Reclaiming Creativity in Music Performance

RECLAIMING CREATIVITY IN MUSIC PERFORMANCE

a short essay by Raul Gomez

As a “classically trained” violinist, I have spent much time during all stages of my artistic development in a practice room trying to master the instrument with which I make a living. Starting a couple of years ago, I gradually started to feel like something was missing in my music making. Even though I still loved music as much as I always had, the passion from childhood had started to fade away. After 14 years of training for several hours almost every day, practicing violin repertoire and playing in orchestras, I felt stuck. I had to take action. That is how I began a personal quest in search for this lost “something.”

This search brought me, in the summer of 2009, to Otterbein College outside Columbus, Ohio for Christian Howes’ Creative Strings Workshop. After meeting Howes and the crowd of young fiddlers hanging out in the dorm lobby despite the late hour (I arrived around midnight), I sat down to chat with people. Before I could have any significant conversation with anybody, a girl got her fiddle out. It seemed as if the sounds of her strings being tuned ignited a chain reaction of excitement, and before long, I was sitting in a lobby full of smiling, dancing fiddlers “jamming” the night away.

In this lobby, the fiddlers were not only incredibly talented violinists, but also violists and cellists with amazing technical ability, at a level that many classical musicians would admire. They were all taking turns playing solos, while everybody else accompanied with their instruments, keeping a ‘groove’ worthy of a Grand Ole Opry full house. I was absolutely overwhelmed, not to say quite intimidated.

These people were having fun. I took my violin out too, and tried to join in the accompaniment, listening as hard as I could to their chord changes and trying to keep a low profile so that I wouldn’t have to play a solo. I would have been terrified. Before long, it was 2 in the morning and my body had caught up with my head. All those hours of driving from Baton Rouge had taken their toll, so I excused myself and retired to my bedroom. I left the party while it was still at full swing.

I knew then than that during the week ahead I was certain to get much closer to, even find, what I had been looking for. It turned out I was right. I (re)discovered that passion in music making lies in one crucial aspect that I had lost: creativity. These fiddlers were creating something. Their music, improvised on the spot, was full of freshness, spontaneity and ingenuity. And they seemed extremely at ease. It was as natural as if they were expressing themselves in their native tongue.

Whenever I share this story with fellow students of music performance, they normally seem to understand exactly what I mean when I say that something is missing. I believe what’s missing is creativity. Music students train intensively to master their instruments or voice to faithfully reproduce the works of composers. In these long practice sessions much time is devoted to building a strong technique and learning the repertoire, yet very little or no training is directed towards the development of musical creativity. Many of these musicians thrive on stage when performing a symphony or a concerto, yet they freeze in horror when they’re requested to improvise over a chord progression or to make something up on the spot with their instruments. They seem afraid to share their own original musical ideas, or even worse, they think they simply don’t have any original ideas to share.

In my opinion, this is a big problem that presents an even bigger danger. Put in the crudest terms, music students risk becoming “brain-dead performers.” They risk becoming machines that reproduce pitches at a learned speed, volume, phrasing and intention. It seems similar to reading a language fluently without understanding the words being read. Musicians should learn how to use their language to express their own ideas, just like writers do with their words. And creativity in music, just like in writing, should be practiced.

It is the premise of this essay, then, that all students of music performance should learn how to improvise in a variety of styles. Training in improvisation should be required for all music performance degrees in universities and conservatories. This would help students become more complete artists by developing their creativity.

David Graham notes: “Traditionally, the focus of music education has been on performance, theory, and music history, with the dominant emphasis on performance. Most of us probably spend the majority of our class time teaching techniques of performance. Are we, in the process, also teaching towards creativity in performance?”[1] Creativity, nevertheless, is a word that escapes easy definition. Williamon, Thompson, Lisboa and Wiffen offer “three quite distinct concepts: (1) ‘creativity’ as a component of human cognition and psychological functioning; (2) ‘originality’ as the probability that a thought, behavior, or product has not occurred previously; and (3) ‘value’ as determined by the society that witnesses the thought, behavior or product.”[2]

All three proposed facets of creativity are represented beautifully in music improvising. Improvisation should be practiced just like any other skill, and the early results of this practicing are not exclusive to the skill in question: “improved efficiency, fluency, flexibility, capacity for error correction and,” more specific to improvising, “expressiveness,” claims Jeff Pressing, adding later “inventiveness and the achievement of coherence.”[3]

Besides being a valuable tool to unleash creativity in music making, having good improvisational skills has many practical benefits for the “classically trained” musician. Learning how to improvise over complex chord progressions helps the musician understand “the works” of harmony and voice leading. This translates into better interpretations of standard instrumental or vocal repertoire.

