Mediating elements during the creative process
In this section I will discuss the parallels I found between the creative processes involved in the creation of the food and the music. I believe that the similarities between both, which relate to the rhythms of craft at their most fundamental level, did in some way link the music and food together during the performances, if only in the sense that both things were created by myself and did therefore reflect my artistic personality, albeit expressed through different media. I also reflect on some of the most fruitful parts of the creative process by themselves, in the hope that the reader might find these reflections useful for their own artistic endeavours.
My thinking in relation to craft relies heavily on the work of Richard Sennett, particularly his two books The Craftsman (2008) and Together (2013). Reading them made me aware of the fact that communicating with others, tidying up my studio, writing my shopping list, etc., were all crafts, which I could develop and train in a very similar way as my music making. By the time I became familiar with this idea, cooking was already a very important part of my life, and I devoted a respectable amount of time to it almost every day. But truly understanding it as a craft allowed me to improve my abilities much more speedily, because I realised that, as when learning to play an instrument, the development of any craft requires a lot of repetition and questioning. In Sennett’s words, “faced with a new problem or challenge, the technician will ingrain a response, then think about it, then re-ingrain the product of that thinking” (2013, p. 203).
Relating my cooking and music making as crafts that I could develop in similar ways also permitted me to let one of them be inspired by the other. I tried to approach my cooking as I did my musical practice (for instance, by giving importance to critical repetition, or by aiming to be more mindful and focused while cooking), and I found that both my enjoyment and technical skills were greatly increased. Similarly, I tried to metaphorically apply certain things I did while cooking to my musical practice, such as the joy of improvising and adding unplanned ingredients to my meals, or the importance of perfectly seasoning and balancing a dish with salt and some sort of sour ingredient. The first translated itself into a more creative approach when practising music, the latter into a greater attention to detail when finishing a piece.
During the craftwork involved in this research, I tried to adhere to these five precepts laid out by Sennett, which have served me well whenever I felt that I was getting stuck:
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- “The good craftsman understands the importance of the sketch— that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin. […] The informal sketch is a working procedure for preventing premature closure. […]
- The good craftsman places positive value on contingency and constraint. […]
- The good craftsman needs to avoid pursuing a problem relentlessly to the point that it becomes perfectly self- contained; then […] it loses its relational character. […] The positive alternative to this drive to resolve is allowing the object a measure of incompleteness, deciding to leave it unresolved.
- The good craftsman avoids perfectionism that can degrade into a self-conscious demonstration—at this point the maker is bent on showing more what he or she can do than what the object does. […] The good craftsman’s remedy eschews self-consciously pointing out that something is important.
- The good craftsman learns when it is time to stop. Further work is likely to degrade.” (2008, p. 262.)
Although I did in one way or the other apply all the principles mentioned above, I will briefly focus on the concepts of contingency and constraint, as these were particularly significant during my research process.
Contingency
The unexpected is an essential element of any artistic endeavour, and embracing some of the unexpected outcomes of the experiments I carried out led to some of my most fruitful investigations. One example would be some of the comments from the audience after the first experiment, which pointed to the fact that one of the dishes had been perceived as particularly well matched with the music because the musical and culinary textures seemed to coincide. This was unexpected, since texture had not been taken into account at all when designing the pairing. Embracing this contingency allowed me to shift my attention, and I decided to explicitly focus the use of texture in my second experiment, which led to a more satisfying artistic result (more on this can be read in the section Mediating elements. Semantic matching).
Constraint
Limitations play a fundamental role in any creative practice. They force the maker to find innovative solutions to problems (without limitations, solutions would be self-evident), and are ultimately what allows the final product to take shape. A lack of constraint would mean too many possibilities, so many that the maker would be paralysed. What sort of artwork would a painter create if given an infinite canvas, infinite types of paint in all imaginable colours, infinite types of brushes, infinite time, and the ability to instantly erase all trace of whatever they painted in case they were not convinced of its quality? Whenever they actually managed to choose a brush, paint, and colour to start with, they would surely return to the blank canvas again and again, unsatisfied by whatever they created, and would finally give up due to pure boredom. Or perhaps they would start creating constraints themselves, drawing up a frame on the canvas, choosing only one type of paint and a few colours, deciding to use only a couple of brushes. And then, they might start making up rules, ‘you have to finish the painting in two hours’, ‘you can only return to the blank canvas once the previous painting is finished', etc.
A scenario without limitations is of course purely utopian. Constraint is deeply woven into the materials and context of each and every artwork. Yet I often find that these limitations are not enough for my creativity to flourish, and that implementing a few more rules will make the work more interesting, engaging, and productive.
One of the countless examples I could give of this would be the choice of (musical and culinary) ingredients for the first experiment. I chose only five main ingredients for the food: parsnips, kapucijners (Dutch gray peas), spelt, barley, and linseeds (why I chose these in particular is explained in detail in the chapter The food). I would have to make three contrasting dishes that would contain all five ingredients, plus a few pantry staples. This constraint forced me to explore all the possibilities that these few whole foods could offer me, and I began to process each of them in a variety of ways to coax out new aromas and textures. Similarly, while composing the music for this experiment, I limited myself to a very restricted amount of musical gestures, each of which would correspond to a basic taste (more about this can be read in the section Mediating elements. Crossmodal correspondences). These gestures, which, like the ingredients for the different dishes, were all to be present at one moment or the other while the audience was eating each of said dishes, were also transformed and rearranged to create a sufficient sense of variety during the performance. These parallel constraints in the musical and culinary materials did undoubtedly give a sense of cohesion to the performance that it would otherwise have lacked.
In a different chapter, Sennett reflects on how intuitive leaps occur. There are, according to him, four stages in this process: reformatting, or "the willingness to see if a tool or practice can be changed in use" (2008, p. 210); the establishment of adjacency, that is, “[bringing] two unlike domains […] close together; the closer they are, the more stimulating seems their twined presence” (2008, pp. 210-211); surprise, "a way of telling yourself that something you know can be other than you assumed" (2008, p. 211); and, finally, the "recognition that a leap does not defy gravity; unresolved problems remain unresolved in the transfer of skills and practices" (2008, p. 211). Although all four of these stages were essential to my creative process at one point or the other, I will briefly focus on adjacency, as it is the one for which I can give the clearest practical examples.
Many steps of my creative process started by establishing adjacency between different objects or ideas. For instance, when I started to think about composing the music, I created a table in which the row entries contained extended techniques for the traverso, the column entries extended techniques for the violin (this table can be found in the chapter The music). This allowed me to mentally travel through the different sound combinations as I studied the table, and to mark which sounds I could consider equivalent between the two instruments, and which combinations I found attractive. This proved invaluable when composing the music for the experiments, providing me with an extensive palette of sound colours which I could deploy depending on my needs in every instance.
Similarly, when starting to think about the food during the creation of the first experiment, I established adjacency between the different ingredients described above. A variety of possibilities of combining them in their different forms started coming to my mind. For instance, imagining linseeds and kapucijners together, a seed and a legume, made me think of how sesame seeds (in the form of tahini) and chickpeas come together in a hummus. Although I was not able to make a convincing version of the kapucijner-linseed hummus in the end (linseeds become tremendously viscous when in contact with liquid), I did end up serving a kapucijner hummus without linseeds in the experiment.
The first and most important adjacency I established in this research was, naturally, between the food and music themselves. Bringing these two domains together in all sorts of physical and imagined contexts sparked all the questions and associations that ultimately generated this entire enquiry.