CREATIVE PROCESSES VERSUS CREATION PROCESSES
In light of this research, making a distinction between the terms creative process and creation process may be useful. The first obvious distinction is that creation is an act of doing: making and putting stuff together. Creative, as an adjective, can be applied to the way things are done: how connections are made between elements in a piece; how meaning is created; how ideas are developed; how original, inspirational and inventive are solutions found to solve certain problems, etc. Throughout this exposition, I have tried to distinguish between these terms and use them as accurately as possible.
OUTCOMES: COMPOSITION OR IMPROVISATION?
Among the projects presented in this exposition, we can distinguish between projects that result in composed, set outcomes, and projects that are more open and improvisatory in nature. Both the First Year’s Creative Projects (FYCP2019, FYCP2020) and the Orchestral improvisations Project (OIMP) allow students to create materials in a very spontaneous way. However, they ultimately aim to produce reproducible, set outcomes. The Joint Module of Improvisation takes the most open form, leaving room for completely spontaneous outcomes (JMI). The ACM trio project (ACM) contains elements from all the other projects. It mixes composed pieces with improvised parts that have only some pre-defined basic ideas along with fully improvised parts too. While conducting projects with conservatory students from classical performance departments at The Hague and Singapore, I have gravitated towards creation processes that
connect them to their repertoire and provide insights in compositional processes from the perspective of creating music on their own. Improvisation skills, once acquired, can be a valuable tool for students to develop their music vocabulary and confidence of expression. Since the Joint Module in the Masters study relies more on improvisation skills, we cannot expect freshmen to participate in this project.
Although the quality of improvisation-based collaborative pieces is generally less rigorous and controlled than composed and rehearsed pieces, they have their own unique strengths. Participants can play off each other, using the energy given by the others and vice-versa to create a natural connection. Better listening brings about better sound and a high level of concentration. Spontaneous interaction and musical decisions result in an urgency, a realization that something only exists in this very moment. In his book Thinking in jazz: the infinite art of improvisation, Paul Berliner writes about the ongoing interplay between collective improvisation and pre-composition that exists in jazz tradition: "the spontaneous and arranged elements of jazz presentations continually cross-fertilize and revitalize each other. Precomposed background lines or riffs, which add interest to the performance and, as musical landmarks, help soloists keep their bearings over a progression, also provide material that soloists can incorporate into their extemporaneous inventions" (Berliner, 1994). During some of the best moments while conducting these projects, I have witnessed this interplay of composition and improvisation. It happens precisely during a performance. This experience is necessary for our classical music students so they can develop a sense of agency and ability to act and respond skillfully in such a situation. Of the types and styles of collaborative creation which are not
covered here, I should mention the practice of free improvisation, which can be highly beneficial and interesting for classical musicians. On a side note, it is good to see that conservatories nowadays have started integrating this practice into their curricula. One example worth mentioning is the European METRIC project (link to the METRIC project). Some of the institutions included in this project are the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, which offers a course called Improvisation Generative, and the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona which has a two-year mandatory improvisation program for all classical students. Since 2020, The Royal Conservatoire of Den Haag offers a Minor degree within its Bachelor of Collaborative Music Creation where a significant component involves free improvisation. In relation to this, I also would like to mention the excellent work of Richard Barrett with his Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble (Barrett, 2020). Through the Minor degree, we hope this project will soon include students from the classical department.
COLLABORATIVE WORKING PROCESSES
Despite their different goals and outcomes as mentioned in the previous section, many collaborative processes in this exposition have common denominators. Most importantly, ideas and their development are never isolated or limited to a single person. They are being conceived and brought in by various actors at different moments during the process. Sometimes they are truly made by a group collectively, but they usually come from those participants who take on a natural leading role. Whether having a deliberate origin according to a plan, or coming up spontaneously, ideas
cannot be developed and implemented into a larger whole without all participants playing off each other. Furthermore, the decentralized nature of cooperation and joint-creation is very much a social process, and one where students are energized by each other and driven by the challenges of the situation they find themselves in. One of my favorite examples of this energized state can be witnessed in the central part of the First Year’s Creative Project 2020: A Covid Opera (Video: Backstage - FYCP2020 - A Covid Opera). Singers have found elegant solutions that include singing as well as operatic elements despite the severe limitations posed by COVID. In the light of this, and other inventive solutions, I came across an interesting quote from John Zorn. During an interview with NPR host Terry Gross, Zorn stated: "It's about people. Music is about people for me. It's not about sounds. It's about people; it's about putting people into challenging situations. And for me, challenges are opportunities” (Zorn, 2013).
