Creativity Breeds Creativity



Sometimes creativity is like a
hidden staircase.



Last week, I finished a theater piece for woodwind quintet.  At times during the process of composing it, I struggled with the idea that being creative means not being responsible or dependable.  I have this idea in my head that one can potentially lose oneself in creative pursuits -- that giving in too much to creativity can lead one far from "normal" society.  I know this is a ridiculous thing for a composer to believe, but since I was raised with the idea that it's very important to be a responsible, mature person, it's a challenge when creativity seems to threaten that.

I'm probably a bit more conscientious than necessary most of the time.  Truth be told, I'm not at risk for being labeled unreliable by anyone who knows me.  When I was in the midst of this woodwind quintet piece and I felt that I was limiting myself, caging in what I allowed myself to create, I made a different decision than what I have sometimes made.  I leapt over the precipice of creativity without worrying about any beliefs that might tether me in some imaginary place of safety.

Something happened.  Not only am I very satisfied with the piece I just completed, but in the past few days, I composed a set of improvisatory miniatures.  I just followed a little germ of inspiration and allowed my creativity to be important.  I've also started formulating a plan to find or assemble an ensemble in Fort Worth, I'm continuing to move forward with a libretto for a first opera, and I've begun to assemble some writing for self-publication.  I also started a new blog a couple of weeks back to articulate some thoughts about spirituality.  And all of these projects are stimulating and exciting.

Fully claiming the identity of creator disallows feeble excuses and supercharges intention.  Instead of complaining that a certain situation doesn't exist or may be difficult to find, I'm realizing (again) that I'm responsible for creating the situations I want in my life.  And being creative with one thing has sparked my creativity across the board.  I haven't heard any reports that I've become unreliable or irresponsible.  What I am in this space is more reliable and responsible to myself.  I know that there will be challenges at some point, but it's always easier to return to something once I know what it feels like.

Expert Opinions

In a recent discussion among a group of professional musicians and artists, I was stuck by the comment, We're all experts at something...  It would probably be an accurate statement in any group, but it's quite different from a phrase often used by one of the leaders in another group with which I worked: None of us here is an expert...  I think these two very different perspectives open up possibilities for very different results.

The word "expert" has actually become suspiciously uninformative.  According to Tim Ferris, you can legitimately call yourself an expert if you've read the three top-selling books on a topic.  Perhaps in some situations that's enough, but it isn't always sufficient for me to trust my knowledge of a subject.  I am much more confident claiming to be an expert in the field of music, because I've been doing that for over 30 years.  I guess from my perspective, experience has something to do with the definition of an expert.  There are a few other niches that I feel qualified to call myself an expert as well, but there are also other people from whom I could learn a thing or two.  Even within the broad field of music, there are areas that I don't consider myself expert, like playing bassoon or crafting a violin.  So whether one is legitimately qualified as an expert sometimes depends on the context as well.

For someone to state, "None of us is an expert here," is intended to open up creative and full participation from everyone present.  If no one is an expert, then everyone's opinion is equally valid.  If no one is an expert, then no one can pass judgment on the ideas that are shared.  But if no one is an expert, then everything shared becomes reduced to opinion and decisions get made based on the most powerful personalities rather than the most accurate data.  If no one is an expert, then it actually devalues the collective experiences of the group. This is a great way to preserve the status quo, but not a great way to move forward and grow.

"We are all experts at something," is equally intended to encourage creative and full participation from everyone present, except with a bit more wisdom and insight thrown into the mix.  It begs the question, "What is my area of expertise?  What do I know more about than most people here?"  It means that everyone has something to offer, but it also means that everyone has something to learn.  You are an expert at something, and everyone else here is an expert at something.  No one is better than anyone else in that case.  Everyone simply has something different to bring to the table.

I'm not trying to hide which perspective I respect more.  The most productive, honest, and healthy situation I can imagine for a group is one in which everyone's expertise is acknowledged and valued.  In assembling a group for a special project, it makes sense to bring together people that have different pockets of expertise that are important to the task.  This is obviously more valuable than just a group of willing people without a clue. 

The trick is recognizing one's own strengths and weaknesses and being willing to bring both forward.  Some people don't want to bring their strengths to the foreground because they want to be modest or humble, or they think that their ideas will be shot down, or they doubt the value of their own experience.  Others live under the impression that they don't actually have any weaknesses, that there is nothing they need to learn and no task that someone else could do better.  Both are equally dysfunctional.  As the philosopher admonished, "Know thyself."  A wise person is willing to fully claim their expertise and fully accept the expertise of others.  And a group of people with that attitude in place could do something truly remarkable.  

