Craft and Creation

I might have mentioned that I have taken up some new hobbies: fountain pens, sketching and journaling. That last one, "journaling" is a relatively new, though very popular, hobby. It used to be called, "keeping a journal" or "writing in a diary", though those are rather out of fashion. I did keep a journal decades ago when I was going through some emotional turmoil. That is not the case, now, I just wanted to do more non-digital things and writing in a journal with a fountain pen, as well as sketching, fulfills that need quite well. Writing haiku seems to have crept in as well.

Working with these new hobbies, which we might glorify by calling them new avenues of creative activity, has caused me to notice some interesting things. In all creative activities there is a balance or division between the craft of the activity and the creation in the activity. For example, I am a complete novice at sketching so nearly all the effort is devoted to simply learning the basics of the craft. Risking personal embarrassment, I will share a couple of still-life sketches:

As you can see, I am struggling to achieve a rudimentary realism. So here is a little chart of creative activities with my estimates of how much effort or time goes into simply working on the craft and how much into actually creating something:

Craft/Creation

Haiku: 10/90

Playing guitar: 70/30

Sketching: 90/10

Music composition: 30/70

Are these numbers surprising in any way? Not the sketching or the haiku, presumably. In playing guitar, after fifty years on the instrument, I find that I have to spend about half my time just trying to preserve and slightly improve my technique and a good part of the rest of the time, when I am playing pieces, is also devoted to technical issues. My creativity in interpreting music on the guitar was probably all worked out decades ago and now I am just trying to keep my hands in shape.

Music composition is an interesting division. I have been a musician over fifty years, as I said, and in that time I always did a little composition. But I have only composed in a serious way in the last ten or twelve years. So I still spend quite a bit of time on the craft, by which I mean basic organizational activities. In fact, it is pretty hard to tell where craft leaves off and creation begins in music composition. A big part of creativity these days consists in making discoveries in the area of what might be called "craft" or using craft in new or unusual ways. And, ironically, some of the most so-called "advanced" musical ideas, such as extended techniques, can often sound very dated these days because they were so overused in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Of course "over-used" is one of those phrases that is applied so subjectively that it doesn't tell us too much. It is largely a matter of aesthetic taste.

Speaking of "taste", is the having and deploying of aesthetic taste more craft or creation? I guess it could be either. And I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

For a suitable envoi, here is a piece for solo guitar I wrote a long time ago when I was still puzzling over the craft of composition. I was also puzzling over how to do a suitable video! This is "Chant" from my Suite No. 1 for guitar. In it I was simultaneously assimilating the influence of Gregorian Chant and Chopin.