Written for the RC Newsletter, September 2014:

Obviously, creativity can exist everywhere and in everything, and is not the sole possession of the creative artist. The RC summer readings study creativity from many non-arts related angles, especially as it relates to education and learning.  I am offering my thoughts on the practice of creativity not only as one of the performance teachers in the college, but also an active performer on the cello: practicing the creative and interpretive arts is a great way to explore your creative processes. Using them as a gateway to discovering your creative brain is not only smart, but also fun and definitely educational, whether or not you intend to make art your profession and life’s purpose. This is why the RC Arts practicum is an integral part of the curriculum of the college.

Creative artists are often portrayed like magicians or shamans, in control of higher powers and inspirations that strike randomly and are all consuming. In all honesty, the idea of inspiration as the genesis for creativity is a romanticized 19th century product of great PR. I rather like thinking it’s the other way around: creativity is the genesis for the inspirations and if your creative brain is active, ideas will come. If you sit around twiddling your thumbs, waiting for inspiration to ascend from the heavens you might have to wait a long time. If you get lucky, and it happens to come anyway, what then? If you haven’t developed the necessary competence to follow through on the inspiration, it will only really exist in your head, and maybe your heart. I would rather it become something real and substantial! 

“Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.” (Dancer Twyla Tharp). The most successful artists are mostly kind of boring, and, usually, incredibly self-disciplined and organized. I, too, am a great fan of the creative habit. It is an active practice of daily creativity, best done at the same time each day, meticulously organized and grounded in skill, or in building of a skill. It is important to define the skill: it could be as conventional as playing the C Major scale perfectly in tune on the cello, or as broadly defined as taking the sounds in your daily environment and organizing them into a piece of music in your chosen medium (recorded, live, rhythmic, vocal, improvised, composed etc). Creative habit is setting up conditions in such a way that they enable the creative processes in your brain – once those processes are activated, creativity is easy. And, in the most wonderful, or at times inconvenient and messy ways, they carry over to all activities, not just the artistic ones.

There are several facts about my own creative brain that I know to be true:

1.     It does not get activated on facebook or e-mail. Most often the best ideas come shortly after I have started my daily practicing, while doing the warm-ups that essentially stay the same every day.

2.     It needs time, space and freedom, not only to work through the idea but also to let the subconscious mind process the new information or discovery

3.     It wants to be grounded in a discipline that needs constant, active nurturing

4.     It finds working with limits often liberating, and helpful

So what can YOU do to explore your creative processes in the RC? I guess first you have to decide the medium – painting, printing, ceramics, writing fiction, plays or poetry, acting, playing an instrument, singing, composing, improvising…and then go do it, every day! Instead of waiting around for the inspiration to come, enroll in an arts class, start learning a skill and practice every day.  

I think with a few more difficult and lengthy concert programs in the horizon I have entered a new realm in my creative process. I feel my brain changing, and I am searching for the right ways to work to preserve the old and apply the new. With more experience improvising, memorizing pieces is at once easier, and harder - initially employing harmonic and formal analysis makes things stick a lot quicker! Being improvisatory about bowing, affect and articulation makes things more fluid and a lot less reliable! I'm finding that if I move back to the old reliance of muscle memory and even for a second loose track of the form, I flounder. It's really the skill of being at once in the present, and in the future. Which brings me to the actual point of time....   

These days time is moving a lot quicker than it used to. There just seems to be a lot less of it. Yes, I am a working mom of three with a second career as a performer. Yes, I am still learning my new instrument and I don't have unlimited time to practice. Enter the new stage in my creative process - panic mode. A week before the recital when my brain is too full of music and none of it makes sense. This is actually a familiar stage in the process, but I don't remember being this scared - I think I used to trust the process more and know that this is just part of it. I think I have figured out why, too - enter the kids. With kids, a week can easily be obliterated by one of them getting sick, crack their head open, get into trouble, you name it ... I think the newly found panic stage of my process is caused the unpredictability of life with children. It used to be that if I needed to, I could play 8 hours a day for a week and be totally ready for a recital in a few days. Not so much anymore. Now, however, I have other weaponry gifted by motherhood: I am really good at compartmentalization. I can also get a lot done in very little time (maybe that's why time feels shorter?). I have superpowers in concentration. And, ultimately, my kids will still love me even if don't play the high F# exactly in tune. 

The concept of time keeps changing!    