This statement also resonates strongly with many experiences I had with students while making things together. During the First Year’s Creative Project at YST, pressure was particularly high to deliver something for the opening concert of the school year. However, participants did not seem worried and instead lost themselves in the process of inventing things together. The experience of collectivity is further enhanced when ensuring there is room for individual initiatives within the collaborative setting. This can be done by making room for improvisation and encouraging students to explore and experiment with their contribution to the whole. The Orchestral Improvisations Project is one example of this autonomous exploration. In the following video clip, we can see how students were ‘instantly’ orchestrating the idea of one sub-ensemble for the whole
ensemble. A cellist spontaneously improvises a supporting part for the harp: (Video: Backstage - OIMP - trying out a first montage of ideas, 2:16 ff.).
While observing strategies and ways to organize the collaborative process, experience has taught me that creation processes develop more organically when starting with small elements and working towards a greater whole. The first step for the First Year’s Creative Projects (FYCP2019 and FYCP2020) and the Orchestral Improvisations Project (OIMP) therefore involved splitting up the larger groups into smaller ensembles so they could invent small-scale ideas. Even though these ideas initially seemed insignificant, getting the process started and bringing students together to generate complicity was their purpose. They help students embark on a path of discovery and challenge themselves to expand these ideas into a larger, more significant whole as they go. I will elaborate further on this way of working in the section on creation processes.
Since this initiative is a collaboration involving a large group with some participants isolated and dispersed because of COVID, the First Year’s Creative Project 2020 (FYCP2020) was the most uncommon and challenging of all. Part of the collaborative working processes occurred online, both in synchronous and asynchronous sessions. This often had a negative effect: there was less sense of being together, frustration with bad sound and video quality, and less sense of achieving a common goal. However, there were also some positive surprises. Once reunited together, students developed a great sense of bonding, having gone through a
rough experience collectively. And the drone videos that had been recorded by each of them in isolation now formed a whole in the opening video of their performance. Thanks to modern technology they were playing together as a full group avant la lettre (Video: Presentation - FYCP2020 - Birth of the Batch)
In the Joint Module of Improvisation (JMI), the situation was different for two reasons. First, the creation process was the final part of a series of lessons, and had been practiced to a certain extent. Certain techniques to develop improvisational ideas had been addressed in the lessons, and were then worked out in smaller sub-groups for the final presentation concert. Secondly, the group was much smaller. As students of the Master, they had considerably more experience creating their own music. Finally, for the Asian Civilisations Museum trio project, we used more traditional collaboration practices. As three musicians with very different backgrounds and skills, we worked together much like you would as a band, with each member contributing ideas and everyone developing them together. For me personally, this was a new experience: we equally contributed very few ideas from the start. Musical cells, inspired by the museum collection, were then worked on collectively to generate a larger whole, and most of this effort came through improvisation.
STATE OF PLAY
Closely related to collaboration and the sense of challenge is another term often called the state of play: a state in which the mind is not occupied by reaching a certain goal, but instead completely lost in the process of
playing and discovering. This means doing something fun and fascinating that removes any sense of time or a timeline. In an article in the American Journal of Play, Scott Eberle argues that play, in its most elemental form, always promises fun (Eberle, 2014). This element of fun is precisely what sparks creativity. Jacob Collier made a similar comment during his online workshop for the Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA). He argued: “don’t create for the results, but achieve a state of play” (Collier, 2020). In her book on Brian Eno, journalist Geeta Dayal writes: “Eno’s playfulness in the studio was key.” Dayal also cites an email from Robert Fripp: “My quick guide to Captain Eno: play, instinct/intuition, good taste.” She continues: “The key to Brian, from my view, is his sense of play. I only know one other person (a musician) who engages with play to the same extent as Brian. Although Eno is considered an intellectual, and clearly he has more than sufficient wit, it’s Brian’s instinctive and intuitive choices that impress me. Instinct puts us in the moment, intellect is slower” (Dayal, 2009). Fripp’s essential distinction between instinct/intuition and intellect highlights a key element that helps to understand many things that happen during creative processes. Many decisions made instinctively have great consequences on the eventual outcomes. Further intellectual involvement and reflection is an essential complement to ultimately achieve an interesting creation.
