That music/awareness thread, part XXXVII

[KB305@aol.com]

In a message dated 01/18/2001 6:57:38 PM Central Standard Time, 
Jonathan@full-moon.com writes:


> In order to be creative, one needs to learn and practice.


I disagree.  
We are born creative.
(Ever notice that art made by children is so without guile or pretense?)
It's a basic function of our humanity.
It's a gift, and I believe everyone has it.  Maybe not in ways that we all 
can see.
My father was born with one external ear (a birth defect), and doesn't hear 
music the same way others do.  So music is not on his palette.  But he holds 
several patents for industrial things he's invented.  Is he creative?  Yes.
Learning and practicing simply expand the choices we have when we want to 
'express' something in whatever language we choose to be creative in.  But 
learning and practicing themselves are not necessarily creative acts.
On the other hand, practicing can be like writing to the writer: keep after 
it, and one can build the mental and spiritual capability of visiting with 
the Muse often and easily.
I'm one of those guys who has been to music school and can spell a Db13b5 
chord, and know which mode to play over it.  I know a rebbe up the street 
that can read and write in Hebrew, and that's no more or less of a feat.
I remember composition lessons in music school: One professor differed from 
others in that he did not try to steer my pieces a certain way, and didn't 
over-analyze what I was doing.  He believed that we could work intuitively.  
Intuition is something everyone has, and among musicians, I find that it is 
sharpened through... experience.  When I have my guitar in my hands, I'm 
adding little bits of experience.  Same as when I'm playing a gig, or drawing 
notes on a piece of paper, or listening to Bitches Brew, which I was a few 
minutes ago.  
It is possible to make beautiful music without knowing much about it.  I can 
think of lots of people who have, and do.  (Don Van Vliet leaps immediately 
to mind.)
As musicians, we often look for benchmarks, things to emulate, things to copy 
and steal.  Sometimes we gather up all these things, and synthesize something 
new out of them.  I truly believe that everything I listen to and love sooner 
or later shows up in my playing.  The synthesis for me is about how to 
reconcile things that I love, even if they are widely scattered.  I love 
be-bop, Eno, and Elvis Costello, just to name a few of the easy ones.  
(During last night's gig, we managed to cover all of those bases in some way. 
 I consdier that an honest performance.)
Sometimes we run out of things to look at as examples.  Sometimes we get 
tired of them, and want something we haven't heard yet in any way shape or 
form.  But we don't know that unless we're listening in the first place.
The creative impulse, as I see it today, is this: I make music outside of my 
body to match the music I hear inside my body.  If it already exists, I don't 
need to write it.  We create things because we believe, or hallucinate, or 
imagine them, and wish to see/hear them, make them, share them, offer them to 
our deities, whatever.  We say: look what I made.
It's a basic human function: the need to be seen.  The need to affirm the 'I 
am'.  
Not to go too far in this direction, but there is an old word that means 'I 
am'.  It's pronounced 'Jehovah'.  The whole idea is pretty old.  What happens 
after the original idea... is up to us, every day.  

We can have the desire to create stifled by lack of reception.  But not 
necessarily killed.  Some people put away their horns and have children 
instead.  That is no less of a feat either, and in some quarters, is regarded 
as more.

We don't see the world as it is, but as we are.  - Anais Nin

k