The Path to Creativity

A few years back I was an airport person, logging too many nights in hotels and thinking as much about management styles as I was about music. One day while I was waiting for a plane, browsing through the airport bookstore, I came across Patricia Pitcher’s Artists, Craftsman and Technocrats. In my opinion, it’s a brilliant piece of work that really puts creativity into context. Dr. Pitcher traced the life of a big company and found that the number of truly creative people – the ones who came up with the new ideas – were few and far between. She also came to the conclusion that maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. People with that kind of creativity are unpredictable and not always good at bringing those ideas into reality. It was the “craftsman,” the ones who had worked their way up in the business, who had the practical understanding of what would work. They could take those new ideas and figure out how to make them fly. Fortunately for me, I was creative enough to be able to segue my way out of University administration and into the position of Composer-in-Residence with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. That led to one of the most creative periods in my life.

It was around that time that I was asked to be a guest speaker at the Canadian Arts Summit and my topic was supposed to be creativity. As I thought more about the whole concept, I came to the conclusion that context is everything, that the creative mind works best coming up with solutions to limitations. For an audience at a classical symphony orchestra concert, Anders Hillborg’s Rap Notes might be a stunning revelation. To a hip-hop audience, it might sound a bit cheesy, or even lame, and they might not get the reference to Mozart in the last section, which to me, is an amazing post-modern stroke of genius. On Saturday night we’ll be sampling music from an Art of Time Ensemble concert, where Artistic Director Andrew Burashko asked some of his favorite singer-songwriters to get inspired by Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet. If you just heard David Wall’s piece What’s On My Plate out of the context of that concert, you would likely think the words were funny, but when you know the melody he uses from the Schumann its hilarious.

It was seeing Matthew Barney’s film Drawing Restraint 9 that got me going again on this topic. Barney uses this idea of working against resistance to challenge creativity. I must admit that I went to see the movie because Bjork wrote the music and I am playing some of it on our Soundtrack Sunday feature this week. I’m not usually a huge fan of performance art and this film has to be one of the biggest scale performance pieces ever mounted. Its part of a whole series based on the idea of working against resistance, just like athletes uses resistance training to improve their performance. Looking at history, it’s hard to argue with the concept. Beethoven struggled against his deafness to create some of the most amazing music ever written. The new classical composers who came out of the repressive Soviet regime, like Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt and others, overcame official restrictions to develop individual styles and establish several new artistic movements. The whole idea of indie rock is based on groups fighting to play outside the stylistic boundaries set by the recording industry. We kick Friday’s show off with No Friend Oh! from the new Xiu Xiu disc. They’ve made a career out of exploring society’s forbidden topics, like alternate sexual orientations and suicide.

Up to this point in world history, there has generally been an official artistic voice. All others have usually been silenced, sometimes forcefully. It’s only been a relatively short period of time since music by women has been openly celebrated. On Friday night we’ll spend some time sampling the musical evolution of Veda Hille. Her unique view of the world pulls in sounds and concepts that challenge us to hear and think differently.

The last few generations have pushed against Society’s restraints and that has led to an unparalleled time of creativity in contemporary music. I know a lot of people are worried about where things are going in the music and media business, afraid of total collapse. But I say bring it on. Our inherent creativity will find a solution to the limitations of the current situation. Great, interesting music is being written in all genres and there is an audience out there hoping to hear it. The problem is making the connection. This music is not always easy to find. Let me invited you to make The Signal your happy place, where you can come and test out some new artists. We are doing what we can get overcome the contextual restraints.