Category Archives: Creativity

Rhythm!

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I am a classical musician. Classical musicians are acutely concerned with pitch. Don’t miss a note! Don’t make a mistake! Performing classical music is a stressful occupation because the notes are prescribed, already known and we spend huge amounts of time being able to deliver those notes. And – if we know what’s good for us – we spend a lot of time trying to sweet talk our nervous and endocrine systems through this fight or flight experience. Although we’ve all had times when it was tremendous fun and/or “flow”, the most common experience of good feelings is afterwards – glad that’s over! Shirt is soaked – we wonder how can you sit in a chair, hardly moving, and be drenched?

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(Big) Improv Quote of the Day: What Does Improvisation Do For a Musician?

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Awareness

(Photo credit: Emilie Ogez)

For one, it gives me a break from tackling my wrong notes, distasteful vibrato, and being torn between interpretations in the practice room. There are no wrong notes, no wrong inflections. I wouldn’t say that a note during improv with “distasteful” vibrato/intonation/whatever was necessarily done on purpose, but was made in the moment and without expectation. There is something very freeing and empowering about this. What happens on accident- a cracked note, or a gasping breath, can turn into inspiration for what is to come.

At the same time, I can tackle my classical music troubles through improv. Lately, I’ve had issues with controlling the style of my double tonguing. I’ll start moving my fingers, with no regard to scales or my piece, and focus solely on my double tonguing. This allows my mind to be entirely focused on the production of my tonguing, because I am not going to be distracted by the fingers in an awkward passage, or by the monotony of scales.

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Creativity in Education Quotes from All Over

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The Creativity symbol as it appeared on the fi...

The Creativity symbol as it appeared on the first edition of Nature's Eternal Religion (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although this blog focuses on classical improve, we are also passionately interested in creativity in general and creativity in arts education (or any education, for that matter). We are very interested in spreading the word that what the World (and schools) Needs Now is a very healthy shot of a “whole brain” approach to education. Small minds in governing bodies (chockablock with lawyers and business folks) are interested in cheap (i.e. no-cost), instant fixes in education (notably All Children Left Behind – “Is Our Children Learning”?) rather than long-range and effective curriculum planning. There. I said it (again). I feel better. Sort of, for a little while. Anyway, we try to keep our ears open for trends and sentiments in this direction. We would like to share some recent clippings and videos from all kinds of online sources from all over the globe. Read on.

 

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Improv Quote of the Day: Is That the Way You Feel About My Music?

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Deutsch: Paul Hindemith, 1895-1963, deutscher ...

Paul Hindemith

When a composer creates a masterpiece, my job is not to recreate it; it’s to try to create another masterpiece even greater than what the composer wrote. I experienced this many times when working with contemporary composers. For example, in 1959 I was asked to play the Hindemith Concerto in Carnegie Hall with Hindemith conducting the New York Philharmonic. I knew how dogmatic Hindemith could be so I made sure that I followed his score to the letter, including his metronome indications. When I was ready my manager told me that Hindemith wanted to hear me play his concerto well before the concert. So I went to Hindemith’s hotel room in New York and knocked on the door. When he opened the door I could tell by his expression that he remembered our fight back at Yale. Then he invited me in and said, “Parisot, play my concerto.” I then played the whole concerto, facing him while he conducted. When we finished, he kept his head down, still looking at the score. I waited a bit too long, and finally asked, “Mr. Hindemith, what did you think?” He said, “Parisot, you play my concerto very well. You even respect the fingerings and bowings of my brother, who was a cellist. But I’d like to ask you one question. Is that the way you feel my music?”

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Start Your Day with a D.A.!

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Imagine that you were not allowed to speak unless you were quoting Socrates, Cicero, Aristotle, Winston Churchill, Lincoln, etc., not even “Please pass the salt” unless you were quoting. Imagine that you were an English major but were not allowed to write any of your own thoughts, no essays, not even an email; you could only copy down quotes from Twain, Dickens, Faulkner, Joyce, Cervantes, Goethe, etc . Imagine that you went to art school but were never trained or encouraged to do anything but reproduce famous paintings, never, never paint or sculpt anything that you thought up, ever. Just copy Picasso, Renoir, Degas, Ingres, Leonardo. Imagine if you went to music school and never played anything but the notes of some distant (and likely deceased) composer, never received encouragement or training to make your own music…

Oh, wait. That is, in fact, how it is in music school. No creating. Just recreating. Nothing wrong with re-creating – unless it’s the only show in town. Any garage band worth its salt composes its own songs. Why is it that your averate terminal-degreed music student can’t write a convincing piece for their own instrument? Isn’t something missing?

