Live Creatively to Teach Creatively

Reflections toward a future

I have been thinking a lot about creativity lately. From attending the Ojai Music Festival over the summer to reading Alex Hutchinson’s The Explorer’s Gene to listening to my favorite podcasts (one of which introduced me to Hutchinson’s book) to guest lecturing for second-year engineering students, I have been deeply immersed in creative and innovative ideas. I also have been engaging more with my own creativity, including writing my first poems since fifth grade Haiku and some simple music composition exercises.

I think as classical musicians we tend to include ourselves when we talk of “the arts” but we maybe don’t include ourselves when we speak of “creatives” as a class of people. Some of us in fact use the term “recreative” to describe what we do—we aren’t really creating anything when we perform but our interpretations of existing musical works are recreations of them for an audience. I’m not here to settle that argument but I have come to believe that creativity is crucial in training musicians and educators and I have been experimenting with ways to help my students explore creativity for several years now. My current weekly technique assignment syllabus is based on Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. I chose a few of the habits she includes in the book and built assignments around them that have allowed me to include activities like improvisation, simple composition, and content creation for my students. Mostly I’m trying to get them to awaken or reawaken their own creativity which I find is underdeveloped in many entering college music majors. They understand and appreciate creativity but they put a high threshold on defining it—people who write novels and symphonies are creative, but not so much the rest of us.

The half-life of knowledge

I was also inspired to include more creativity in my own life and in my teaching by a concept called the “half-life of knowledge”, attributed to the economist Fritz Machlup. The half-life of knowledge is the amount of time it takes for half of what you know about a given field to become outdated, inaccurate, or irrelevant. Various pontificators will weigh in with their estimate of the current half-life in a given field, with some estimating that computer science and information technology can have a half-life of a few months to a couple of years, while other fields like medicine might be three to seven years. It got me thinking—what is the half-life of knowledge in teaching classical music? On one hand, the values we hold in our field have not changed significantly in the last 300 or 400 years and while new repertoire is constantly being added, it leverages much of the same knowledge and skills (notation and its interpretation, basic techniques of tone production). There have been some significant advancements in understanding human learning in the last century, but many of them have yet to have a significant impact in the way musicians teach. Partly this is due to our audience, which drives (or doesn’t) innovation by preferences. In the current world those preferences mostly value repertoire that it is 100-300 years old. While we can certainly come up with ways to advance the performance of this repertoire (and there is always at least some new repertoire entering the canon), we do not have market forces or life-and-death matters driving innovation in our field as you might find in technology and medicine. Which led to another question—does a decrease in the half-life of knowledge follow creative activity in a field or does it necessitate it? A classic chicken-and-egg question but I think it is clear that much of our current technology did not spring from necessity; rather, we were presented with ideas, products, and processes we didn’t know we wanted or needed. Yes, the market responded but I’m not sure there was a market for (for example) an iPhone before it existed.

Where is our iPhone moment?

So where is classical music’s iPhone moment? Did it come and go and we missed it? Have we not found it yet? This is difficult to pin down since the music world (in which Western classical is one of the most standardized genres) is becoming increasingly fragmented. I’m not sure anyone can claim to clearly identify and understand an “audience” for music of any genre. More importantly, where is music pedagogy’s iPhone moment? Where are the ideas of teaching and learning that will force us to re-examine our assumptions and begin experimenting and innovating just to keep up with new expectations of student achievement?

I think it is happening now and it is happening in the diminishment of the “talent cult”. I have been asked directly whether I believe talent exists. I don’t have an answer for that because I’m not sure what talent is or how it can be measured. What I do know is that it is not important in my teaching. It is absolutely a non-factor. I don’t look for talent when I’m recruiting and auditioning students, and I don’t consider talent when I’m making weekly or long-term assignments. I certainly don’t consider talent when discussing career and artistic goals with my students. I have been called irresponsible for this—how dare I feed the false hopes of a student who lacks the talent to realize those hopes? If you have read my previous posts, you know that I just don’t see the world that way. I’m not seeking to nail down the “potential” of each student and to predict their progress along a career path that I define. Rather, I’m trying to help them imagine all the possible paths their artistic and life journey could take. I won’t lie to a student who has an undeveloped skill set. They need to know that their journey toward a professional performing career will be much longer than those of their more accomplished peers. The difficulty of it will be compounded by the late start—they will feel a sense of urgency that can erode confidence in their abilities and are at an age where self-awareness of the learning process can be paralyzing. But who am I to say that they can’t do it?

Dreaming of a world…

I guest presented in a second-year engineering class several weeks ago and talked about the short novel Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. Lightman found himself fascinated by Einstein’s famous “thought experiments” and wrote “dreams” that he might have had while contemplating the implications of rethinking time and space. Here’s a short sample:

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly. For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over. Traders do not know that they will make the same bargain again and again. Politicians do not know that they will shout from the same lectern an infinite number of times in the cycles of time. Parents treasure the first laugh from their child as if they will not hear it again.

This is what I’m asking music teachers to do: have a dream about a world where talent doesn’t exist. Think through the implications. What if our role as teachers isn’t to identify and develop talent? What if we just help students see the skills that they have and add to those skills? What if we encourage them to explore the opportunities that are available to them with the skills they have and see which opportunities will open for them if they increase their skill set? What if we point out the well-established paths that lead to the most desired opportunities but also point out the less-traveled paths that diverge and might be more interesting? What if we encourage them to explore their own paths, creating new opportunities for themselves and for others?There are many of us who teach this way, and maybe we are being irresponsible by telling students to explore something other than pursuit of existing living-wage positions in music or by developing skills and interests that don’t lead directly to those positions. As for me, I’ll continue to encourage my students to explore and be creative, and I’ll continue to model those behaviors in my own life, teaching, and performing.

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