The Creative Process

There is no "formula" for how to be creative.
If anything, it is trial and error.

For the most part, when we are stuck, its not because the task at hand is bad,
it's because we don't fully believe in our capabilities. Or trust the outcome to be to our standards.
Fuck our standards. Let's face it, look at the standard that shows like American Idol and the Voice and all of that other bullshit sets.  You're going to tell me you can't do better than that?

Perhaps being overly trained (and yes, I fall into that category as well) hurts us.  We know too much, we've seen how great and how shitty things can be.

Be the person who escapes the prison of
self doubt and knowledge.

It's like being a doctor and having a child.  They will jump at every sneeze or cough, because they have seen things go wrong.  In reality, it's probably the sniffles, but still there is that burden of knowledge.

I am a generation brought up under the mantra, "Knowledge is Power"
Fuck having power, I say let go!!!
Stop trying to control everything. It's pathetic.

Back to the point... what kind of artist are you?
One that does it for the money, the fame, or to keep art alive?

We all want to be paid for what we do. This doesn't make you a sell out, it makes you a product of capitalism.. being famous is out of someones control, so don't strive for fame.  If the art is good or bad, it still exist and perpetuates the symptoms of criticism. So what is the creative process?

Step One: Let Go!
Lesson Complete

The art of art is simple. It's about self expression; to convey the entire spectrum of human emotions.  I suppose here, having a little more knowledge is essential.  But human emotion is not taught... it is experienced.

Our issue is balancing our being
mind-intellect-head-thought-ideas.... or
body-technique-hand-facility-tools....or
spirit-extension-heart-feeling-emotions.

"Nothing is out of the question for me. I’m always thinking about creating. 
My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light…Then I’m grateful"

That is enough to think about don't you think?  So why the hell do we put ourselves through years and years of school... because society says so and the government needs money.  Regardless, we need teachers and I am not saying abandon education... (perhaps I am saying abandon the CURRENT education system)

My biggest point is, look within. Art is not math, it is intangible, it doesn't have a strict wall surrounding it.  From my personal experience, I am trying to write a suite of sorts, but am struggling.  I as frustrated that I couldn't get the right ideas out on paper.  Then it hit me, I am too absorbed in something else right now, a different kind of writing.  I HEAR duo stuff with piano right now,  and I am trying to force my mind to hear and see something I am not ready for.  I will eventually get to that point, but I am not under a deadline.  I remember being in class and having a composition due the next week over the concepts we just learned, I wasn't immersed in the concepts long enough to HEAR them, so the composition came out sounding 3 weeks old. Why? Because I finally heard the concepts we learned about 3 weeks ago.

Of course, good teachers recognize how compartmentalized school is, and accept that not every student can catch on as quickly as others, but it can be a real drag when you want to write something but your mind is just out of balance.

Give yourself time, and everything will fall in place.  To truly master something, it takes practice of more than just the techniques...

Let's Evolve.

 Paul Hindemith advocates the restoration of instruments and performing practices of Bach’s age.  Therefore saying that a composer only fits in the restraints of his own time, therefore, constructing instruments of the time would give back the essence of what the composer really intended.  This can be seen as a modern invention, rather than a return to the past.  Theodor Adorno feels that reconstructing the past is in the wake of depersonalizing forces of industrialism and capitalism.   It is a sense of irreversibility, and leaning toward modernistic ideas.

I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect.
I say let's evolve. Let the chips fall where they may


       Taruskin uses Stravinksy as an example that even when you compose in the past (his neo-classical era) it is still riddled with twentieth century concepts.  The ears are tuned into the sound of Stravinsky, not the sounds of the classical era.  Therefore, we would have to start from scratch and never have given our ears the chance to hear what we’ve already heard.  There isn’t an authentic representation of the past; it will always be a copy of a copy. SO why even try?

      Nikolaus Harnoncourt  was recording with early instruments in the 1960’s and wrote several essays on his "pioneering period" that ultimately popularized the virtues of associating early music with its original performance practice.  For some reason, just because you write essays and make a recording or two, you suddenly become the authority.  The popular, mainstream idea.

      Laurence Dreyfus builds on Adorno’s view but adds the question “ why the historically 'correct' performance of music should become such a particular issue in the late twentieth century?”  He also states how wrong it is to refer to this view as a “thing”.  A few other critics are Joseph Kerman, with his observations on musicology and how ALL points of musicology should point towards criticism, rather than studying music as an artifact.  Richard Taruskin (well respected music scholar) criticizes historically informed performances, or HIP (leave it to the non performing musicologist to make "hip" un hip) being a symptom of twentieth century modernism.
           
     Modernism fames on defamiliarization, as does HIP with earlier music.  HIP is a symptom of twentieth century modernism. HIP can be counter-cultural by overthrowing accepted models of musical taste, and threatens civilized society.  Leads to equality of members, no sense of hierarchy, crossover between professional and amateur performance and on the same level as the audience. 

     


      Robert Morgan links HIP to society as a whole characterized by insecurity, uncertainty and self-doubt. Anxiety for short.  He criticizes the overwhelming amount of multi-culturalism in music based on an unawareness of the current state of music.  Saying that all culture is available is saying the same as no culture at all.   HIP is a last resort for western music.  There isn’t a clear divide between the past and the present.  Lately, I've noticed music and art as a whole coming out of a "museum culture" mentality. Combining nearly dead items of culture in one place and expecting it to be something new and invigorating.  I have highly strong opinions about this.  Although I do understand that lineage is important, we can’t keep living in the past.  The reason most of those “timeless” pieces are timeless, is NOT because we keep playing them, but rather the incredible amount of ingenuity and IN THE MOMENT character they have.