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Dangerous Things

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Genghis Khan in traditional Mongolian writing

I recently saw a brief (6 min.) video presentation by Gever Tulley about a “Tinkering School” for children. It’s not a regular school; it’s six-day “immersive experience” where the kids take a wide range of materials (wood, rope, wheels, etc.) and make whatever they want out of them. You have to see the video to believe what these kids create. A roller coaster made of wood built by seven-year-olds! A bridge made out of plastic grocery bags. A boat. A bicycle. There is no curriculum, no tests. Just lots of tools – real tools (hammers, nails, soldering irons, etc.)  - plus time to explore, experience, and “figure things out by fooling around.” Tulley: the kids soon learn that “nothing ever goes as planned. Ever. All projects go awry.” Sometimes they start with sketches and doodles, sometimes they just start building.Success is in the doing. Failures are “celebrated and analyzed.” The children have a change to imagine, creative, fail and try again, and solve problems to create things that interest them. Tulley is the author of 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do). What he’s interested in is having kids acquire good sense and mastery of “dangerous” things in life rather than avoid them and remain ignorant and unskilled in them. Walking is ‘dangerous’ to the very young, but we work on it and then move on to running, climbing stairs, etc. Tulley says, why stop there? Go another step and learn to walk on a tightrope. We learn by “fooling around”, and his book sets up chances for kids to learn, experience, and discover. In current society children are often raised in overprotected, overscheduled environments and may well miss out on the wonderful enrichment that comes from “doing it yourself”, making “mistakes”, getting dirty, using whatever’s around to make up games and projects.

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Winging It With Piet

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Piet [pron. "peet"] Swerts is a Belgian composer/pianist who is a giant among composers for saxophone music, and our [i.e. U of Iowa] sax prof Kenneth Tse invited him to be a guest artist at UI: for masterclasses and solo piano and chamber music recitals of his music. He hasn’t written much for horn, but I was tapped to perform his “Signals” for horn and piano on the chamber music concert. We hit it off immediately and talked about all sorts of things before settling down to rehearse. At one point I was telling him about my classical improv class and Latitude Ensemble [improvised chamber music], and got a better idea: instead of telling, show.

“Let’s make up some music,” I said. “I’ll start, you come in.” He’s a pianist and composer, but hadn’t improvised before with anyone. But he was game. It was remarkable – he jumped in, echoing the motif I had started with, then embellishing it, then transposing it. We tossed ideas back and forth, developing the juicier ones. It was as though he had been doing this for a long time. Since my splendid collaborator Evan Mazunik moved to the Big Apple some years ago, I haven’t had much of a chance to improvise like this with a partner. It was terrific fun; very much like being back with Evan making wonderful spontaneous chamber music. Exhilarating!

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Creative Thinking: O Canada!

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Canadian flag outside the Maritime Museum of t...

Canada again is at the forefront of innovation and creative thinking in an article by Jennifer Lewington in the Globe and Mail: “More Business Schools Offering Arts, Creativity Courses.” Music to my ears: “At the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, an elective course on creativity will be come a mandatory [my italics] component of a revamped MBA this fall.” Alleluia. Another quote: “A 2008 Conference Board of Canada study found that arts and cultural organizations employ more than one million Canadians and account for 7 per cent of the national economy.” We will all wait an eternity if we wait for our SuperPac elected officials to recognize the contribution that the arts and arts education makes to the well-being and quality of life of the nation – they care only about $. The ones who are mostly likely to make something happen are the corporations themselves (who can then goad the legislators into action) when they finally realize that the key to the future is innovation and the key to innovation is education that includes training in creative thinking. They (i.e. non-Canadians) have been slow to grasp the point because 1) there is a no way to put creativity on a standardized Every Child Left Behind test 2) there is a delay time between when creative activities are undertaken (music, art, drama, dance starting in elementary school and continuing through college) and when creative thinking produces new approaches and new products and 3) there is no direct this-to-that connection between arts education and innovation and legislative minds in this country have a hard time valuing anything that does produce immediately and obviously. If you can’t count it, weigh it, measure it exactly, today, what good is it? goes current thinking.

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Improv Quote of the Day: Where is the creativity?

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oil painting Improvisation

In teaching music students to be creative, most schools are derelict. … Music education, so strongly rooted in performance traditions, has resulted in the virtual absence of creative problem solving processes in its teaching and learning practices.

– Lee Willingham, “Creativity and the Problem with Music” in Creativity and Music Education

On Cartoons, Bathrooms, and Creativity

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Pixar Animation Studios atrium.

Pixar Studios

I have a lot of books on creativity and creative thinking, and bookstores know I’m pretty much a sure thing when something new and interesting comes out. NPR alerted me to a new one: “Imagine: How Creativity Works” by Jonah Lehrer. I just downloaded the audiobook, which I will listen to right after I finish my current audiobook (“1493″ by Charles C. Mann). But even before I get a chance to hear Lehrer’s book, I wanted to share some flash inspiration that I got from the NPR interview. It was the part about how Steve Jobs redesigned Pixar studios (of blockbuster animated film fame) “to maximize collaboration and creativity.” The original design had the three teams of specialists separate in their own buildings: scientists, animators, and directors. Creative soul that Jobs was, he saw immediately that this was a Very Bad Idea when it comes to inspiring creativity.

Steve Jobs at the WWDC 07

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