Ghost Stories

Until we sell our house in Houston, our entertainment budget in Fort Worth is a bit scant.  Luckily, when we tire of board games and Netflix, we are easily entertained by free museums, theaters with great matinee prices, and drives down country roads.  As far as the drives go, Joy is enamored with bluebonnets, which are plentiful this time of year, and I am on the lookout for cemeteries and ghost towns.  It seems that every community has its own folklore about hauntings and spooky supernatural occurrences, and although I consider myself to be an open-minded skeptic, those ghost stories are still fascinating to me.  

Thus, when we made the move to Fort Worth, I was given a book all about the area's haunted locales, and when a friend came to visit on Friday, we decided to check out a couple of spots the author highlighted.  The first was Carter, Texas, a town that doesn't exist anymore except for some historical markers, an old church building, and an open-air, tin-roofed gathering area the author calls a "tabernacle".  According to the book, the ghosts of a couple of children supposedly still played in the area, but we discovered something that the author neglected to publicize.  At one end of the tabernacle stood an ancient piano, the victim of weather and neglect.

Ghost town piano detail

An old ghost town piano

Of course, I tried to play a few tunes on the decrepit instrument, and of course, they sounded creepily dissonant.  Although we didn't hear any ghostly children, we did hear sounds of living children and livestock from nearby farms.  It was easy to imagine how such noises, made ethereal by distance and intervening vegetation, could seem like spectral entities on a dark, quiet night in what remains of Carter.  But the fact that the author didn't mention the old piano surprised me.  It's not like anyone would travel miles out of the way to see a broken-down musical instrument, and given that the locals likely already knew about it, that old piano seems a strange thing to keep secret.  Given what I know about children and pianos, if there truly were any juvenile spirits hanging around, they would be hard pressed to resist the urge to play it (or bang on it, depending on your perspective).  Still, prowling around the ghost town and reading the historical markers was quite cool, and the discovery of the poor old piano was indeed a treat.

The author of my Fort Worth ghost book also mentioned a cemetery not far from Carter which boasts a glowing tombstone.  According to what he wrote, "the phenomenon is consistent, night after night, regardless of the weather or any other conditions that might affect it."  From his own personal account, this tombstone, supposedly 50 yards into the graveyard and clearly visible from the road, was "blazing away in ghostly iridescence."  We decided to check out this "consistent phenomenon" for ourselves, since we were already close by.  The experience was somewhat disappointing.  Although we waited outside the cemetery gates for awhile after the sun had completely disappeared, we never saw anything glowing with the intensity the author described.  We chalked up the alleged glow to some kind of optical illusion, but there was simply nothing there for us to see.

Which got me thinking about why a person would publish a story that was so easy to verify as false.  The Carter stories are par for the course: On certain nights, if you listen carefully, you may hear the ghostly voices of the children of Carter.  That kind of story might have people returning and hanging around time and again (although I can't say that such visits would benefit the local economy in any way).  To suggest that one visiting the cemetery would experience something specific with absolute certainty, no matter the time of year or weather conditions, is just a silly claim.  But we accept all kinds of silly claims all the time without verifying them, so stories about glowing tombstones seem like small potatoes.  

In fact, I think I have accepted a great many "ghost stories" as true, without bothering to verify them for myself, and I'm not talking about glowing tombstones and underage specters at this point.  From Hollywood movies to church pulpits to popular songs to adages that are somehow just floating through the collective unconscious of society, there are so many stories about how people should be.  I have fallen prey to other people's beliefs about what a husband should be, what an artist should be, what a responsible adult should be, what a friend should be, what kind of music I should be writing, what kind of connections I should be making, and on and on.  And as many times as I have accepted other people's beliefs, I have rebelled against them just to be defiant.  I know that most people mean well when they share their beliefs about such things, and I know that most people are convinced that what they share is steeped in truth.  Still, it takes a bit of work to peel back all of the layers of ghost stories that have covered my perspective of what my life is supposed to be like.  

Stories about glowing tombstones are easy to verify.  You drive up to the cemetery and you look out across the gravestones and visually determine if one of them has an eerie green ghostly blaze.  It takes an inner eye to verify all of the folktales about more mundane subjects, how men or women are supposed to act, how success should be defined, what one must do in order to be a valued member of society, and why that is of paramount importance.  Maybe some people find it easy to disregard such stories, but I know some people that take such beliefs very seriously.  Some of them might be true for me, but I will only know that for sure if I take those ideas from external sources and verify them against what makes sense to me personally.  If I don't see the glow, then I know that's one more ghost story someone just made up.  Otherwise, I am essentially always measuring my life by someone else's ruler, and sometimes it seems that no two rulers agree.

I will most likely keep enjoying ghost stories and my own amateur investigations of supernatural folklore, but I haven't come across one yet that has turned out to be verifiably accurate.  Likewise, I'll keep testing other people's beliefs that have made their way into my psyche.  Hopefully, I can peel away the ones that don't make sense to me and hang on to the ones that ring true.

