Quiet Creativity

Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking posits that introverts, people who find the social world overstimulating and hence prefer solitude and small group interactions, are nevertheless vital components of the social world despite being in the minority. Like many popular books of this kind, Quiet directs its attention towards the usefulness of such persons in organizations. Nevertheless, Cain devotes one chapter specifically to creativity, so I have gleaned some information relevant to this blog.

Cain uses published research to bolster her claims. One such study was conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Berkeley's Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, which compared well-known creative people (people who have made a name for themselves) in engineering, science, math, architecture and writing with others deemed "less groundbreaking" in the same fields. The well-known creative people tended to be "interpersonally skilled but 'not of an especially sociable or participative temperament" (74). Cain notes that current management models value social cooperation over  solitude, a style that Cain nicknames the New Groupthink (75). By borrowing George Orwell's term for the authoritarian suppression of intellectual individualism, Cain reveals her skepticism about management strategies such as open-plan offices and team-based organizational structures.

Many such management models like to use the idea of "networking," a term popularized by computer technology, but as Cain notes, technologies such as the Internet allow people to work alone in rooms that are geographically dispersed rather than crammed into a cubicle farm in a highrise. Computer scientists tend to be introverted people, after all. Even management styles tend to value the extrovert. Not surprisingly, Cain questions extrovert-centred ideas of leadership. She quotes Janet Farrall and Leonie Kronborg in their own book Leadership Development for the Gifted and Talented that some famously introverted people, such as Charles Darwin and Marie Curie, have contributed massively to the world.

Apple founder Steve Wozniak is Cain's exemplar of the social value of introversion, a man who, though he helped design the type of personal computers that made the Internet a world-wide phenomenon, developed his best ideas when he was alone.

The ideal quiet person that Cain describes is not a shy person, someone who is anxious in groups. A quiet person will think and wait before speaking up rather than bolt forward at the head of the line.  Noisy groups irritate this kind of person, so time alone gives a low-stimulus environment better suited to permit the quiet person to think clearly.

Imitative Exercise: Setting and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks

I sometimes worry about physical settings in my stories. How much do I need to describe, and how much do I let my readers fill in on their own? I found a passage I liked in Thomas Mann's second novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), translated by HT Lowe-Porter, which describes the idiosyncratic location of the Hansesaal, the assembly room for the Lübeck's government councillors:

The room belonged to the beer-hall and dance-establishment of a widow named Suerkringel; but on certain days it was at the service of the gentlemen burgesses. The entrance was through a narrow whitewashed corridor opening into the restaurant on the right side, where it smelled of beer and cooking, and thence through a handleless, lockless green door so small and narrow that no one could have supposed such a large room lay behind it. The room was empty, cold, and barnlike, with a whitewashed roof in which the beams showed, and whitewashed walls. The three rather high windows had green-painted bars, but no curtains. Opposite them were the benches, rising in rows like an amphitheatre, with a table at the bottom for the chairman, the recording clerk, and the Committee of the Senate. It was covered with a green cloth and had a clock, documents, and writing-materials on it. On the wall opposite the door were several tall hat-racks with hats and coats.

---

The language is fairly simple, so my attraction  to it does not lie in the sophistication of word choice. The verbs are not vivid: "were" is the most common verb. Neither is the sentence structure is  particularly complex: "The (noun) (verb)" starts most sentences. Quite possibly, the setting itself attracts me more than the way the setting is described. Government buildings I am familiar with are not rooms attached to a tavern. This particular meeting room does not seem opulent, either, or at least it is not described as being opulent. Photos I found of the actual Lubeck Rathaus make the building seem impressively styled, though it's true that in Mann's time they may not have been so impressive or at least not as impressive as other buildings the book described.

