Some people think that creativity cannot be taught. “You either have it or you don’t,” they say. But I happen to know that this is total bunk.
Music education is all about training the imagination! And because I’m passionate about singing well, my own imagination is constantly getting stretched, tweaked and cultivated.
In the classic Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street, a little girl named Susan Walker (played by Natalie Wood) has never exercised her imagination. So Santa Claus (Edmund Gwenn) coaches her patiently in the art of pretending.
Voice lessons are actually based on the same principle, that a kindly mentor can shape his student’s earliest experiments in creativity. And by the time she goes onstage to sing a role, a young opera singer needs to be very good at pretending!
Of course, this always includes a lot of discipline and hard work. We tend to assume that creativity is the opposite of discipline, but that could not be further from the truth. Only a skilled musician has the power to be fully expressive, because she knows so many different ways to sing the same phrase. She can choose from a wide variety of musical tools. Stephen Covey got it right when he said that “only the disciplined are truly free.”
But freedom is hard to control, and maybe that’s why people use so many ocean metaphors when they talk about creativity. Inspiration is often described as a cresting wave. Well, if creativity is a wave, then artists are imagination surfers! And everyone knows that surfers have to practice.
When I was training for my first triathlon, I attended a swim clinic hosted by the LA Tri Club. It’s for newbies who want to try ocean swimming, and it’s called Ocean 101. I learned a lot about singing while I was treading water in Santa Monica Bay at 6 o’clock in the morning. “You can’t control the ocean,” the teacher told us sternly. “But you can control your thoughts.” He was telling us that ocean swimming is a mental game that
requires both concentration and playfulness. A body surfer uses the energy of the wave to arrive at his destination. He has fun but he plays by the ocean’s rules.
In the same way, a musician might not be able to control a surge of creative energy, but she can train herself to surf it with increasing expertise. And that’s why the imagination needs to be taken seriously. After all, it’s a wild and watery thing and it needs to be treated with respect!
Without rigorous training, however, the imagination can shrink and atrophy. But of course it never goes away completely, and it responds very well to the slightest bit of attention. That’s why it’s so important to practice (and to teach!) creativity.
“My imagination needs feeding and exercise,” writes Rev. Elizabeth Nordquist in her blog post, Imagining a Story of Spirit. A powerful imagination enriches every area of life. It helps us approach things that are wonderful and mysterious.
So go ahead and dream. Be an imagination surfer. Follow your creative instinct and imagine your way into something new. It just requires a little bit of mental yoga.
In the words of Dr. Seuss: “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”
