Well, I’m getting into an argument with somebody over this issue today so I figured why not write about it? You’re probably not going to want to read a lot of this because it’s quite brash. But it really drives me crazy when people mistake tools for creativity learning. So let me first just come right out and state the bottom line of this article.
You cannot teach creativity…period.
Now, if you want to keep reading, enjoy. If you like a good rant, you’re going to enjoy this one.
So I’m taking this songwriting course and there’s this forum that we all attend. Somebody mentioned something about how they were disappointed with the course so far because it was just teaching them rules and not teaching them creativity. I responded saying that you can’t teach creativity. You can give somebody the tools to try to become creative, but you can’t teach creativity.
He disagreed and pointed to some Odyssey Of The Mind program online.
So I checked it out and this is right off their web site.
“students learn skills that will provide them with the ability to solve problems”
Notice the words in bold. Let’s start off with skill.
A skill in music would be something like being able to construct a verse or chorus to a song. You learn what makes up those things and then you create one yourself. Well, all you’re learning is some ABCs of how to do something. You’re not teaching creativity. You’re giving them the “ability” (the next word in bold) to be creative.
This person is unhappy with the lessons we’ve gotten so far on how to map out a song, what a verse is, what a chorus is, what a bridge is, and so on. He wants to learn something that will make him creative.
I’ve been writing music for over 35 years and I’m sitting here scratching my head trying the damnedest to come up with something, anything, that would be considered “creative” thinking when it comes to writing music, something that can actually be taught.
Well, I can come up with some stuff that I’ve learned over the years. I don’t necessarily agree that it’s “creative” or that it’s going to teach you creativity but here goes.
One thing you can do in order to be “creative” is to randomly make up a song. What do I mean by random? Take the various elements of a song and randomly create them. In order to do this, you will need some kind of a random generator that can be programmed to return different values.
Let’s go through the various parts of a song and see what we can come up with.
First, we have the title. How can we creatively come up with a title? Using our random generator, we program it to come up with numbers from 1 to 26. These represent the 26 letters of the alphabet. We also need a random number generator programmed from 1 to, let’s say 5. This is going to be used to determine how many words are in our title.
We use the number of words generator first and then, after we determine how many words, we use the letter generator to generate the first letter of each word.
So let’s say we get 3 for our first generation and then (running the second generator 3 times) we get F, T, P as our letters. Now we have to come up with a title that has the letters F, T, P as the first letter in each word.
How about Free The People?
Not bad. Okay, but how did I come up with the title? The method didn’t make me creative. It just gave me a tool to come up with letters in order to come up with a title. But I still had to be able to look at the letters and come up with the title. Now, I could have programmed a random word generator, but then that’s not creativity either. That’s just spitting out words from a computer. I can get a monkey to do that.
But okay, we have our title. What’s next?
Well, we need a melody for our title. We’re going to need another random generator for this from 1 to 12. These are the 12 notes we have available to us in tonal music. Let’s program it to give us 3 numbers from 1 to 12. These will be the first 3 notes to our song.
Let’s say we got 4,9 and 3. Starting from C, that would be E flat, A flat and D. Sounds kind of funky mysterious. I guess it could work. But is this teaching us creativity? Not really. We have 3 notes randomly generated. We still have to come up with a whole tune from these 3 notes. And with some note combinations, that’s going to be hard to do for some.
What about song structure? Well, we can make a list of all the different kinds of song structures such as…
Verse/Verse/Chorus/Verse/Verse/Chorus/Bridge/Chorus
And assign a number to each structure (1 through whatever)
Or…
We can assign a number to each part of a song such as
1 Verse
2 Chorus
3 Bridge
And then generate numbers from 1 to 3 and use each type of section in that order. Oh, but what happens if we start off with our Bridge? That becomes a problem. I think option 1, list all the different song structures, is the better option here.
But again, is this teaching creativity? Not really. All it’s doing is saying “Here, this is the song structure you’re going to write. Go ahead and write it.”
These are nothing more or less than tools to help you jog your mind a little. They are no more or less creativity tools than the box method or anything else that you might learn in a songwriting course. They’re just tools.
If you want to learn creativity or how to be creative, you’re going to be seriously disappointed. All anybody can do is give you tools that will help you think of ways to do things. No tool is any better or worse than another as far as breeding “creativity.”
It’s what you do with the tool.
But in the end, that’s all they are…tools.
All of them. Every single last one of them.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim