When it comes to creativity, music is a construct; the notes
the scales the chords have been made. Someone decided on them, they took sounds
and labelled them and you are doing them as dictated.
So how do you fix that well you cannot by doing the same
thing with the same ideas because it is the master’s tools and the master’s
house literally. Want something new? Do something different with different
tools.
The thing that traps you will never be the thing that
releases you; you need new tricks and tools for that. So if you are creating a
piece and it is getting boring then you will need something different to break it.
Language creates a cage and to escape you will have to do
something else, if you are using logic, free yourself by using myth. If you are
using myth then use logic and if that does not work make up the words or use
another language. This has been done many times by the great and the good. Many
great thinkers had another alphabet from Leonardo’s writing in mirror image to
Hildegard of Bingen and John Dee having an angelic alphabet.
In the creative process of writing songs or coming up with
new business ideas lateral techniques are often needed in the early stages to
free oneself of the traps. Edward de Bono’s books on lateral thinking took us
into a weird world of words with new meanings such as Po being the word that
sat between yes and no. This is similar to the idea of suspending disbelief
where you do not need to believe in something you just need to allow it to be
possible.
Some of the lateral thinking techniques involved taking random
words out of dictionaries and thinking of the implications and feelings
associated with those words then being reapplied to the problem that had been
presented. It was allowing the mind to find another way back to the world of
logic and reality from the unconscious.We can postulate that there is no such
thing as reality only structures that we perceive as real. In other words
no scale, no chord, no song structures only things that appear familiar.
One of the cages that we are trapped in regarding science is
that anything that lays in the unproven cannot possibly be real, the problem
with that is that the area that the mind inhabits is getting smaller and
smaller. I see this a lot in the way that people are treated for anything that
lies outside of the ‘normal’ aspect of mental behaviour.
This is covers any of the traits that are unusual be that
Asperger’s, bipolar or just having an active imagination and for all of these
there is some sort of chemical cosh that can be used to make them ‘normal’.
The problem with this is that we are probably losing all of our artists
and creative thinkers that way which will have unforeseen circumstances in the
future.
To get out of that cage start looking at people who are
considered ill or unusual and ask is there something that they can bring that
is that is in real benefit to humanity? Let us not try to fix so many things let
us break them; instead of trying to cage every bird we should let them fly and
be birds.
This may be the only way that we can dismantle the rich
man’s palace and share the proceeds amongst everyone.
Vic
www.bluescamp.co.uk
