Creativity and Convention

I love music (as most humans do) and I can say when I love a piece of music but I'd be hard pressed to explain to anyone why I think a piece of music is great. Ask me about why I love a painting and I can use my knowledge and understanding of Art to explain why I think a painting rocks. I've attended plenty of concerts and happily enjoyed the music despite not having a musical vocabulary or a knowledge of music history. However, this past Saturday, I heard the Toronto Symphony Orchestra play Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 and also heard an explanation of why the music is so great. Which I guess is what you can count on when you go to a concert entitled What Makes it Great?: Beethoven Symphony 1.  The conductor, Rob Kapilow, spent the first hour of the concert describing the musical conventions Beethoven was working from and how he structured his music in a way that acknowledged those conventions while simultaneously moving beyond them. Okay, that might sound dull, but Rob Kapilow is an amazing teacher. He delivered some meaty content in a light and humorous way; it was like biting into a flaky pastry stuffed with juicy morsels of steak.

After Kapilow's talk, he conducted the orchestra's performance of Beethoven's 1st and it was unbelievable-- I could hear the patterns and structures in the music and understood (to a degree, or course) their significance and meaning in the context of the time period Beethoven was writing in. One of the themes Kapilow kept returning to in his talk was a quote from the music teacher, Nadia Boulanger, that genius cannot help but be original. Even though Beethoven borrowed some of the techniques and devices of Hayden and Mozart, his genius altered and expanded the boundaries set out by those predecessors. Something that I especially appreciated was Kapilow's observation of how the contemporary take on creativity overemphasizes individualism; an artist is supposed to delve deep inside themselves and, operating outside of time and cultural context, produce an original creation. It was really great to be reminded that creativity isn't some mythical process of making something out of nothing. Nobody operates in a vacuum. Certainly a genius such as Beethoven is unique, but hey, even the work of geniuses is informed and influenced by convention--the genius is that the work is nonetheless original.

I've been taking photographs with my new camera and I can tell you that they are not especially original. And while I know I'm not a photographic genius, I'm comforted by the thought that using conventions doesn't mean you can't also be creative.