(RE-POST: This piece was originally posted on June 7, 2011.)
I’ve admitted it more than once: I know my work is going well when I have ideas in the shower. That is, those times when I’m thinking that I’m not thinking.
By the way, whenever I think about the creative process, and the difficulty of forcing ideas, I think of this classic Sesame Street sketch featuring Don Music: “I’ll never get it, never, argh!”
I’m posting today to direct your attention to this piece from the fascinating 99% blog by Scott McDowell, “Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno.”
It does not hurt that I have been a big Eno fan since the 70’s.
Read the opening quote from McDowell’s piece and you’ll see why it grabbed my attention . . .
Current neuroscience research confirms what creatives intuitively know about being innovative: that it usually happens in the shower. After focusing intently on a project or problem, the brain needs to fully disengage and relax in order for a “Eureka!” moment to arise. It’s often the mundane activities like taking a shower, driving, or taking a walk that lure great ideas to the surface. Composer Steve Reich, for instance, would ride the subway around New York when he was stuck.
Comments Eno:
The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen. One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.
The 99% piece references a July, 2008 article that I recall reading in The New Yorker, written by Jonah Lehrer, in which he investigates the nature of ideas, “The Eureeka Hunt.” Lehrer brought joy to procrastinators everywhere when he opined:
The relaxation phase is crucial. That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers. … One of the surprising lessons of this research is that trying to force an insight can actually prevent the insight.
Always an intellectual with a lively mind, Brian Eno, along with Peter Schmidt, developed a deck of cards in the 1970’s called Oblique Strategies, a series of prompts intended to help push people through periods of creative block. Now the Strategies are available for FREE on your iPhone or iTouch — just click here.
To close, here’s a cool fan video of Eno’s beautiful “By This River,” taken from the disk, Before and After Science. The album, by the way, has very distinct sides to it — something that’s lost in today’s CD era. For Side 1, Eno delivers traditional pop structures. But Side 2 plays like a series of dream songs, lullabies, hinting at the ambient sounds he’ll explore more fully on later disks.
Last month marked the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Terry Riley’s In C. The date was 4 November 1964 at the San Francisco Tape Center. Having written a book on the topic, it’s a time of reflection for me as well. The piece continues to endure, and though only five years out, it becomes ever more clear that its inclusion in the OUP series Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation was justified. In short, it’s a canonic work.
Happily, most of the participants in the event are still with us. In particular, Terry is celebrating his 80th next year, and such luminaries as Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Stuart Dempster, and Ramon Sender are still going strong. One of the great joys I experienced in the course of researching the book was to meet a group of composers about 20 years older than I who were not only still productive, but also not bitter. Their engagement with their work and purity of commitment was inspiring then, and continues to be.
By now minimalism is so ingrained in our era’s musical consciousness that it becomes ever harder to imagine what a break the piece represented. But it came over me recently in a different way, when listening to a new release on New World of the “TudorFest” that was organised in February 1964 by Oliveros. This was a series of concerts centered around David Tudor as both performer and general collaborative provacateur. The 3-CD set concentrates mostly on music of Cage (though there’s a great work for accordion and bandoneon by Oliveros, that she and Tudor perform on a multi-dimension seesaw—how I wish for a video!). Even though Cage’s ethos of experiment and freedom is obviously an inspiration to the circle that organized the event, it’s also clear just how different that sort of experimentalism was from what was about to erupt in the immediate future. Cage’s pieces, most from the 1950s, are amongst his most radical works, “atonal” in the purest sense for the word, and resolutely refusing any traditional form or teleology. Frankly, listening to several in a row, exhilarating as is their invention, they’re also tough.
For me this makes it clearer just how much the new music percolating under the surface in San Francisco wasn’t just about process or repetition, it was also about beauty (even if no one really wanted to use the word). Cage was a California boy, but he found his milieu in New York, with its intensity, rigor, and challenge. To take a counter-example, Lou Harrison, his early friend and collaborator, went there too, but he returned West and found himself in the pursuit of Asian sounds. I may be making too much of a dichotomy here, as there are many other factors involved in the making of a style and individual works therein. But the old trope of “mean old modernism” vs. minimalism is too pat; there was a generational shift at work as well. Cage was a beloved pioneer, but he wasn’t living the Haight life. The music that was about to resound in November had a new sensuality and freedom, in tune with the adventure, love, and sheer subversive fun that was erupting across the country.
Headline image credit: Music. CC0 via Pixabay
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