Being fluent in musical improvisation is also a useful skill that can get the musician out of trouble both on stage and off. It can be a “life-saving” device when performing a concerto with orchestra, for example. Willis Delony, LSU Barineau Professor of Keyboard Studies and Professor of Jazz Studies at LSU, played Gershwin Piano Concerto in F in 1999 with Baton Rouge Symphony. He recounts:

Back then the orchestra did two concerts, one on Thursday and one on Saturday. The first performance went great, so the second concert had a more relaxed feeling to it. I got distracted during a tutti section where the piano plays arpeggiated lines accompanying the main theme by the orchestra, and I blanked out. Luckily I knew the chord changes, so I simply improvised over them until I found my place at the beginning of the next solo        section.

Furthermore, improvisation is almost a necessary skill for successful “gigs” in the world outside the walls of the Conservatory. How often does the hard-working wedding-string-quartet have to excuse themselves by saying: “Oh, we’re so sorry, we don’t have that piece” to a request as simple as: “Do you know this song… umm… Ode to Joy?” If it’s not in their gig book, they can’t play it. The aural skills necessary to play a tune by ear and accompany it come only from practice.

Seen from a broader perspective, performers of music should be creative artists for the sake of the art and creativity itself. In my opinion, this is more important that any of the practical benefits mentioned above. If one of the objectives of music performance is to communicate through non-verbal sounds, then the performer should be able to express ideas in his own musical voice. The focus of music performance should not be to master an instrument so that one can play one or several pieces of music. It should be to understand music and be able to create it with an instrument.

By no means am I trying to belittle the achievements of so many great composers that have graced us with their creations. On the contrary, musicians should be inspired by them to express their own musical ideas through improvisation and eventually, composition. After all, many of the greatest composers were excellent improvisers.

It is understandable that a group as large as a symphony orchestra needs a conductor to make artistic decisions and a composer to provide material (or some kind of direction) for the orchestra to function. It is virtually impossible to include every single player’s creative input into the process.  This is why the musician should look for these opportunities individually (in his everyday practicing) or in smaller group settings such as free improvisation groups, jazz combos, baroque ensembles and popular music bands.

The musician faces then important questions. How much time should he spend developing his musical creativity while trying to stay competitive in the demanding classical music arena? Is spending time on developing improvisational skills a worthy pursuit? In the conclusion to their essay Spontaneity and Creativity in Performance, Chaffin, Lemieux and Chen state that “solo recitals in the Western classical music tradition place extraordinary demands on the performer. Performances must be practiced to the point that they can be delivered automatically in order to ensure reliability under the pressures of the concert stage.”[4] They argue that there is creativity involved in the initial phases of learning and practicing a piece of music. The process of making preliminary artistic decisions about the interpretation of a particular piece is a creative one. Then, when the musician finally presents his work on stage, creativity lies “in the ability to control, and thus to modify, a highly prepared performance.”[5]

Indeed, highly polished performance at the highest artistic level offers moments of undeniable spontaneity and originality in interpretation. I cannot deny that. I do believe though that the development of improvisational skills would only help make these moments happen more often and more naturally in the developing music student, along with the other benefits mentioned above.

The fiddlers in the lobby, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, have been practicing improvisation for years. Through constant creativity, they have found a way to keep music fresh and have turned it into a true way of expressing their ideas. As a music lover and a professional musician, I want to be able to do exactly that. I believe that if all performers of classical music were to sharpen their creative skills, we would have a more fruitful musical scene where players go beyond reproducing sounds and enter the realm of true self-expression. It is unrealistic to expect that all musicians become skilled improvisers, but being in touch with their creative side may bring about direct practical results such as better understanding and interpretation of works from the traditional repertoire. In other words, disciplined implementation of creativity would produce more complete artists.

One way to incorporate this important aspect of artistic development into the education of young musicians would be to add training in improvisation to all curricula of music performance in Conservatories and Universities. Just like students are required to take courses in music theory, music history, music literature and humanities to become better musicians, they should be required and encouraged to train their musical creativity. The joy, passion and fun that I witnessed at Christian Howes’ Creative Strings Workshop should happen every day in every practice room, bar gig or concert stage.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chaffin, Roger, Anthony F. Lemieux, and Colleen Chen. “Spontaneity and Creativity in Highly Practised Performance.” In Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, edited by Irene Deliege and Geraint A. Wiggins, 200. New York: Psychology Press, 2006.

Delony, Willis. Interview by Raul Gomez, 5 October 2009. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA.

Graham, David. “Teaching for Creativity in Music Performance.” Music Educators Journal 84, no. 5 (March 1998): 24-28.

Pressing, Jeff. “Improvisation: Methods and Models.” In Generative Processes in Music: The Pshychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, edited by John A. Sloboda, 129. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Williamon, Aaron, Sam Thompson, Tania Lisboa, and Charles Wiffen. “Creativity, Originality, and Value in Music Performance.” In Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, edited by Irene Deliege and Geraint A. Wiggins, 161. New York: Psychology Press, 2006.

[2]. Williamon et al., 162.

[3]. Pressing, 129.

[4]. Chaffin, Lemieux and Chen, 214.

[5]. Ibid