The two stages of my creative process seem to be pretty solidified by now (for classical performance anyway): the learning process and the performative process. I think that the essential thing here is that I start with a piece that has already been composed, and meticulously notated. The process varies depending on the genre - whether or not it's a musical language I'm already familiar with, or one that I have to learn (this happens a lot in new music...) 

The steps in the learning process are always the same, regardless of genre - of course, depending on the difficulty of the piece, the weighing of the categories can change rather drastically! 
Starting a new piece in so fun, exhilarating, and pretty soon frustrating. I often do a first, quick pass at fingerings and bowings, just to have something to work from, and assume that these will change as the piece matures. The more I learn, the more I understand that studying the piece without my instrument is essential, and the sooner I do it, the better: I need to know about form, harmony, details of performance instructions...but especially harmony! Starting to pay more attention the actual chord analysis on Bach has essentially revolutionized how I practice, and memorize it now -- every time I find something new and my mind is blown all over again.  

My favorite part of the learning process...Drilling. No thinking, just doing and listening, purely physical. Finding the most efficient and elegant way of playing a passage, then solidifying it and making it easy. I love the use of gadgets - metronome, egg timer, tuner, recording devices. 

The most difficult part: artistic choices. The more choices there are, the harder it is for me. Luckily, I have had some very excellent teachers and I know I lot about the history of the different cello styles, so a lot of times I already know the route I'm meant to take. Again, new music is in a different category - I usually hope that by the artistic choices time, I have learned to speak the language of the composer, and I know the dialect that I want to speak. 

This is kind of a long story so I'm going chronological - 

E3Q has practiced two times since school is out. In and of itself that is remarkable. Mark has written a sweet chord sequence in C phrygian, and so I've been playing around ("fooling around") with the Phrygian. I love it - I think it's my current favorite mode. I have also been toying around with another progression that I wrote, and thinking about how to use the modes to write a Prelude for the Lullaby Project (recording soon!). At the same time, my friend Maria and I have been picking repertoire to play for a concert this summer, and I thought of the Cassado Solo Suite, which I have neither played or thought of in 13 years. Today I decided to play all the C modes (Major, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian...) to warm up, before reading through the Cassado to see what was what. And, low and behold, how does the Cassado start? First declamation, D dorian. Repeat that in C mixolydian, then c lydian. And so forth. The whole thing is modal. And I heard them, and was able to recognize them by ear and also by pattern for the first time. I didn't really know that before: I probably knew that he piece was modal in some way, but I didn't really KNOW it. Mind completely blown. 

What sort of freaks me out is that apparently my ear knew, and nudged my sub-conscience ("remember the Cassado?"), but it wasn't until I actually played the piece that I realized how exactly the Cassado fits all the other things I am currently working through. 

The things us classical instrumentalists hear from our teachers, "always practice with thought","don't just fool around but have intent" are certainly words of wisdom. I know that growing up, "fooling around" on the cello, and "playing without thinking" were somewhat synonymous. Now I am really questioning that. In fact, when I "fool around" with the modes or any other set of of parameters, I am thinking very hard and certainly, have just as much intent, if not more, than when I read music or practice music written down by somebody. I think "fooling around with intent" should be highly encouraged in instrumental learning! I really would love to see some brain imaging done on improvisers brain compared to a brain reading music...The two processes are incredibly different.

I'm learning so many new things that my brain is on total overload - and, as usual, I feel like I have so many good idea floating around I have no way of remembering them or writing them down, and certainly no way to follow through on any of them.

I got schooled a bit by the good professors, in preparation for our concert of the Dohnanyi Piano Quintet this Sunday. Bad for the ego, great for the learning process and long term development. I was just reminded how it's really awesome to get direct feedback. And how you can either get unnerved by it or use it for your benefit. I'm choosing the latter. 

There are also some really great reminders going on facebook. One of my favorites is a poster reminding to practice not until you get it right, but until you can't get it wrong. The only problem is, who's got time for that? I'm getting so wrapped up in practicing that I forget everything else. In theory this is very good for my soul and also for my playing, but not so good for the family, the students, the house or the job. It's kind of hard to work on the work/life balance when work is also a major part of the "life" to which that refers. Somebody let me know when you figure it out, please...    

To really know this new instrument, I feel a need to play all the repertoire I have ever played. That's not really possible, and certainly not probable. Plus, I've now run out of lesure time and have to be ready in three weeks for prime time. So, what is a cello player to do when there is a need for mapping out the fingerboard once and for all? There's really only one answer - Popper. Going back to High School. 

