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Topic: The Path To Real Creativity and Innovation - How? |
Mat Rhodes
From:
Lexington, KY, USA
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Posted 5 Mar 2008 9:02 pm |
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The Holdsworth and Hippie threads got me thinking about how a musician breaks the musical mold, especially in an environment where specialization and saturation are ever-increasing. Many would agree with me that it's harder, though not impossible, these days to find music that goes in a new direction AND perks up the ears. Difficult as it can be to find it, it seems equally difficult to identify the insecurities (if there are any) within the artist's personality that give birth to such innovation and creativity.
And sometimes it's the "outside" influences as well.
Is it reactionary? Does he/she one day decide "I hate what I'm hearing all around me. That music is crap. I'm gonna show these people what I think should..."
Is it ego? Do such musicians just want to be noticed, so they'll contrive anything novel and hope they'll score big with the listeners? And how would we know if it's contrived or genuine?
Is it like the need to have kids?
What do you use as a stimulant (at least one that won't send you to jail  )? Coffee, wine, women, a picture, a movie, a vacation, etc.?
Anyway, that's just a few although they're not comprehensive. It's a phenomenon that's mystified me from the get-go as everyone who has had some personal success with it has a different path as well as the way to approach it. |
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Jim Cohen
From:
Philadelphia, PA
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Posted 5 Mar 2008 9:06 pm
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| This sounds like a Hankey subject, only readable. |
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Edward Meisse
From:
Santa Rosa, California, USA
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Posted 5 Mar 2008 9:42 pm
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Just keep playing your guitar....and playing and playing and playing.........what's going to come of it will come on its own. But ya gotta keep playing. So shut your computer off.  Right now.
In all other respects I have to agree with Mr. Cohen.
_________________
Amor vincit omnia |
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Mat Rhodes
From:
Lexington, KY, USA
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Posted 5 Mar 2008 9:54 pm
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You're probably right; it's best to leave esoteric matters to those who know esomaterics. I forget that a public forum in this day and age probably isn't an appropriate place for such soul-bearing. Strike One.
My dad did have an interesting take on the creative wave that hit in the 60's. He believed that it (the creative force) was an entity unto itself - not quite an alien intelligence, but an entity with its own motives - that decided to visit that time period. Kind of like the effect of monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey". The kids of that generation just happened to be more receptive to it. Hence, the large volume of output. |
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Webb Kline
From:
Orangeville, PA
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Posted 5 Mar 2008 10:29 pm
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For one thing, there didn't use to be Garage Band and all the software virtual bands around to write with. There were no computer-based rhythm tracks to lock into. In order to develop a musical idea, it often took the collaboration of band members to get it done. That still works well if a band takes the time to do it.
Another thing is that the hippie era was, by its very nature, non-conformist. We rebelled against institutionalism in nearly every form. Avant-garde jazz spawned a lot of creativity, as did LSD. Everything was experimental. Record companies demanded innovation. Unlike today when they want everyone to be the same, you couldn't get a deal unless you were different. |
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Leslie Ehrlich
From:
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
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Posted 5 Mar 2008 11:20 pm
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| I prefer to go in my own direction because I'm fed up with struggling to sound like someone else. |
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David Mason
From:
Cambridge, MD, USA
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Posted 6 Mar 2008 2:46 am
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I happen to collect quotes from Very Important People on this Very Subject, so you're in luck:
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"We need the restraints of convention and structure to help us avoid self-indulgence, since we are all self-indulgent to some extent. How do you know you're being self-indulgent? I don't know. In the end, everything's a question of taste, I suppose - up to the point when taste disappears, and you're in a state of grace where taste doesn't matter." Now he's thinking and speaking of himself, playing on some present-day stage. "You're in another reality, an altered reality, an altered state of consciousness. Well, who wants to be in the usual state of consciousness, as it's been fabricated by society? The intellectualization of everything, the discrimination of everything - and we take that as being the most real!"
