Who are the most creative people you can think of? What makes them creative? Where does that creativity come from? Does their creativity always translate into success? Is it possible that creativity exists in species other than homo sapiens? Fun questions.
Since music is a big part of my life, I’ll start my discussion of creativity by mentioning some fantastic talent I’ve personally met or played with: Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Fiedler, Luciano Pavarotti, Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Seiji Ozawa, Neville Mariner, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Andre Watts, Art Linkletter and Michael Tilson Thomas. I’ve also met, studied or played with an enormous number of very creative musicians with names you may not recognize yet who have contributed greatly to our high quality musical culture in the United States and abroad. Names like Paul Rolland, Adolf Bruk, Barbara Rahm, Homer Schmidt, Verne Sellin, Jim Shallenberger, Rufus Olivier, Beulah Logan, Eric Maddox and Joe Gold. Each of these enormously talented and creative people have taken music to a high level.
I’ll speak of them all in the present tense even though some are deceased, since their legacy lives on in the people they have touched with their music. Most of the performers I have mentioned are primarily “recreative” artists. They take scores written by others and make something special from what is printed on the page. The composers listed have written original compositions or have made unique arrangements of work done by others.
All of the people I’ve mentioned seem to have a spark in them which surpasses the ordinary. They are passionate about the hard work required to attain a super high level of artistic quality. These artists take what could be ordinary and mould it into something very special by adding a tone color, phrasing, tempo change or some other unique character to what is printed on the page. They look at those black dots in a distinctive way and translate them into sounds such that an attentive blindfolded listener could discern which artist is performing. That is one form of creativity.
Another form of creativity comes from the act of arranging musical components in ways which never existed before. Composers such as Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok, Stravinsky, Bob Hughes, and Javier Castillo (and of course many others) used the base of their musical training and expanded on it to create combinations of sounds never heard before. Their creativity seems to have built on the traditions established before them of what sounded good generally pleasing to the ear. Each composer in their own time took what might have sounded weird and created new patterns which ultimately sound tame today after many repetitions. Riots ensued when Stravinsky premiered the Rite of Spring under the baton of Pierre Monteaux in Paris. Now that work is a classic.
So where does this creative genius come from? I would surmise that in most cases it came from hard work and a lot of trial and error. As a boy, I used to spend hours at the piano or violin trying different combinations to see what they sounded like. Every once in a while, an accident would happen which sounded really cool. That moment of inspiration seemed to come from “nowhere”. The trick was to capture and repeat the accidental discovery. It is a little like the scientific method. One hypothesizes an outcome and devises tests to repeat the same result in subsequent trials. To be creative, the random accident must have a solid basis on which to build, otherwise the subsequent re-creation of the event would be virtually impossible to replicate. That is why a monkey could not write an Encyclopedia. The result is too far removed from the base experience of a monkey. On the other hand, Stravinsky, whom I met in 1970, had a terrific musical knowledge and arranged the notes in patterns which could be recognized and readily repeated by others.
Creativity translates into success only when the creative work is communicated to others and can be replicated. An example would be Albert Einstein, who perhaps was the most creative scientist of the last century. His work would not have been at all successful had he not had the publication of his general and special theories of relativity reviewed by his peers. Some very creative boy scouts did art work using unusual materials in the Sierra Nevada but their work was not recognized because it was put together with materials found in nature. Their work was both impossible to replicate and short lived. Sand sculpture is one such format taking enormous creativity, but which is temporary. Music has the same problem. Once the sound is made, it vanishes. Recordings attempt to preserve such sounds, but they fail to exactly replicate the live experience.
I have written some music which uses unusual combinations. Who knows whether it will even be performed. The first page of the Score is shown here:
Is it creative? Perhaps. No one has put the notes in that combination ever before. Is it recognized? No. Was it fun to do? Of course!
©Frank Bliss 2008 All rights reserved
February, 2008