CREATION PROCESSES
Engaging in collaborative creation processes requires a paradigm shift for classical music students. The switch must be made from music making based on a score and practicing/rehearsing processes to making music
through listening, inventing, and responding to others while letting go of any need for notation. This represents a significant change for most classical music students, particularly since it shifts their attitudes towards listening. For obvious reasons, many classical musicians are good listeners. However, what do they really hear? We know they listen very carefully to the sound they produce on their instrument, but to what extent are they listening to the whole. Are they able to focus on other specific things while playing? In this sense, I believe the role of holistic listening, or complete aural awareness as some prefer to call it, is crucial. It boils down to listening, playing, and thinking at the same time. Decisions are being made based on what sounds are heard. When achieving this state, listening makes a connection and generates a response. From the response comes collaboration and a more critical attitude to the quality of the musical ideas being developed. To illustrate this concept further, I found a nice quote made by Jacob Collier. During a masterclass for the Performance Science Institute, he stated: “My idea of what it meant to create, kind of evolved as I learned what it meant to listen” (Collier, 2020a).
Because of this paradigm shift, some students feel confused. They simply don’t know what to do. Since these students never held the role of creator before, the processes are a learning experience for them. As mentioned in the Backstage section of the First Year’s Creative Project 2019 (FYCP2019), much time was spent discussing the process of creating music from a technical perspective: extending of phrases, creating contrast, creating contrapuntal voices, making a natural sounding transition between phrases and sections, creating logical harmonic structures, using imitation and canonic techniques, orchestrating and more.
The project therefore become a course in practical understanding of “theoretical” concepts, directly applied and tested through the resulting sounds. If such a thing exists, it could be the ideal theory lesson for classical performance students. An example of how this might work can be given from the first part of the First Year’s Creative Project 2019. One of the sub-groups came up with a short Waltz loosely inspired by Tchaikovsky. (Backstage - FYCP2019 - Shostakovitch group). The initial idea was a short, 4-bar phrase with a perfect cadence at the end. This was repeated many times in the same way. As a coach I challenged them to develop this phrase and create a larger structural context. I pointed out that it can be done along similar lines as what a composer would do. A few options would be:
1) Double the phrase length by changing the full cadence to a half-cadence, then repeat with the full cadence at the end.
2) Invent a counterpoint voice and repeat the phrase with the counterpoint in another instrument group.
3) Repeat again but with switched voices.
4) Make a version with a new orchestration that includes, as an example, percussion and brass.
5) Make a contrasting section that is very much a continuation of your phrase yet still distinct enough.
These are common-sense procedures for a composer. However, for most participants, it was the first time they got confronted with them from a creator’s perspective. The result was a section of more than two minutes of music (Video: Presentation - FYCP2019 – Full performance of Russia, Bali, Cuba, 1:57-3:57). Similar procedures can also be followed at a higher structural level. A whole section can repeat again with new counterpoints, orchestrations, etc. An example is the percussion theme in the First Year’s Creative Project 2020 and its return roughly 4 minutes later (Video: Presentation – FYCP2020 – Alone together, full stream 15:47-17:30, and recapitulation 20:52 ff.).
The creation processes are not only related to the desired outcome of the project, but also to group size. Both First Year’s Creative Project and the Orchestral Improvisations Project involved large groups (30-60 students). In these types of situations, it is practically impossible to ask all participants in an early phase to come up with an all-encompassing plan for what they are going to make. The group size requires everyone to break down the process and start small. An effective, frequently used strategy involves beginning with small ideas and gradually moving towards larger structures. The process generally includes the following steps. At an early stage, participants split into break-out groups to create small ideas. After coming back together, they play for each other and comment on each other’s inventions. Through discussion and a selection procedure, students filter ideas and the best ones are developed during further steps of the process. As a coach, I make sure that ideas don’t become too fixed right at the beginning and encourage the participants to improvise, imagine different ways of playing something, and leave room for variation. Processes are obviously different depending on final goals set by the project.