Perhaps this passage impresses me because it reflects the book's goal of describing a ruling class of merchants, who, despite their severe Protestantism, valued trade and wealth to the point where all other values were pressed into their service. The room is described prosaically and with an emphasis on its country plainness ("whitewashed," even "barnlike"); nevertheless, it is attached to a beerhall and dancehall, two places associated with the kind of licentiousness that the Buddenbrook family and its social class were supposed to reject. This rejection in theory does not always apply in practice. Some characters in the novel have their downfall because of scandals over drinking or associations  with people outside their narrow social circle.

Word choice plays an important role in this representation of Hansesaal, but only in conjunction with other of the book's motifs. This passage demonstrates the interrelationship between the sentence level of writing and the thematic level of writing. A description, therefore, can do more than present a sensory impression of a place to satisfy people's desires to "see" where characters are. The description of a specific setting can reflect and thus participate in the communication of thematic goals.

Creativity and Musical Arrangement

To find out what arrangers think about the creativity and music arrangements, I interviewed Allan Gilliland, dean of fine arts and composition at MacEwan University and a prolific composer and arranger. His base of operation is classical music, but his experience as a jazz trumpeter has allowed him to write and perform in many music genres for both small and large ensembles. When I spoke to him, his recent musical adventures included the scoring for the Edmonton Citadel Theatre's production of Sense and Sensibility and a new orchestral composition for jazz legends Tommy Banks and PJ Perry for the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra's 2017-2018 season.


Typically, Gilliland says, an arranger works with someone else's melody. The arranger must do, as Gilliland says, "everything else." This "everything else" includes scoring for the instruments in an ensemble, harmonization, bridging, transposition, and countermelody.  One form of arrangement popular in jazz is contrafact: the use of chord progressions, rather than melody, from someone else's composition. An arranger in contrafact thus creates the new melody over the chords.Thus George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" has lent its chords to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker's "Anthropology" and to Django Reinhardt's "Daphne."

Gilliland says that some "famous and great arrangements" have not received the respect they deserve because of the music industry's greater valuation of original composition. Arrangers are paid through fee for service. Unlike composers, arrangers tend not to get royalties, since only melodies can be copyrighted. Gilliland gave the example of Gil Evans, whose collaborations with Miles Davis are legendary. Also legendary is the fact that Evans received no royalties from the success of those collaborations. (Read Stephanie Stein Crease's biography of Gil Evans to find out more.)

In the case of contrafact, chord progressions cannot be copyrighted in American law, so a musician can generate a copyrightable melody over an uncopyrightable chord progression. The contrafactual arrangement, therefore, lies in a tender zone at the interstices of copyright law and the emulation of other musicians.

Gilliland says that the diminished status of arrangers is unfair because they are doing "really creative work." Jazz and big band in particular use arrangements heavily, so these genres lean on the labour and ingenuity of arrangers.

Gilliland  both composes and arranges, and he says the creative act is present in both. For arrangement, he says that creativity feels different, more "bound" to the originating melody. He agrees that there can be a "clash of creativity" between the original work and the arranger's desire to interpret that work through instrumentation and scoring. Some song standards have been arranged countless times, so the challenge is to make an arrangement that stands out from others. Gilliland says that some arrangers will ask themselves, "What can I do that people won''t expect?" Some arrangements, for example, are "deconstructions," such that the original has been dispersed in complex ways into the arrangement. Compare, for example, Dave Ballou's arrangement of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington's "Smada" to a recording of the original.

Or compare a standard version of "O Canada" with Gilliland's arrangement.

Arrangements

As part of my novelty agenda for this year, I plan to be a busker for a day. Why a busker? I was walking around doing chores and thinking of novelty ideas. All kinds of strange thoughts enter my head when I am desperate for ideas, as I often am. The word busker surfaced, and I had to admit that, yes, I have never busked before. No way around it.

Other ideas I generate I can eliminate because they cost too much money to arrange (go to Easter Island, buy a horse), or I can see no reasonable route to accomplishing  the novelty (compete in the Olympics, become an inventor), or I just don't want to do it (yell at a rude person I meet in public, rob a bank). Busking for one day, though, I could not handily dismiss.

