The Delightful Negligence of Song

A Blog About Music Creativity — Creativity #1

By Mickey Jones

I have been thinking a lot about creativity lately. I have been thinking about how, though I received both undergraduate and advanced degrees in music — classical guitar performance to be exact — it was only prior to formal music study and post formal music study that I exercised anything that I would identify as a truly creative impulse, in the vein of improvisation or composition for example. Which is to say, I created music that came from me and that reflected some kind of integration of what I knew and what I could imagine and what I could do.

It’s no surprise that, in my many teaching years, I have rarely taught my students to be creative either — in the sense of composition and improvisation. Yes, we discuss finessing the music they learn. They learn how to interpret but, take away the music and they’re lost. Just as I was and sometimes, still am. Everything evaporates in moments like that and it’s more than a little terrifying, it’s dispiriting.

The long and the short of it is that, especially in traditional classical music training, we are taught how to execute music, not create it. To be sure, traditional instrumental study can be very successful at teaching us how to play our instruments (though there is a healthy debate to be had there) and execute music that is conceived on the page. But it’s the gap between the ability to play what we are given and the ability to just simply create and really know music and know ourselves through music that is so terribly deficient.

It seems very important to me now that students of any level and any discipline, experience that type of creativity. I not only believe that it will allow them to have a more meaningful relationship to music but to their instrumental progress as well. In addition, I believe that the performance of traditional classical music by students of any level will become less stressed and more fun. Some of the distance between who they are as people and who they are as musicians will close.