Musical Thought and Musical Notation

 

       It should not be confused with productivity or originality.  On those few occasions when a product that can be shared is the result of creativity, this product need not even be especially original, and most original or unusual adaptations do not survive.  Culturally, and within the academic environment,  the word creativity is often used interchangeably with productivity, originality,  craftsmanship or skill.  Moreover our interest in creativity seems to extend to activities that can be channeled into demonstrable and conventional items of current cultural concern.  This utilitarian restriction of creative thought is inevitably constricting, inhibiting and destructive to the creative process.  Those products that are preserved are valued not because of their intrinsic worth but for other relative social interests.

        Creativity is a notion that has been given superficial attention within our culture, referred to and studied from a variety of perspectives.  Ironically, creativity is inherently subversive and at odds with established norms, and in reality, creative thought is discouraged, particularly in an unchanneled or pure form.  Creative behavior actually disrupts the status quo.  Our naive notions of creativity is something remote from the actual process itself, relating instead to productive measurable performance.  Ours is a performance based, goal directed culture; whereas creativity is prompted by timeless and universal natural laws of growth and change, a process which incorporates the uncomfortably divergent, and the unexpected and emerging unknown into life, a process that is not always socially convenient.

        Rather than an attempt to provide new gadgets and curiosities, creative thought  arises from the struggle between need, mind and some physical medium of representation.  The value or meaning of the final representation that evolved from its original creative impulse ultimately represents the historical residue of an internal journey, the lived experience, born from the desire to know and perceive something initially glimpsed from the interior of the creative individual's soul.

       This meaning can only partially be shared with others, who can only project their own internal struggles onto the object, recreating it, as if it were their own.  There is no objective way to measure the correspondence between that which is experienced initially and its recreation.  Perhaps these independent experiences are tangentially related.  Is it possible that this is some type of communication?  If so, what is communicated?  Whatever it is, is entirely different from communication in normal discourse, as in: "Please pass the salt."
 

Musical Thought and Musical Notation