I can more or less play a piano accordion, so I plan one day this summer to go outside to a street corner and play. All my work in coming up with a repertoire of songs got me thinking around music arrangements. I want to do one or two new songs to supplement my existing collection of accordion music, which is dominated by classical music, folk tunes and American jazz standards. Has someone out there, for example, arranged "Hotline Bling" for piano accordion? (Yes, of course.)  If so, where can I find the sheet music?

From this speculation, I asked myself, What kind of person would be in the business of arranging Drake songs to publish as accordion sheet music, or as sheet music for any other instrument, for that matter?

I need to investigate.

Cento

My local library branch has begun to display book-spine poetry. These are poems built with the titles of books as printed on their spines. To create the poem, you stack the books in the order you want.

Artist Nina Katchadourian tends to get credit on the Internet for this art form. Her website has many examples of her work.

Book spine poetry is a form of cento, a genre of poetry extent since the first centuries C.E. in which the lines come from other people's poems. 

I have books. I have been known to write poetry. Why not, then?


























If you want to write
Primal myths
Daughter of Earth
Unwinding threads
Writing down the bones
Hellgoing
Making a Difference
You can't go home again




The wars
echo
inside memory
fatal passage
under the ribs of death
on the road
all on fire
under the banner of heaven
never let me go



The technique reminds me of using poetry magnets. The writing process is less flexible but permits flights of fancy that might not otherwise arise.



The waves
to the lighthouse
island
disgrace
the known world

Follow-up to Creative Stimulants 3

Below is part of the outcome of my creative stimulants exercise from last time. I did not include the entire story, since it goes on for some time and I wanted to spare the blog the long chunk of text.

 After I finished my story, I read the host story, as it were, Julia Alvarez's “Trespass." That story focussed on a child, while mine focussed on an adult who was visiting the American Garcias. My Garcias are Argentinian, a more or less random choice of country. I have some Argentinian relatives, whom I met once when they visited here. The father in that family was a doctor, so I made my father of the family a doctor too. The class differences have an impact on characterization as well as on the plot, such as it is in my story. I noted with interest the sordid turns that both of the stories ended up taking. I don't know why that would be. 

I have work to do on this story still. But for what it's worth, here is an excerpt of its first draft.

True Blue

“The day the Garcías were one American year old, they had a celebration at dinner.”  Julia Alvarez, “Trespass”

     The oldest García, Jacinta García, was not an American. She was visiting from Argentina. She insisted on cooking, however. She made her version of a true-blue American meal: hot dogs and French fries for her son Diego’s two youngest children; roast beef, mashed potatoes and coleslaw for the adults and the two older children, who were teenagers; and apple pie with tiger tail ice cream for everyone.

     None of the children liked the pistachio ice cream. Pablo, the oldest grandchild, said, “Abuela, you should have asked me what kind of ice cream we like.”

     Jacinta nodded. A smile twisted her mouth even as an exasperated frown threatened below it. “You’re right, Pablo.” Jacinta was a diabetic and had not eaten ice cream in years, neither American nor Argentinian. “Here I thought ice cream on sale at Sam’s Club was ice cream most people liked.”

     “It is,” Diego’s wife Maria said. “Your grandchildren have become picky all of a sudden.”

     “You can’t know America from watching telenovelas,” teenaged Brisa said.  “You should have asked us.”

     Jacinta had waited ten years for this visit to America, and now, with a sweep of her hand, she had alienated her grandchildren from her. Since Diego, Maria and the two oldest had citizenship, she had felt safer coming over. She had heard stories about American immigration not letting their family stay in America if they let an older parent come to visit. In the past they had come to visit her for long periods, often taking advantage of the visit to sort out details of their planned application for citizenship. Once Diego had managed to convince Jacinta to come to America when they were in California but that was because Maria had just had given birth to Ana, and Diego had said that Maria needed help--the pregnancy had tired her out, and she was slow to recover. Maria’s youngest sister Nadia wouldn’t come, so Maria had no one else. Even so, Jacinta had stayed only for three weeks.