With projects meant to produce a relatively composed outcome, ideas crystallize as they grow: they become more and more fixed (even though they are almost never documented) and will never be repeated exactly the same way every time. Formal elements are established, themes are fixed, arrangements are essentially set, but there is still room for improvisation, especially in terms of the details. This offers students a few advantages: participants must memorize, learn many things from others by ear, and always must adapt by listening to the whole. It also gives them ownership of the materials, knowing that everything has been created by themselves and the group together.
Projects with a more improvisatory nature follow different procedures. In the Joint Module of Improvisation, there are several preparatory lessons that expand upon specific techniques of improvisation. Most importantly, students have learned from the masters by studying the way composers have developed their vocabulary and shaped their compositions. They have also learned how to apply roles, restrictions, and rules in their improvisations (Backstage - A joint module of improvisation - A few examples). During the final presentation concert to conclude their module, the creation process happened during the performance for the most part and was strongly improvisatory in nature. Creation processes were primarily mixed with the ACM trio project. With inspiration from the artwork and artifacts in the museum, small ideas, cells, and musical motifs were created. Various sections were developed based on improvising with them, ranging from full blown compositions to parts that were freely improvised during the performance. A synchronized slide show projected behind us (Video: Presentation – ACM trio – Live stream, full set) accompanied the concert.
MY ROLES AS A LEADER AND COACH
I found myself taking on many different roles while ultimately being responsible for all projects mentioned in this exposition. Of these different roles, I felt most at ease as a teacher, as teaching is what I have been doing for a large part of my musical life. However, since teaching my first improvisation classes at the ESMUC in Barcelona in 2002, I gradually developed new skills that are equally important, if not more. I learned to let students discover things instead of telling them what to do. I learned to let them take responsibility for their ideas and take on the role of a facilitator more. But I also gained experience in improvising together with students and treating them like equal musicians, despite having the upper hand with my experience in the field. With these different projects, it meant that I had to adapt myself and take on the role that was appropriate for the stage the project was in. My main roles can be summarized as follows:
1) The role of a teacher: teaching specific techniques, showing how things can be done, then letting participants work for themselves (A Joint Module of Improvisation)
2) The role of coach and facilitator: letting participants discover, guide them to listen and respond, intervene when necessary, make decisions occasionally when students need help with the process. (FYCP 2019, FYCP2020)
3) The role of collaborator/co-creator: become actively involved, co-create parts of the piece to inspire or show the way. Suggest solutions
when the process gets stuck, contribute materials. (FYCP2020)
4) The role of band-leader: true collaboration, being a co-performer, having equal roles with the other members of the group, playing off other members of the group. (The ACM trio project)
Once again, I would like to highlight the First Year’s Creative Project 2020 (FYCP2020) as a special case. For the first time, I worked with a team of coaches. Here I was effectively coaching the coaches as well, as many of them had not had direct experience with similar projects before. It was part of a development initiative we began at YST to involve more faculty and adjunct-faculty in the creative part of the curriculum. This should result in more faculty specializing in teaching and coaching of collaborative improvisation and composition projects.