"I don't buy that," says John McLaughlin, emphatically. "I think the world is music and the world is madness. I do, I really do. I thank God every day that I have another day, because it may sound trite, but it's a miracle to be alive. And so here I am, and I'm going to do whatever I can, and that's it! It's as simple as that!" |
http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/mclaughlin/art/madness.html#eq
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| "Remember that your improvisation must have feeling. It must swing and it must have beauty, be it the fragile beauty of a snowflake or the terrible beauty of an erupting volcano. Beauty--no matter how disturbing or how still--is always true. Don't be afraid to let go of the things you know. Defy your weaker, safer self. Create. Make music." |
<CENTER>- Sonny Sharrock</CENTER>
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| "The essence of art is form: it is to defeat oppositions, to conquer opposing forces, to create coherence from every centrifugal force, from all things that have been deeply and eternally alien to one another before and outside this form. The creation of form is the last judgment over things, a last judgment that redeems all that could be redeemed, that enforces salvation on all things with divine force." |
<CENTER>- George Lukacs</CENTER>
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| "You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." |
<CENTER>- George W. Bush</CENTER>
It has been said innumerable times that creativity is actually the recombination of disparate elements - country + R&B = rock & roll, for example. Unfortunately, now that that little (uncreative?) factoid is being taught in schools and PBS specials, you end up with didgeridoos on blues records, Madonna in harem pants, and Cowboy Troy.... I think it probably helps to like all your sources, work really hard, and be a genius too. (Especially the latter.)
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| "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration>" |
<CENTER>- Thomas Alva Edison</CENTER>
(as is now well-documented, Edison also had a great knack for intellectual thievery, too....  )
P.S. -> a few added bits then I'll shut up (for a while):
A) Most creative geniuses are very well-versed in the history of what came before them, but at some point make a conscious break and seal themselves off to chase an individual path. Jazz in particular is full of examples like Miles Davis, Coltrane & McLaughlin who consciously chose radically different, even tonally-offensive routes to divorce themselves from the mainstream (Davis & Coltrane were ragged on for their lack of vibrato in the jazz press);
B) The existing society has a huge amount of influence on how "creativity" and genius is perceived in context.
Ex. 1: Mozart had just a few tiny tweak's difference between his deviations from the rules of classical composition as compared to Haydn's deviations, but these were enough in that society to vault him to genius status and this distinction has only become magnified over the years. If you played a Haydn & a Mozart symphony for anyone uneducated in that genre, there's no way they'd know the difference.
Ex. 2: Buddy Guy was largely playing the "Hendrix schtick" in 1965 or so, but there just weren't enough stoned white kids to sell it to, or the mechanisms for crossover that were there for Hendrix 2 years later in London. While B.B., Freddie & Albert King were all double-billing at the Fillmore with the Grateful Dead a few years later, Buddy Guy was turned down by some promoters because he was "too much like Hendrix." 
In this cultural context, sometimes old people just have to die and young ones take over... right now, the aging boomers seem to have a stranglehold on the radio & television programming and a young musician's chances of being judged "creative" probably best lies in their ability to subtly mirror the Beatles, playing a Celtic didgeridoo in harem pants with a soul patch. It's not that there isn't great new music being made, it's that the boomer producers in the music business refuse to grow up, turn the reins over to the "kids" and shuffle off to oblivion. No - Herman's Hermits weren't geniuses, and the "geniuses of Motown" were old people writing pop drivel to exploit the inanity of 11 year-old girls.... Decaying societies always have a last neo-classical "retro" period before the collapse, fortunately it's a bit too early to say that that's the issue here. Maybe. |
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Donny Hinson
From:
Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.
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Posted 6 Mar 2008 8:47 am
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| I can sum it up in two words... "Don't copy". The caveat is, though, that some people are blessed with imagination and creativity, and some aren't. Temper that with the thought that some new stuff is accepted and admired, while other new stuff goes largely ignored or scorned, and you'll see that luck plays a part in it, too. |
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Steinar Gregertsen
From:
Arendal, Norway, R.I.P.
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Posted 6 Mar 2008 8:58 am
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Boredom.
I was bored to the point of desperation by my own guitar playing and felt the need to pick up another instrument - which led me to the lap steel guitar.. This has again rubbed off on my guitar playing in a positive way, and also the music I make.
Plus, not the least - I finally realized that I'll never be a 'star' anyway and might just as well just play what's on my mind and care less about pleasing 'the masses'. Definitely opened doors to my creativity...... 
Steinar
_________________
"Play to express, not to impress"
Website - YouTube |
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chas smith R.I.P.
From:
Encino, CA, USA
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Posted 6 Mar 2008 10:38 pm
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| so they'll contrive anything novel and hope they'll score big with the listeners |
those guys don't last very long, especially today with the overwhelming glut of material out there.
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| insecurities (if there are any) within the artist's personality that give birth to such innovation and creativity |
I don't agree that insecurities (fears) give birth to innovation and creativity. I think innovation is the ability to "see the connections", and creativity, from my perspective, is mostly trial and error without giving up.
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| Is it reactionary? Does he/she one day decide "I hate what I'm hearing all around me. That music is crap. I'm gonna show these people what I think should..." |
All "reactionary" music is rooted in what its reacting against. Currently, there is a post-Cagean/hyper-minimalism form that is a reaction to the zillions of notes, overblown music. In the same regard, Minimalism in art was a reaction to the over-emotionalism of Ab-Ex.