Jacinta was grateful for Diego’s courage in visiting Argentina so frequently and ensuring she could keep in touch with Pablo and Brisa. She had wept over her grandchildren the most when Diego moved to the United States. Her first two grandchildren had loved her so much. And now she had ruined this first attempt at showing that she loved them just the way they were, whether they Argentinian or American. Of course the littlest ones had been born in Spokane and so had always been American. They had never known their grandmother as anything other than someone from a foreign country. Jacinta had become like one of the itinerant parents she had been acquainted with through her childhood school friends. So many fathers of her friends lived somewhere else to work or do graduate studies and came to visit their children only once or twice a year. Her best friend Elenora’s father had been one of those men. He lived in Dubai many years. Elenora had told Jacinta that she had never viewed her father as a real father. Elenora’s mother had taken a lover, one of her many, in the meantime and considered him to be her real father.

     “What kind of ice cream do you like, then?” Jacinta asked all four children the question. The two oldest waited for the two youngest to answer. Ana, the five-year-old, looked up at her grandmother and opened her mouth. A word Jacinta didn’t understand came out.

     “Birthday cake flavour,” Diego translated.

     “Ice cream with the flavour of birthday cake? What does that taste like?”

     “You know,” Pablo said. “White cake, with sprinkles, and very sweet icing.”   Pablo smiled as though he shared Jacinta’s skepticism, but Ana seemed irritated. Nevertheless, she said nothing and neither did Brisa. Jacinta wondered if Ana knew any Spanish. Diego said she did, but she had never heard Ana speak a word of it. She had only heard Ana speak English, and only then when Jacinta was not in the room. Once Jacinta walked in the room, Ana’s eyes narrowed, and she shrunk into a small package of herself.

     The littlest one, Connor, just past one year old, didn’t speak at all, except for “Mama” and “Papa.” 

     Ana said something else, and Diego didn’t translate immediately.

     “What did she say?”

     Brisa said, “She asked you have any birthday-cake ice cream.”

     “Is there a place to get it?” Jacinta asked.

      “Oh, no, you don’t, Mama.” Maria shook her head in that exaggerated way she always shook her head, like a nervous horse tossing her head at a strange sound. “The kids don’t need birthday-cake ice cream.”

     Brisa wrinkled her nose at Ana. “You can’t even buy that in stores,” she said. “You can only get that in ice-cream shops.” She spoke in Spanish, as though she expected Ana to understand her. Ana frowned as though she had understood perfectly.

     Baby Connor picked up a piece of cut-up hot dog and pushed it cautiously into the scoop of ice cream in his plastic dish.

     “That won’t help, Connor,” Ana said in English.

     Later, while Jacinta, Maria and Diego were doing the dishes, Jacinta wanted to have a smoke. With Diego around, however, she didn’t dare bring up the subject. One thing she had liked about Diego not being home in Argentina was that she could smoke whenever she wanted to. Ever since Diego started medical school she had not been able to smoke around him. She had even quit smoking for his sake. Once he had moved to California for his residency, he had left her, yes, and taken his family with him, but he had also taken with him a barrier to one of his mother’s great pleasures. She restarted her smoking only one week after he left. Now in his permanent job in Spokane, he had not changed his ways, and he had his eye on her. “I hope you aren’t smoking again, Mama,” he said when they were driving from the airport to his home.

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Not inside the house, of course!”

“Of course.”

Creative Stimulants 3: First line

Take the first line, sentence, or paragraph of a piece of writing and create your own story from it. You should acknowledge the authorship of the inspiring piece somehow. Otherwise, write it as you wish. This exercise is most interesting if you use a first sentence from a text you haven't read yet. Read the parent text afterwards and compare.

My parent text is "Trespass," a short story by Julia Alvarez, published in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

"The day the Garcias were one American year old, they had a celebration at dinner."

The original story is 81 paragraphs long. Likely my piece will not be as long. Stay tuned for it.