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. 

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.

Trying to analyze the transition that happens in academia is really interesting to me for a couple of reasons (I'm now talking about those of us who teach fall and winter, but not summer or anything in between - in Michigan, there's a crazy spring half-term in addition to the summer term). It's probably because in my ninth year I'm still totally not used to the rhythm of them, even though they ebb and flow in really predictable patterns. The semester is always the same length, 14 weeks, and, teaching the same subjects, the arch is familiar too. The semester has three parts to - beginning, middle and end - that include their own smaller transitions. In between the fall and winter semesters there is a short break - this year, I got a whopping five days off. Between winter and fall, however, we get close to four months off from teaching. This is where magic is supposed to happen. And this is also the reason why I will never complain about my job, even when I have to work 24/7 (none of this is complaint - I'm just trying to analyze to understand what happens in my head...). The magical period otherwise known as summer makes life good.

The semesters themselves are a lot like a screw that gets tighter and tighter as they progress. In the fall, my colleagues are genuinely nice people who really enjoy each others company (the RC retreat in August is a hoot and a lot of fun). Come December though, people seem pretty tightly wound. Last year we had the shortest break ever (something about the way the holidays fall on certain days of the week). I had 10 days between the day I turned in grades and the first day of the new semester. Barely enough time to transition OUT of the old semester, just enough time to start feeling so very tired, definitely not enough time to reach the bottom of the exhaustion, let alone start climbing out of it and to recharge. The screw loosened a little bit, but was still pretty tightly wound (maybe 2/3?) Definitely one of those transitions where by sheer will I forced the stuff that was getting loose in the head to stay put, knowing that I would not have time to find new place for it. April used to be my favorite month of the year (Easter, birthday, spring, 1st of May Eve...) and now it's probably survivable (hang on to your hats territory). By the last few weeks of classes, the screw is wound so tight that we're  barely hanging on - there's so much that has to get done by the deadline, and no choice in any of it.   

In contrast to the winter break, we've now been off for about a month. Have I done any of the stuff I said I would? Not yet. There's still hope. In the last week I finally hit what I hope is the bottom of the exhaustion.

The pattern of this particular transition seems interesting, if for no other reason then the time that I can afford it! It seems that each school year, I can keep on running on the fumes and get something done for about a week or two after graduation (usually it's the stuff that I've been planning on doing for the past three months...). Then I start slowing down, looking at my list of things to do but feeling no particular urgency to do them right at this very moment...then, for about a week, I just can't bring myself to do anything. It almost seems like a chemical reaction, in some sense depression-like (although I know that real depression is very serious, and doesn't just last a week)...and usually, after a week or so I decide it's time to start getting things done, and I start slowly re-energizing, and re-focusing on being a different kind of creative person. Every year, I plan on transitioning faster, getting more stuff done, avoiding the bottom...but it doesn't really work that way. I haven't gotten to the re-energizing part yet. But I did practice some scales and etudes today, because I wanted to. Is there something to learn here? I'm actually not sure yet, maybe I'll figure it out this year...

Yesterday at a cello lesson we were working on a very specific technical thing - how to transition from one kind of trill to another. It dawned on me that in purely technical transitions what matters most is the preparation: in other words, once you've transitioned, you're there, the transition happens before the event. In classical music, the events themselves are predictable because of music that is composed and practiced, so anticipation is easy (sort of). Wouldn't it be great if we could anticipate more in real life as well, and ease the transitions that way? 

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!