Obsessing Over Originality

It is hard to imagine Mozart, looking at the flow of harmonies in a piece he has just completed and saying, Crap, that sounds just like Haydn!  Or Beethoven writing a major scale in the middle of a piece and thinking, I can't do that; it's been done before!  Looking back, we know that every Western composer writing during the same era as Mozart and Haydn had the same harmonic aesthetic, and it even persists today in a ton of music.  The same goes for major scales, and yet it isn't inaccurate to say that Mozart and Beethoven were both innovative composers in their own ways.

George Crumb's Makrokosmos II, Mvt. 12

Originality seems to have a high place of honor in our thinking (mine at least), and yet our society doesn't respond with much enthusiasm for completely original thoughts.  Off-the-wall solutions that no one else has conceived are often met with ridicule and judgment.  One has to think almost like everyone else with just enough originality to captivate and inspire.  Too much innovation and people's minds rebel.

So why, when I am composing a piece of music, do I have this running criteria that it must be "original," that is must have completely new ideas that no other musician has ever considered?  Some composers manage to do that some of the time.  A century ago, the Impressionist movement (the most prominent figures of which were Debussy, Ravel, and Respighi) turned traditional harmony on its head.  Debussy took it a step further and slipped out of traditional musical forms as well.  But this didn't revolutionize the way people listened to music.  We still hear the traditional harmonies and forms every time we turn on the radio.  The influence of that innovation from a hundred years ago may be threaded into our 21st century musical expectations, but it didn't completely override the previous 200 years of musical development.

Harry Partch's quadrangularis reversum

Other composers have done very innovative things as well, and many of these people are the composers I most admire.  Yet even they used musical elements in common with other composers.  My mental criteria that what I write must be completely unique is not only unreasonable, but literally impossible.  It focuses my attention away from the actual music I am composing and onto some strange value for originality that doesn't even play out in practical reality.  Even the most compelling piece of music I can write will have some common elements with other music, and I would go so far as to say that the common ground is what makes new music accessible to people's ears.

So, I am releasing myself from the requirement that I must be an innovator.  At the same time, I recognize that if I am simply true to my own creativity, the music I compose will convey my unique voice.  Which is to say that I don't have to evaluate the originality of each discrete element in a piece in order to look at the completed product and see something of value.  Perhaps this idea extends beyond the realm of composing as well.  Perhaps there will be a time when we all set aside the obsession with originality and evaluate each idea on its own merit.

A Real Job

When I was on the threshold of adulthood (on which I sometimes feel like I'm yet lingering), my stepfather asked one evening, "When are you going to stop this music crap and get a real job?"  Or something to that effect.  My mind may not accurately recall his exact words, but I do remember him suggesting that I could be a dishwasher for a local restaurant if that's what it took.  Although at the time my reaction was fueled by teenage rebelliousness, there are still moments when I struggle with that question.  I have nothing against dishwashers, but after earning a doctorate degree, teaching at colleges, and directing a multi-disciplinary, inter-generational arts program, expecting to thrive on creating music sometimes seems like cheating somehow.

My stepfather's question made perfect sense to him at the time.  He chose a profession that reflects his strong work ethic, the kind of blue-collar career in which you know that you've been working at the end of the day.  He respects people that stand on their own two feet, people who are responsible for themselves.  A music career equated with a pipe dream of fame and fortune, slightly more respectable than winning the lottery, but less likely to happen.  Especially in the small town where we lived.  It has its own share of culture, but it simply lacks the critical mass of population to attract much attention.  No wonder he would suggest a more realistic course than being a musician.

Even then, I didn't see a music career quite the same way as he.  I simply wanted to get paid for creating music, in whatever forms that would take.  It wasn't as though I wanted to be handed something for nothing, I just wanted to make money doing what I loved to do.  Recently, I have made decisions as if I needed to earn money somehow so I could indulge in creating music.  I could see music as a luxurious destination, but not the path.  Somewhere along the way, I became unconvinced of the feasibility of just creating music and getting paid enough as a result.  Even though that had been the reality previously in my life.  Bizarre.

Relocation was an opportunity for me to hit the reset button on a few things, though.  I decided to identify myself (to myself and to others) first and foremost as a pianist and composer, and to trust that to be enough.  I don't need to add anything or take anything away from that.  It is an act of faith, and it is an act of authenticity.  At the same time, it is based in reality.  There are certainly people of my skill level and less who are doing just fine in music careers.  Perhaps partly because they believe it's possible to do so, at least most days.


Now I believe that it really boils down to authenticity.  I don't quite believe in "Do what you love and the money will follow."  I do, however, believe in "Do what you love and the satisfaction of doing what you love will follow."  I think that when people are doing something that has personal value, they will do it well enough to be satisfied.  Different people are satisfied by different levels of success, of course.  My stepfather is satisfied, at least in part, by doing something at which he excels, with the confidence that his effort is worth his compensation.  As it turns out, we have that in common.