While the roles of teacher and band-leader are relatively straightforward, some roles are less defined. More specifically, this includes co-creator, and coach to a lesser extent. When does one cross this line? When does one intervene? I would say the main pitfall is telling the group what to do, especially during the early stages of a project. When placing him/herself above the students, a coach obstructs the very nature of the collaborative process. Instead, the focus should be on helping everyone involved discover they can have their own ideas, receive support from others to validate and develop them, find their strengths, and learn how to develop these ideas in a collective setting. This does not mean that no room exists for a coach to bring in ideas and share valuable expertise. In my opinion, the main goal is creating a space for all to listen and learn to
act in response to listening, recognize when something doesn’t work and help find a way forward. When nothing is concrete, especially at the very beginning of a project, one may be tempted to create a plan, share it with the students and tell them exactly what you want them to do. But this denies the very nature of the collaborative endeavor. I personally believe strongly that responsibility for content creation should completely lie in the hands of the participating students. A coach (or multiple coaches) should initially facilitate the process while refraining from initial judgements on the quality of the ideas being formed. The percussion theme from the First Year's Creative project 2020 (Video: Presentation - FYCP2020 - Alone Together, full stream of the performance, 20:52 ff.) illustrates this point. The original and first version of this theme was not exactly musically interesting. It sounded a bit like a bad version of the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. I could have lectured the students about having bad taste and pushed them in another direction, but that would have had a few negative side effects, potentially taken away their enthusiasm and made them feel the idea was ultimately not their own. Instead, I let them run with it. At a later stage, there are usually many opportunities to help develop the initial idea into something better, and use your expertise to show them how to work certain things out.
Actively getting involved as a co-creator was something that just happened to me during the First Year’s Creative Project 2020. The COVID situation created the ultimate improvisational experience. There was no recipe, and the process itself had to be reinvented. The video postcards drew me in and served as inspiration to become actively involved in the creation process itself. I began by creating sample materials for incoming
students that would inspire them to explore what could be possible with the technology. The other coaches and I ended up working together with the students in a creative process of discovery and exploration, enjoying the twists and turns of the circumstances and being challenged to find creative solutions.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE MUSIC: WHAT ARE THE INSPIRATIONS AND WHAT IS BEING EXPRESSED?
A question that always comes up is the question about meaning. What do we want to express and how do we do that? What are our points of departure? How can we express anything in music actually? We see a great variety of inputs and inspirations when looking at the various ways music was conceived in the different projects,. I will try to break them down into a few categories and expand upon each one.
Let’s start with storytelling. In this case, inspiration from a story becomes the input for an improvisation or a composition. We already know that a story cannot be directly translated into music, and this fact creates the space and freedom to attach meaning to the musical translation of the story. A fair number of projects have used this storytelling process. For the First Year’s Creative Project 2020, the COVID situation inspired stories for the piece: fear and uncertainty, being locked up in quarantine, and stories from the news. They were narrated most strikingly in the COVID opera (Video: backstage - FYCP2020 - A Covid Opera). Students structured this section with 5 singers, and each of them performed a segment. They would use their own language and include two players from the larger ensemble
as improvising accompanists. This resulted in a very interesting section with pre-recorded singing (because of COVID restrictions) and simultaneous action on the stage. The Orchestral Improvisations Project also used storytelling. Participants experimented with newly added fairy tales to Ravel's tales from the Mother Goose suite (Backstage - OIMP - Stories). The Joint Module of Improvisation used stories as the starting point for freely improvised pieces, guiding the players in their roles, material content and dramatic evolution of the pieces (Video: Backstage - JMI - A story with English vowels and consonants).
Other projects drew from different musical styles, genres, and repertoire. A few participants involved in the First Year’s Creative Project 2019 knew how to play jazz and Latin music. They developed a groove based on Cuban Salsa and found some very nice ways of arranging the music, gradually adding new layers, and increasing the level of tension. Their creativity blossomed when adapting the Cuban groove to an orchestral setting (Video: Presentation - FYCP2019 - Full performance of Russia - Bali - Cuba, 10:16 ff.). While participants in the Orchestral Improvisations Project drew inspiration directly from elements in the score of Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye (Video: Presentation - OIMP - Trailer: developing ideas for Orchestral Improvisations), the Joint Module of Improvisation used various pieces from the repertoire as starting points and input to develop improvisational skills and strategies (Video: JMI - A Steve Reich inspired jam in the classroom).