There's a great (young) cellist, Joshua Roman, who just completed an amazing Popper Project, posting a video on youtube of all 40 Popper Etudes, one every week. I'm very impressed. I must admit I wondered why...but I think I get it now. The process is important, and intent changes the process.  

As students taking lessons, we play technical studies (etudes), to our teachers, who hold us accountable for notes, rhythms, styles, correct technique, flow etc. We learn to perform musical pieces and so we learn accountability in performance also. But the etudes usually stay within the confines of the student-teacher relationship, at the most we share them within the studio. Unless you are Janos Starker or Erling Blondal Bengtsson, in which case you record them for the world to hear. After school, who cares if we never play another etude ever again? Well...playing etudes is kind of like taking your vitamins. In the summertime when the sunshine is plentiful, you can get away with not taking them so much, but when the winter-funk strikes you better take them regularly or else...you risk loosing things. Without a teacher, though, nobody holds me accountable but myself - and I find that after ten years of no school, I'm slacking. I blame it on life and job, but it doesn't make me play better. We've already started a practice diary shared as a google doc with some school friends, with the hope of more discipline coming out of peer-pressure and semi-public humiliation for not practicing. This week I'm adding my own Popper self-challenge in two parts. 

Part one, a two week challenge in which I play through the book. This translates to roughly three etudes every day. I've studied most of them (I think?), and so there are a couple of reasons for starting with a "play through". I want to identify the ones that I need to really learn (or re-learn as the case will be). But first and foremost, I want to map out the fingerboard on the HC.

Part two, learn the ones that I don't know. These are all the ones that are 5 pages long, have 6 flats and are played on the thumb, mostly. This is the hard part: I don't know what platform to use to humiliate/motivate myself to learn them well enough to "perform". One option is to record them for myself - ugh. Or ask friends and children to listen - double ugh. Ideas? Let me know... definitely no youtube though. That has been done.    

Anyway, I already learned from contemplating this challenge that the process will be different because it's a formal challenge with specific, stated goals and some kind of performance (ie public or private humiliation) at the end of it. Now I get why, Joshua Roman.   

When I played my senior jury in DeKalb, IL in 1996, the only comment violinist Shmuel Ashkenazy had for me was, "you need a new cello". I'm sure he was 
right: I still play the same instrument I got from my teacher in high school. It's a very excellent student instrument, made by the Czech maker Julius Hubicka in 1920. I have to say that I am terribly attached to this cello, probably more so than I should be given that I had already grown out of it in 1996. I have to credit Mark Norfleet for keeping me afloat all this time: he really does an amazing job adjusting stringed instruments so that they can sound their absolute best. I think it would probably take some deep psychoanalysis to figure out WHY I haven't gotten a new instrument, but the short version is money, family (I have, after all, had three kids in the last 8 years) and also, lack of the perfect match...and I guess I always figured out I would know when the moment was right.  

As you can imagine, I have played many a cello in the last 16 years. New, old, thin, fat, brown, red (sorry, I had to quote my favorite book about Elmer, the patchwork colored elephant). I discovered very fast that the debate is between getting a newly made instrument, and getting an old instrument. For X dollars, You can probably get a better contemporary instrument than an old instrument, simply because the makers are still alive and they are still making the instruments. On the other hand, the older instruments appreciate more so they are better as investments, and there's also the fact that a new instrument changes quite a lot over time, and has to be played in. There's a camp that says you should only consider getting an old European-made instrument, and a camp that says the contemporary instruments are absolutely the only thing you should consider. I always thought myself rather in the second camp, since my quite physical playing style seems to fit the contemporary cellos well. But...

This summer I played a cello made by HC Silvestre in Paris in 1868: I guess that would fit in the "old" cello category. EXCEPT, it plays like a new instrument! Ahh, how to describe this cello...Complex, sophisticated, sturdy, not particularly beautiful to look at, more like a Pinot Noir or a Cab Franc rather than chocolate or coffee in sound. I could play Bach on it for eternity. Extended techniques? No problem, harmonics would pop out like firecrackers and sound like a million bucks. The tension is high on the strings, and so the cello plays hard - but that is just fine by me, since I am rather a physical player. In the month that I played the Silvestre I just scratched the surface of what we could do together, and got a glimpse of an amazing palette of colors and possibility. Mind you, I haven't fallen in love with it so much that my wits would completely leave me (I have heard of such things, and of people selling their houses for their instruments). But I AM trying to figure out how to buy it. With this cello, stars seem to be aligned and, if I could use another cliche, opportunity has come knocking. It for sale by a friend, and indeed, I would be able to get for a VERY fair price. Life is amazing, isn't it? 

