Creativity for Composers

That scene from the movie has stuck in my mind for years and years because it always seemed to me to capture something about the creative "process." And by the way, I hate the word "process" in that context because that implies something you can plan and outline and design and so on. But really, I don't think that real creation is like that. A metaphor Jordan Peterson used once comes to mind: an artist is someone who leaves the warm, comfortable circle by the fire and goes out into the darkness, the wilderness, to find ... what? Who knows? Something. It's not so much a process as it is a journey of exploration. The metaphor is important.

Now don't get me wrong, yes, there are processes later on, but not in this stage of actually creating something new. Once you have something: a germ, a seed, a vision, something, then you have to figure out what it is and how it can be used. That has process-like elements if you are an experienced artist. Likely, as you become more and more established, you may rely on certain processes and procedures to generate the finished artwork. But the more you do that, the more you court mediocrity. A good artist is always willing to make that journey again, to strike out into the darkness. We can see it in the stages that many artists seem to go through. When things become too ordinary, to settled, you have to delve into what is not ordinary and not settled.

Shostakovich at fifty-six years of age set out to write a symphony unlike any previous one: it was not only musically unusual in using a bass soloist and male chorus, it was also a little risky politically as it used poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This is the Symphony No. 13, subtitled "Babi Yar" because it is a denunciation of anti-semitism, as well as a denunciation of the cruelties of Soviet life: deprivation, anxiety and corruption. Setting poems by Yevtushenko was not the safest thing either as he was something of a thorn in the side of the Soviet leaders. We can measure the courage involved here by noticing that not one major composer in North America or Western Europe actually does real criticisms of the systems that they are part of. Is John Adams likely to write something criticizing the "Climate Change" hysteria? Not likely. But this symphony really does strike out into new territory, and for a composer in his fifties, that is not so usual.

A composer like John Cage, whether one enjoys his music or not, was genuinely creative through his whole life. Were the final products of much musical interest? Well, that is actually a different question, relating to aesthetic value. You can wander out into the surrounding darkness and not come back with anything terribly worthwhile--in fact, that may be the usual result.

But sometimes, you have the case of a composer who isolates himself in a tiny 8' x 8' room with just a chair and an upright piano and several months later walks out with the score to the Rite of Spring under his arm. And he didn't get there by following any kind of creative "process" because there ain't none!

Let's listen to that symphony. This is Symphony No. 13 by Dmitri Shostakovich in the recording by Valery Gergiev and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater.