When Bach climbed out of bed..

‘There is a story of a student who once asked Bach how he created so many wonderful melodies. The question seemed to fox Bach. He is supposed to have replied that he did not know. He simply stepped on them when he climbed out of bed.’

The story about JS Bach is a recurring theme which you can find whenever you speak to a great artist and musician about how they do what they do. The recurring refrain is one of, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘That’s easy I just do whatever comes into my head’. There seems to be a detachment from the intellectual process that we assume they have been using to a more instinctive process.

It was also true that JS Bach did not compose from the keyboard but from his head, the idea that a sound could be fully formed in your mind seems impossible to those who cannot do it, however the point that many of the musical greats had this ability to just know something without having to find it is also common.

I think that the map that we are using is created by the way that we learn and it is not the same as the map that people with this type of ability use. The unconscious ability to create is something rarely discussed in the education system and in many cases as in maths it is actively discouraged by saying that the correct answer is still invalid if your workings are not shown. However one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century Srinivasa Ramanujan did not know how he achieved his answers believing them to come from a goddess so the workings are more to do with the evidence of the journey than of the arrival, the arts need more of the medieval aspect of revelation where a piece of work can arrive fully formed.

There is a way to develop a skill of listening, ok it may not produce a work like the St Matthew Passion but it will bring out the creativity that one has. You can just start by listening in your mind to a tune that you already know and then have it appear with a different instrument playing that melody. For instance imagine hearing Happy Birthday, first of all being sung and then hear it again being played by trumpet. The next step is to make up a melody as a variation of something that you know, because those things are already in your head from what you have already experienced and you mind will present sounds that conform to various protocols otherwise it will not sound musical. So change Happy Birthday developing the tune in different ways in your mind.

I encourage pupils to be led by what they hear and not just by muscle memory or by what they regurgitate. I think this is very important because the unconscious responds much quicker and more efficiently to hearing and feeling than it does by seeing. So sing ideas, play with the ideas, be crazy with them, be playful and imagine yourself into the space that melodies come free and you are an open vessel to musical ideas that are already there one just needs to let them out.

Vic Hyland

www.bluescampuk.co.uk rock summer school