If you want to hear how it sounds, stop by the "sounds" section, the short movement is from my "Lullaby Suite", Finnish Lullabies a la solo Bach.  

Everybody should see this. It talks about a lot of the things I have been thinking about (on and off this blog). Space! Open mode versus closed mode! So obvious.

In music, transitions are the time in between events - transitioning from the first theme area to the second theme area in a Sonata-Allegro form. In life, it's more like the time immediately before and after an event - getting used to the idea of moving from your childhood home to a college dorm, then getting used to the new reality after the event (a 3-part transition: before, during and after an event). In either case, they can vary in duration and magnitude. In the mind, transitions seem to BE the events. I was looking for a good metafor and came up with earthquakes...which also have duration and magnitude. Imagine that your mind is a room (or a suite of rooms) - it has a certain organization, folders, shelves, notebooks, office supplies, a recliner... The longer your mind stays in the same state, the more solidified this organization gets (for me, the idea folder gets buried in the busy stuff and kind of disappears in the pile of things "to do") . Then there is a change, the catalyst can be an event in the real world, but it doesn't have to be - the change can be slow and stealthy, fast and violent, or anything in between and the head stuff gets thrown about. We take our time reorganizing the stuff, and many times new organization patterns emerge. Maybe new ideas that were buried underneath come to the surface. So in this way, transition is actually something that my mind needs in order to be creative. I suppose we can try to re-create the same order we had before, but what's the fun in that? Admittedly, it takes a lot of courage and effort (and TIME) to organize the stuff differently...

Seems to me that time is the essential ingredient here. And, the time needed seems to be related to the magnitude of the event (duh). If there's time to be rested, there's a better chance of courage to allow patterns to change. If there's time to think, I'm more likely to allow some room for the stuff in the head to shift around if it needs to. Unfortunately, the pace of life these modern days doesn't really allow for a lot of time...and I know there have been transitions where by simple equation of facts of life I was forced to put all of the stuff that got tossed about into black trash bags and dump them (no time to process any of it). Usually the head stuff comes back to haunt, though, if it doesn't get processed, kind of like the great heap of trash that floats around the Pacific Ocean...  

This time of year - after the U is out, before summer is really here - I think a lot about transitions, and how insane they sometimes are. Small transitions (like getting two four-year olds to leave the house in a timely fashion) and big transitions (like having your 92-year old grandmother transition from living alone and being self-sufficient to the extent of walking to the grocery store daily to her moving to an assisted living facility...) are kind of the same and so not the same. In my ninth year of being on faculty I'm still kind of not used to/happy with the process of transitioning - and trying to trick my mind into a different process is interesting.

First of all, let me say that this is definitely not a complaint. I recognize that I would have a hard time in the regular schedule of 9 to 5 through the year with the exception of vacation time. I like being self-directed and at times free to attend to my creative projects - even if it means that several months out of a year I work 24/7. It's the transition from being 110% structured on a schedule to being 80% not on a schedule and free to decide what to do next that I want to change. In the end the total sum of "work" is probably close to the same, it just doesn't have the same set of parameters. And by "work", I mean being a full-time contributing faculty member September-May (teaching, meetings, planning, running the program, that kind of stuff. A little cello playing) and being a full-time creative artist June-August. (as a side note, I know a lot of my colleagues manage to be creative artists during the semester as well, and I hope that next year when the twins go to regular school, I can carry over a little bit of that stuff). I suppose if I was to use language that artists often hear, it's the transition from "real work" to "creative work", the implication being that since there are no hours and at times no tangible evidence of "work" since a lot of it happens in the head, creative work is not real work. 

There's a lot of talk about creativity these days, and about how we should/need to/do apply creativity to every day life - so that it is not just something artists do, but engineers and lawyers too. But  I think there are different kinds of creativity - and certainly, different creative processes. The obvious one here is structure versus no structure, a lot of rules (or parameters) versus few rules (parameters). I think it would be interesting to compare the differences in the processes from one to the other. I deal with this in a very fundamental ways when I move between classical chamber music (very highly structured, a lot of subtle yet important rules that differ between styles - and, since the music has been written by a composer at some other time, more of a re-creative process), structured improvisation (like jazz -- a lot of rules but more choice as to how to apply them) and free improvisation (it's free so there's no rules - except the rules that apply to all good music...which are many). I think analyzing these transitions and processes will help me in the other transitions in my life, so I am planning to write a series of blog posts trying to do that - live-blogging the transition from an academic to an artist!