes felt like an "FM Radio;" he was merely picking up songs on his dial and broadcasting them to those around him. When Paul McCartney penned "Yesterday," he had just awoken with a tune in his head intact from his dreams the night before. In fact, he was so certain that it was someone else's song, he almost didn't publish what went on to become the most-covered song in the history of pop music.
To go further back in time, how about the music written in a mere 24 days that became Handel's
Messiah? If the composer-at-the-helm went without sleep in order to finish his masterpiece, where did its coherent brilliance come from? According to various tales, Handel was often found in his chamber weeping as he wrote the piece...it was almost as though he was just as much (or more) of an
observer of this work as he was its composer.
As much as I would like to believe that it is in our power to create such powerful substance as music, I'm just not so sure that's the case (although I will discuss this vantage point in a future post). So if we're not the creators, who is? Where does such creative power come from? And how does it manifest itself in us, so that music
does come about through human vessels, though it may not have originated completely within our souls?
...perhaps there is a
Brooding Omnipresence at work here, as well.
On Tuesday, April 28th, the talented soprano Ursula Maria Kleinecke-Boyer will be presenting the world premiere of my setting of A Lecture Upon the Shadow by John Donne. Joining her will be Karen Cahill on flute, Ana Maria Maldonado on cello, and Tatiana Thibodeaux on piano. The concert, which is sponsored by The Musicians' Club of Pomona Valley, will be at 7:30 PM at Trinity United Methodist Church of Pomona, 676 North Gibbs Street, Pomona, CA. The concert is free and open to the public.
