Hi everyone. I wrote this for my Writing for Fun" group that meets at the Cottonwood Library and thought I'd post it on my blog as others might find something of value in it.
Dr. B
Writer's Block
Most of us have experienced it. I
am experiencing it now in both my music composition and in trying to come up
with a topic to write about for this week’s writing group. I experience it
every time I sit down to write a new composition. With over three hundred and
fifty compositions to my credit, I wonder how I am ever going to write
something new.
New!
That seems to be the key word. Here is a definition I found at dictionary.com
regarding creativity:
Creativity
is the ability to transcend traditional
ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to
create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations,
etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.
How
does a creative artist constantly transcend traditional
ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and
create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations,
etc.? It seems like an impossible task.
I think that “new” is overrated. All
the arts went through a period during the second half of the twentieth century
where newness was exalted just because it was new, rather than for a work of
art’s quality. As Robert Ehle states in his article From Sound To
Silence: The Classical Tradition and the Avant-Garde published in the March
1979 Music Educators Journal, “the quest for new ideas without old associations
has led to the abandonment of music as sound and the emphasis on music as pure
idea.”
An example of music as pure idea
would be John Cage’s “4:33” where a pianist comes on stage and sits at a piano
for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and does nothing. The idea of the
composition is that the sounds in the room are the music.
In the world of theatre, consider
Samuel Beckett’s play Breath. Breath is an unusually terse work.
Its length can be estimated from Beckett's detailed instructions in the script
to be about 25 seconds. It consists of the sound of “an instant of recorded
vagitus” (a birth-cry), followed by an amplified recording of
somebody slowly inhaling and exhaling accompanied by an increase and decrease
in the intensity of the light. There is then a second identical cry, and the
piece ends. No people are seen on stage, but Beckett states that it should be
"littered with miscellaneous rubbish." He did specify however that there
were to be “no verticals”, the rubbish was to be “all scattered and lying.”
The visual arts were not exempt for the newness craze. There
are many examples of abstract art that consists of a line or two on a white
canvas. I think I’ll create a painting with nothing but a white canvas and call
it a painting of a polar bear sitting on an iceberg during a blizzard.
So what is it that creative artists really do? Many years
ago, I attended a lecture on jazz trombone playing at the Eastern Trombone
Conference. The lecturer described trombone styles as falling into three
categories, preservers, innovators, and refiners.
Preservers are those
people who create by copying and already existing style. For example, if I
wrote a composition of my own using the tonal language and contrapuntal
techniques that Bach used in the early eighteenth century, I would be
considered a preserver of a bygone era.
Innovators are those people that try to do something that
was never done before. I believe that innovators are very necessary, otherwise
we would never move in a forward direction. However, not all innovation is good
and only time will be able to separate the good from the bad.
Refiners are my favorite creative people. Refiners take what
has come before them and what is new and put those two together in a manner
that incorporates the artist’s own personal vision. They take what has stood
the test of time, combine it with fresh ideas, and come up with a personal
statement that is modern. They do not reward newness just because it is new.
Rather, they discriminately filter the new to see if it has practical
applications.
With my musical compositions, I feel that I am a refiner. So
when I sit down to compose, I’m using my favorite techniques and sounds that
have stood the test of time and try to put them together in a new and fresh
way. Sometimes I consciously use music I have written before and give it a new
setting; new instrumentation, add a section and/or take away a section.
Sometimes I borrow from myself without even knowing it.
For example, I am currently writing a composition for tenor
saxophone and piano. After working on a part of it, my wife said to me, what
are you doing with “Pinocchio”, a composition that I wrote in 2001 and that
will be choreographed and performed at the Festival at Sandpoint in Idaho in
August. I replied, “That is my tenor saxophone composition, not Pinocchio.” But
there is a section in the saxophone piece that sounds like a section of
Pinocchio! I must have had Pinocchio on my mind and borrowed subconsciously
from myself.
In conclusion, I believe that to be creative doesn’t mean
that one always needs to do something totally new, something that has never
been done before. Creativity means taking one's craft and putting things
together in a manner that is unique to the artist. Many different things can
inspire the artist to create, but if one sets out each time to create something
totally new in the artist’s field, one can easily experience a block. I guess I
solved my “writer’s block” for this week’s writing group as I wrote this essay.
I hope that this creativity will carry over into my musical compositions.