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| Is it like the need to have kids? |
That one has always puzzled me, but then, I don't own a tv, either.
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| What do you use as a stimulant...It's a phenomenon that's mystified me from the get-go as everyone who has had some personal success with it has a different path as well as the way to approach it. |
I work with instruments that I've designed and fabricated and I incorporate the steel guitar in my compositions. It also helps that I studied music.
If you agree that work (not labor) has value and meaning, as far as what to do in life, then what you work with/work on, is probably going to be something that you enjoy working with. Like building hot rods or guitars or cooking or working with sound.
I have a shop and a studio, that I built (part of the bonding process), and what these give me is a place to exercise and enjoy my skills. That in turn validates, to me, what I do and who I think I am.
I prefer working with complex sounds and I build instruments to generate the kinds of sounds I enjoy. Then it's a matter of how to organize these sounds to be compositions. Not a simple task. What I think I'm doing is taking sounds that border on the noise realm, and set them in an environment that becomes "musical". Not simple, because, we've all grown up in an environment of 12-tone music and diatonic harmony, and we are constantly surrounded and bombarded with it. The further one gets away from that, the less that the traditional techniques apply and other techniques have to be developed. That's the fun part.
You might say, why not just write pretty music? And I would probably respond, how much more do we need? Which is not to say that I don't enjoy listening to pretty music, but it's been done, far better than I could do it. So, what I do, either you find it interesting or you don't. |
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Kevin Hatton
From:
Buffalo, N.Y.
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Posted 7 Mar 2008 6:11 am
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| One must ponder the incomprehensible possibilies of the universe while at the same time struggle to keep one self grounded in the ironies of life. Eschewing the negative and accentuating the postive in a world of ever increasing normality certainly does hinder the possibilties of attainment of that niravana which we all seek to attain. Especially when you get an order of turned egg salad at a Kosher Deli. If Mary's daughter is my daughter's mother, what relationship am I to Mary? |
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Andy Greatrix
From:
Edmonton Alberta
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Posted 7 Mar 2008 8:29 am
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Think of your brain as a computer that defrags while you sleep. If you practice, study and consciously want to go outside the box of what we know during the day often enough, the answer will come to you in your dreams.
Many times I've pondered hard on a musical problem and then dreamed a solution. I would get up in the middle of the night and try it, and it worked. |
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Webb Kline
From:
Orangeville, PA
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Posted 7 Mar 2008 9:50 am
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I learned to play 10 different instruments in my attempt to maintain creativity and it works to degree.
I also find that I tend change genre preferences with the seasons, just allowing myself to kind of go with the flow of my feelings, and that works to a degree as well.
My son is a busy session drummer and he has a remarkable profound approach. The first thing he does when he arrives at the studio is to ask fer a copy of the song lyrics. He studies them. If the songwriter is present, he asks him or her questions about what inspired the song. He then strives to communicate those feelings rhythmically. I know that sounds kinda out there, but it really works. I've been trying it myself, and I find myself much happier with the results. I never used to even pay attention to lyrics and I think it was a big mistake.
Yet, when all else fails, I just get away from it all for a while. Let my brain defragment. I've kept my CDL and I will sometimes even take a job driving truck for a while to change my perspective. The mountains, desert and ocean are very inspiring, invigorating to me, and they always have a positive impact on the way I play and write.
Music should communicate life, and if our life becomes nothing but music, we have nothing to make music about except music itself--and money--and we all know how damaging that can be to any kind of creativity, but that's another topic altogether.
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Kevin Macneil Brown
From:
Montpelier, VT, USA
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Posted 8 Mar 2008 9:07 am
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This thread is fascinating, and I'm really enjoying all the responses.
As I grow older--coming up on 50--I find that the creative process engages me ever deeper with feelings and concepts that seem to need expression; that ask me to explore and communicate them --however strange someone on the receiving end might find them to be!
I compose ambient music, write, and paint mostly to express the sense of mystery and joy I find in the natural world.(Though I write love songs and country story songs, too.) I guess I would say that mountains, lakes, shorelines, and sky are my main stimulants.
For me, the creative impulse always comes back to my personal need to manifest and share something like what the poet Charles Olson referred to as "energy transferred from where the poet got it." |
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Barry Scott
From:
San Diego, California, USA
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Posted 14 Mar 2008 8:45 am
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| Jim Cohen wrote: |
| This sounds like a Hankey subject, only readable. |
Tha's one of the funniest comments I have ever read on the forum. |
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