Are You Creative or Merely Re-Creative?
And Does it Really Matter?
During fundraising drives, radio stations like to talk about “driveway moments.” These enchanted interludes happen when you become so involved in a story that you end up sitting in your car to hear how it ends, even if that means you sit parked in your driveway long after you’ve arrived home.
I love driveway moments. If you’ve been lucky enough to experience them, you probably do too.
One that has stayed with me, even years after the event, involved a story about creativity. The story was focused on classical music as a creative medium, specifically in its performance (rather than its composition). It highlighted the requirement that instrumentalists learn how to erase any trace of individuality or interpretation from their performances and instead focus on producing note-perfect recreations of the work under study. Reporter Gracy Olmstead described the goal nicely in an article published just last August:
“… the classical-music world has created a field in which musicians are expected to do the same things over and over, with the same tone, pitch, lilt, fingering, and pauses as the next performer. This perfectionism may make it easier to weed out applicants in a search for a first-chair bassoonist, but it also means that musicians — and innovation itself — are left outside in the cold.”
Performance musicians, in the classical music realm, are asked not to create something new, but to reproduce a very specific style and technique that has been established as the accepted standard for a given piece of music, much like a purebred dog or cat would be judged against breed standards in the show ring. Pursuing perfection in reproducing the standard is the goal — creating an individualized variation of that standard, no matter how pleasing the result may be, is not only discouraged, but actually disqualifying. The pursuit, especially for young musicians, can be stifling. Olmstead further describes this phenomenon:
“This perfectionist culture can crush young musicians’ creativity: they’re too afraid of messing up to take risks. As Thor Eckert Jr. wrote for the Christian Post back in 1982, ‘the very qualities that made Rubinstein unique have been abandoned in the music world today. Rather than emotion, we now have technical prowess, rather than expressivity and poetry we have accuracy, rather than individuality, we have a bland sameness.’”
When this topic first came to my attention as I sat behind the steering wheel in my driveway years ago, a memory from college popped into my head, as complete and vivid as it was on the day it happened. The incident took place during a rainy spring afternoon on a grey Northwest day. I was standing next to a cluttered desk in a music professor’s office, puzzling over a jazz chart propped on a listing black music stand. I had found some extra time in my class schedule that semester and had decided to fill it with something “fun” for once. So, after more than a dozen years of playing clarinet in a variety of symphonic bands and orchestras, I thought I would try something different and take private lessons on the saxophone. I’d played alto sax in high school jazz band (although never as an improv soloist), and I thought this would be an opportunity to take a musical side interest to a deeper level.
What stuck in my head about that particular afternoon was an instruction that the professor gave me about a single note. “That held note at the end of the bridge?” he said, “Try to make it sound, I don’t know, a bit more purple?”
“Purple?” I asked, completely nonplussed.
“Yes, absolutely,” he said with growing enthusiasm. “Purple!”
After more than a decade of being instructed to pay close attention to things like time signatures, dynamics, accidentals, and tone, I had not the slightest idea of what to do with an instruction to play a note via a particular color — or was it a color via a note? Who knew? Purple. Huh. I wondered if he was kidding me; was this a joke?
Evidently not. He waited expectantly, stroking his goatee. But I had nothing to give him. I didn’t start the measure again. I just stood gaping at him, shaking my head. He had to pick up his own horn and play what he meant for me before I could even attempt to color in the note. And when I did, it was with a strange prickle of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
Purple. Wow. I’ll be damned.
All these years after the driveway moment that resurrected it, the ghost of that memory still rattles around my head. I finally realized, sitting there in my parked car, that this jazz professor, using his inscrutable beatnik jive, had invited me to interpret a note of music — to fill it with an emotion and put my personal stamp on its existence, even if it meant treating the printed notation on the sheet music as a guideline rather than a mandate. He was, in short, for perhaps the first time in my musical career, asking me to be truly creative.
And this, my friends, was a much belated and very uncomfortable realization.
For if I hadn’t been creative in the many, many years I’d been playing music, what had I been? Of course musicianship in any form is creative, I assured myself; it has to be. Being a musician is de facto evidence of creativity. It’s like being a poet or a painter — isn’t it? I’d always believed this to be true, but sitting in the driveway that day, a small fissure suddenly appeared in the shell of my certainty.
Was it possible that the sort of musicianship I’d been pursuing was no more creative than filling in the pre-marked areas of a paint-by-numbers picture? Certainly, it was more difficult; it required a higher level of training and commitment to practice. Perhaps it required a higher level of artistry (which, to me, is something distinct from creativity — although your mileage may vary), but in the final analysis, was it really all that different?
Instead of being creative, had I instead been being merely re-creative?
I’d never written a note of music from my own imagination, I reminded myself. I’d never improvved a solo backed by a jazz combo, never even riffed on a melody, other than in the private, warm-up noodling all instrumentalists do before getting down to actual practice. My musicianship hadn’t amounted to anything more than perfecting the performance of notes transcribed onto a sheet of paper.
But still, still, something inside of me continued to insist that this sort of music was a creative pursuit.
