Creativity

Creativity. We value it and aspire to it when we pick up our guitar, but what is it? How does one pursue creativity? This is a key issue in my teaching, in my own music making and other artistic pursuits, and in daily life in general. I spend a lot of time reading about it, thinking about it, developing ideas and collecting schemes.

Many of us think of creativity, if we actually stop to think about it at all, as an ephemeral, vague quality—a gift of the gods that comes, or not, of its own volition. However, there are ways and methods for guiding and controlling creativity.

One effective and diverting way of evincing “creative spark” involves bringing together disparate elements, allowing them to become catalysts for something new, unexpected, surprising. Excitement manifests with singular clarity when the original elements carry no self-evident connection or relationship. For example, the energy or speech patterns in a presidential inauguration speech, or the tangible texture of an orange peel (inside or out), coupled with patterns from two different pages of a bebop drum book might combine to inspire a fingerstyle guitar phrase. A question like, “How would Mozart arrange a hip-hop record?” might lead one somewhere.

When working on song lyrics we might randomly pull five nouns and five verbs out of the dictionary and combine them in every possible way getting twenty-five pairs of descriptive action that will shed new light if we ponder them.

The brilliant Edward deBono convincingly described the mechanisms of mind that allow these things to happen, inventing the term "Lateral Thinking" in the process. We have all empirically observed that an altered activity, or the diversion that comes from a changed train of thought, seems to allow the subconscious to work on a creative project that had us stymied. I’ve had an attention-grabbing headache open the door to a solution when I was snagged on a half-finished opera libretto. I once quickly sketched a deck of cards strewn on the floor and their patterns led me to the solution for an unrelated staging problem in a play I was directing.

The trouble with any example is that it suggests a contrived sluggishness in the process. When you are in the state of flow, following specific thoughts that move you, ideas fall together organically and smoothly, almost magically, with a recognizable rightness and effectiveness. The insidious little voice in one’s head that insists, “This is ridiculous, how silly, it will never work” may need to be sent to the closet for a time-out so that work can be commenced.

When I make a picture I concentrate on filling the available surface area with line, color, space, and balance. When I make music the area to be filled is time. When I write the area to be filled might be termed thought, or intellect. In all cases line, color, space, and balance are the qualities in play.