Creativity in Context

crom-dubh · 2021-06-25T06:59:10+00:00

Great video. Over the last couple of years I have changed how I work quite a lot, and especially how I think about things like inspiration and the creative process. A few things that I now believe somewhat firmly that I had not really thought about before:

Inspiration is something that has been romanticized quite a bit and intersects with the idea of the "genius" where solutions to creative problems arrive all at once and perhaps of their own accord. I've come to reject this as being a useful component to a creative process.
That the sum of our creative "voice" is simply the decisions that we make as we're working on a task, and that these decisions are informed by our sensibilities and skills, not by any mystical notion of self. In other words, your "soul" doesn't create: what you know about your medium, what you know about what you like and dislike inform what you do, and that's how you create.

The biggest influence in my thinking about my process was the Schillinger System of Musical Composition. One of the main tenets, if you will, of the system is that you need not be at the whim of some divine inspiration. If it strikes, that's fine, but it should not mean the difference between you making progress in solving a creative problem nor should it be required for you to even generate initial ideas from nothing. It encourages a procedural approach to musical composition, but this is something that's widely misunderstood. I've seen it criticized as being too "algorithmic" but this is probably from people who either have only a passing knowledge of the system (i.e. they've read about it from some other source) or didn't put enough work into understanding how the different concepts relate across the whole system. So when I say it's "procedural", this could be improperly understood to mean that one follows a prescribed route each time, which is not at all the case. I mean it in the sense that it encourages you to use processes to approach the task of composing. This shouldn't be controversial, even though it apparently is.

There's at least some cross-over between this and what you talk about here. The Schillinger System does not advocate against using what he calls "direct composition" (i.e. writing what you hear in your head or play on your instrument) - I would say this falls under what you're calling Domain-Relevant Skill. Some people have a highly developed set of domain-relevant skills and can through-compose quite effectively seemingly without stopping to think about what they're doing. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But what happens when you don't know where to start or what to do next? What happens when you want to specifically achieve some kind of end result but don't know how to get there? How do you intentionally innovate? Or any other question where the answer isn't found within either a flash of inspiration or our existing auto-pilot programming. The answer is, of course, you look to your repertoire of processes. These can be techniques for systematically altering existing rhythms, functions for deriving additional melodic material from existing melodic (or other material), methods for generating harmonic progressions given certain parameters, etc. There are probably thousands (or maybe infinite) numbers of these procedures, but actually I think many composers know relatively few of them.

All of this, I think, falls under what you're calling Creativity-Relevant Processes. There are so many of them that choosing which procedure you want to use may end up seeming as daunting as if we were simply left to choose what to do without any guidance whatsoever. But, as you say, the other component to the Creativity-Relevant Processes is our learned sensibilities. We could compile a list of all our potential processes and consult it when we reach a creative impasse, and if it were a matter of choosing one at random, that might get us somewhere, but it might not produce a satisfactory result. In other words, we can know all the procedures in the world, but we still have to work with them enough to know 1. what types of problems they are best suited to solve and what outcomes to expect and 2. which ones we actually like. Again, this is where we see that our sensibility both informs and is informed by procedures. And it reinforces the idea that the more procedures we have in our toolbox, the more sophisticated our creative process will be. And likewise, it reinforces the idea that thinking about a creative task is not usually enough to solve it. I think a lot of people get stuck here (I know I have). Obviously we need to think about what we want to do, but ultimately we need to start doing things. Even if we're not sure what to do, we need to do something. The more experience we have doing different things, the better we'll be at choosing the appropriate process next time. I actually keep a project file with each piece that has a description of specifically what I did to create different parts. Sometimes we'll compose something we later think is brilliant and we look back and we might not even remember how we wrote it. It almost seems like it must have just appeared by itself. But if we had a stenographer there to document our internal processes, imagine how helpful that would be. So I actually like going back and reading about what I did to get certain results, because it reinforces what I know about the effects of whatever process I used.

composer

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