Which begs the question, what exactly is creativity?
After considering the matter for a number of years, I’ve realized this can be a dangerous question. It’s a bit like asking what is art or beauty or even pornography; you can chase your personal definition in semantic circles for only so long before you’re tempted to throw up your hands and declare simply, “I know it when I see it.” But I don’t think the creativity slope is quite as slippery as some of these others. I think the concept can be corralled, at least to a certain extent.
For me, it comes down to three elements:
1) Something is produced. That something might be a sonnet or a portrait. It might be an urn or an afghan. It could be a photo, a hard-boiled detective mystery, or a symphony. While “art” might sniff that some of these items are merely “craft,” creativity, I feel, is far more democratic. In fact, it’s possible that almost any output could serve as a vehicle for creativity.
2) This second point, I’ll certainly admit, is a little more fluid, more helium-filled in its ability to rise just beyond language’s grasp. But to put it in necessarily imprecise terms, something individual to the creator is either included in or has shaped the work. That elusive something could be personal experience, intellectual analysis, imagination or fantasy. This is where we reach that pesky I-know-it-when-I-see-it part of the discussion, so I’m going to attempt to imbue some legitimacy on this otherwise wishy-washy quality by coining a name for it: spiritual idiolect. By my thinking, creativity will always — always — reflect some measure of the creator’s spiritual idiolect.
3) At this third point our discussion might veer into the weeds of controversy, but hear me out. I think the final element in an act of creativity is subject. You might apply your spiritual idiolect to creating a play about a bus stop or maybe an essay about the unspeakable horrors of dentistry in 18th century Europe or a painting of a politician’s under-aged bride. In all these cases, the subject is obvious.
Certainly there is an argument to be made that a person can produce a creative work without any subject matter at all. The abstract expressionists, for example, believed that it was possible to separate art from its subject, producing paintings of no discernible subject at all. A quilt can include recognizable figures or it can forego them in favor of unimpeded geometry and color. And while lyrics certainly have subjects — even if most seem to be silly love songs, as Paul McCartney mildly complained a few years back — music performed independently of lyrics? I think it could be said that such music is creative even in the absence of subject.
I’m happy to admit that creativity can exist, on an exceptional basis, independently of subject. I include subject as one of my three criteria because 1) I believe it exists in the vast majority of creative works with few exceptions (and if you are having trouble identifying the subject, look to the work’s title for enlightened clues), and 2) because it’s vitally important to realize when you are inclined to judge someone’s work as “Not Creative,” you might be responding to the subject rather than the inspiration and technical prowess and persistence that united to create it. You will always find some subjects to be personally offensive — maybe those subjects include nudes in paintings or politics in essays or vampires in preteen fiction — by all means, live your life without consuming these things, but please don’t condemn them for a lack of creativity.
So this leads us back to classical music and the argument for or against its creativity. Certainly I would never condemn instrumental music for a lack of subject (partly because I’m convinced subject usually exists among the notes, even if obscured to the casual listener). My main argument against the presence of creativity is instead the intentional removal of the performer’s spiritual idiolect. Certainly a strong scent trail of the composer’s contribution remains in the performance, but none is present from the performer who creates the music in real time. As uneasy as it makes me to say so, I don’t believe the performance of classical music is a creative pursuit.
Yeah, I said it.
Does that make you cringe? If you’ve ever devoted yourself to mastering a musical instrument, it probably does. After all, most of us who have made music a central feature of our lives have been lauded since childhood for both our talent and our creativity. Challenging such a long held belief is more than uncomfortable — it might even feel insulting.
Consider, however, the field of painting. Imagine a world where visual artists are trained in techniques that will ultimately allow them to create the truest copies possible of the old masters, portraits and landscapes that are, in every way possible, indistinguishable from the originals — that, in fact, creating those copies is the main goal and ultimate expression of art.
Unlike in music, we have a special word for the reproduction of a master artist’s original expression: forgery. It’s a word loaded with condemnation and judgment, one that fails to acknowledge the technical prowess and years of practice that go into learning to create a faithful reproduction. It’s a weighty word that certainly squashes any notion of creativity under its heel. Yet in a comparative analysis, is a painter setting out to recreate a master work any different from an instrumental soloist setting out to recreate a note-perfect rendition of an earlier performance? Yes, the intentions behind these pursuits might be very different (if we assume an artist who forges a painting seeks to deceive and a musician doing the same seeks to honor), but does motivation in anyway change the creative process behind the goals? I don’t think it does.
The broader question is, of course, does it really matter if one pursues a re-creative art versus an individually creative art? Certainly one could seek to enrich one’s soul through either or both. But I would encourage you as I have encouraged myself, as we set about our daily activities, to consider just how much of ourselves we put into our pursuits, from our common activities and our artistic endeavors. Usually the best way of leading a creative life is to lead a life of awareness. Recognize the difference in being creative and being re-creative. Celebrate both. And, when you’re ready, step into ever more comprehensive creative pursuits. It’s how the soul ultimately grows.