One challenge students in the Orchestral Improvisations Project faced was expressing emotional states, moods and atmospheres
(Video: Backstage - OIMP - Atmospheres, Moods & Emotional states). Participants could choose a starting point, and then develop a short piece that expressed the emotion or atmosphere. Students remarked that outcomes, in their opinion, were highly subjective, especially since the entire group had to agree on them. While the general audience may think so, translating an emotion into music is not as simple as playing a major or minor triad to feel happy or sad. In addition, if we try to imitate something literally on an instrument, such as imitating the sound of an alarm on a hobo (Video: Backstage - OIMP - Atmospheres, Moods & Emotional States, 4:12 ff.), it can quickly become banal. Many nuances can be expressed with orchestration, scale types, harmonies, sound colors, rhythm, and other musical parameters. Regardless, meaning is ultimately attached to those creating the music. The more believable it is for them, the more convincing it will be for an audience. Many great artists in the past have mentioned the power of association and even synesthesia in their creative work, ranging from Messiaen to Anthony Braxton. Both created very idiosyncratic languages to represent their musical thoughts and creation processes. Graham Lock wrote a nice article that illustrates these concepts about Braxton and his symbolic language that drew connections between visual objects and sound (Lock, 2008).
The artifacts and art objects from the Asian Civilizations Museum therefore became a rather abstract source of inspiration, leading to musical creation through inspiration and association. Concerning the creation of meaning, connections made during the process were quite personal. Members of the trio, including myself, drew inspiration from very different musical and cultural backgrounds, and we gave ourselves complete freedom to take
these inspirations into any direction. This resulted in Arab and Indian influences in two composed pieces called Bazaar (18:18 ff.) and Yodha Man (4:40ff.), impressions of a more literal nature in Submerged (13:30ff.) and The Battle (24:30 ff.), and a very abstract translation of shape and symmetry into the note material and harmonic structure of Triangles (28:05 ff.). (All timings refer to Video: Presentation - ACM - Live stream, full set).
NEW TECHNOLOGIES: CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS IN TIMES OF COVID
In conclusion, I should highlight the expanded use of technology and the new role it has taken on with the COVID situation. Use of live internet connections, pre-recorded video materials, synchronized projections and live-streaming has surpassed being employed as a mere solution to solve certain limitations. It has led to new creative possibilities, changed old ways of thinking, and the recipes for creation. As mentioned in the paragraph on working processes, the First Year’s Creative Project 2020 was severely hampered by the everchanging rules related to COVID. All students recorded and submitted the videos with drones and melodies while they were in isolation, and they only came together in a later stage of the project to form some of the materials that would be used at the beginning and during some transition sections of the piece. This assembly process of creating these musical materials was a new experience for all of us. It revealed new possibilities of creating material in stages, starting with creating rough content followed by using video editing software, giving us the chance to assemble the materials in an infinite number of ways. Most of the time it even went a step further. Pre-recorded materials were not just
assembled, but digitally processed and manipulated as well (Video: Backstage - FYCP2020 - Virtual Jams). During the same project, some students experienced the limitation of still being in their home countries while others were present. Connecting them remotely to these creative sessions therefore become essential. While a few musicians have explored telematics in the past, COVID has suddenly forced nearly all musicians to explore playing together online.
In April 2020, this resulted in a wave of musicians posting videos of themselves playing together. Each one appeared in a little box on the screen. While an understandable reaction, from an artistic perspective, the result was quite poor. During his keynote speech at the PGVIM international conference in August 2020, Alan Pierson, the conductor of the Alarm Will Sound ensemble, coined it nicely: "it felt like a pretty hot idea in March, and in May we were all so tired of it” (Pierson, 2020). To a certain extent, this may be true. Musicians, with these videos, were trying to find a workaround for doing the same they had always done instead of looking for truly new ways of playing together. Contrary to this belief, I believe we unquestionably entered new territory with the First Year's Creative Project 2020. We pre-recorded various Zoom sessions with online improvisations. Afterwards, we selected the best sessions. During the final performance, we projected the selection on the large screen while live playing musicians interacted with it (Video: Backstage - FYCP2020 - Wind ensemble playing live with a zoom session). Considering the entire was streamed live, the result consisted of many layers of creation with impressive depth.
To conclude, the new possibilities offered by technology and the insights we have gathered during the COVID period could potentially move us a step forward in developing our creation processes, how we think about the possibilities and figure out ways to expand the borders of creative collaboration. It certainly has challenged me to think of expanding and developing these inspirations in upcoming projects.