   
      Jumping ahead with HIP being apart of a museum, culture is a conception of the sanctity of places and times, persons and offices, customs and rites.  Resurrecting past ensemble stylings perpetuates the inequality of the political system.  In the end, restoring the past does not bring the original political connotations with it. (Replace ensemble stylings with anything.) What most of us do in the present has nothing to do with wanting to change the future. Likewise, we don't anticipate having the people look back on our accomplishments to try and recreate the social environment.  

      Responsibility. What I understand the word to mean in music is, the composer has a job and the performer has a job and the audience has a job.  Don’t try to be all three.  There is a sense of responsibility that Taruskin implies that most musicians WANT to be all three so they can experience the music in all three perceptions. To give credit where credit is due.  The composer as an authority, in some artists minds, there is never any place for the performers interpretation, only the audiences interpretation.

      Taruskin does mention that reconstructing should add to the creative pile, NOT replace the pile entirely.  He says tradition is cumulative and therefore has many steps, accepting and messy, or in other words, human.  Music is not about what is on the page, but the interaction, and reaction.  HIP is productive if it spawns its own tradition.

      On a final note, evaluate yourself, are you a "straight" performer or a "crooked" performer.  The words may be misleading, so I'll define them. Straight performance is one that does exactly what’s on the page with audience expectations that are meant and satisfied.  Crooked performances are “real artists” who don’t respond to generic demands that can be classified, but by personal and intensely subjective imagination.

     

     I prefer to be crooked.

Update

The past few weeks I have been uploading videos to youtube.  They are mostly for my own use.  I get random ideas that I am much too lazy to write out, so I decide to tape them and upload them for future reference.

Of course some shameless self promotion is never bad... if the right person sees them... and offers me something... then so be it.


Regardless, something has recently come to my attention about our education system... particularly the one I came from.

I have some band students coming to me asking for help in "general music".  Initially I laugh because they should be fine...but after talking with them, I find that they are being confused by the general music teacher.  In other words, the general music teacher is awful and is complicating the simplest of music theory.

Without slandering the teacher... I started to think about the potential of how inferior other teachers may be...  The only reason these band kids can question this teacher is because they have some sort of understanding of the material.. They aren't being blindly taught theories and applications... they have actually used these concepts and have played the notes.  They already have a basic understanding of music.

What if  the student has parents who are biologist, the student brings home an assignment from biology and the parents notice how incorrect the assignment may be.  Otherwise, the student would never have known any different if what they were being taught was right or wrong.

Same goes for english class, math, art, etc.  Students RELY on the teachers to tell the truth... the average students doesn't take the initiative to research on their own, and therefore depend on the teachers.

Think about how the years have gone by and you realize either how invaluable, or useless, or WRONG the education you received actually was.  Of course, there are few of us that went straight into the real world and found out what we actually needed to know.

The fact of the matter is, if I ever have kids, I will probably walk into the teacher's room and ask for their transcript before I let them teach.

I say this because I know MANY people who have graduated with Music Ed degrees and were terrible at their instrument and received LOOOOW marks in theory and history classes.  The only difference is, they figured out how to work the system to do the least amount of work possible for the greatest gain.

Another case for the "Think for yourself, question authority" campaign.  Force your teachers to PROVE they know what they are talking about, don't take their word for it.

A pedagogical follow up

For many years now I have had students and colleagues ask about my “warm-up routine”.  For the most part, my “warm-up” is just to make sure my horn is in working condition; Checking valves, slides, etc.  What most people are really asking is “How to you practice?”

While living in New York City, I had to adapt to my surroundings and was forced to practice with a mute.  Of course this isn’t ideal but I had noticed a change. Instead of focusing on my sound and tone production, I was focused on playing with ease and intonation (since the mute changes pitch a bit).

Naturally, after taking the mute out I was playing very relaxed and my tone was just fine. Maybe a side benefit, but the mute turned my focus of attention away from making the perfect sound, to playing with ease and in tune.  The tone seemed to take care of itself.

After thinking of analogies, I realized it is similar to a baseball player swinging a bat with weights on it, to “warm-up” before the moment he had to do his job of hitting the ball.

The added weight (or mute in my case) turned the attention away from a single aspect, and ultimately to a net gain in my overall playing.

After teaching for a few years, I noticed my students would live by long tone studies and various other exercises and don’t really know why.  They just do them because they are told it will help their overall playing.  This “warm-up” routine that I follow is exactly that, a warm-up.  In my mind, it is the equivalent to an athlete warming up their body before an event.  Most athletes don’t sprint right from the beginning; instead they stretch to loosen up.  The more relaxed you are, the more productive the session will be.

The idea of air is controversial, and this is not a routine to analyze how to breathe.  We’ve been breathing since day one, no need to teach that. The goal in these ratio-based exercises is to ease the body into a normal practice session.  By adding on a beat of music incrementally, the body has enough time to get comfortable to the demand that playing music requires.  Again, it isn’t good for the body if the first note played is an 8 beat long tone; that’s the equivalent of waking up first thing in the morning and sprinting as fast as you can out the front door; You can do it, but you won’t make it very far at the same pace.

The beauty in these exercises is that they are not written in stone.  The fundamental idea is for incremental breath to beats of music ratio.  The beats of music you play do not have to be these exact exercises. 

On a final note, this is designed to be a short “warm-up” that precedes any flexibility exercises, scale patterns, or any other “daily maintenance” exercises already in place.  This is just to get the body and the air moving.  At the end of the day, the goal is to make music!

This is not all my own creation, nothing is new anymore, but it is something I endorse.

Feel free to look and try... it's just what I do, doesn't mean you will be like me in any manner... which is a great thing.