The Role of Choice in Creativity
Start from the basis of describing art in terms of choice. Consider it to be primarily manifestations (i.e. a medium is required) of a set of related choices (generally, but not necessarily related by their copresentation; they are displayed together in one template for the medium, e.g. a canvas, a page.)
There may be a way to liberate us from unnecessary conceptions of aesthetics using this basis, but I just want to use it to tell a little autobiographical story:
I began making sound my first artistic medium in high school. The motivation, as is generally the case, was to play popular music on instruments around the house, but at the same time I was developing other motivations: theoretical, in that I was reading about contemporary techniques in composition; and formal, in that I was guided, to an extent, by the type of recording devices I was using.
The first problem I encountered was an apathy in the choice of sounds, perhaps introduced by my interest in aleatory composition, and a direction toward the theory indicated above. That is, the choice of notes, or more loosely, sounds, is implicit in the definition of music, but no necessary aspect of musical recording or composition dictates or even guides the choice of particular notes. In other words, although the choice of notes was necessary, the preference of notes was not. The psychological component was not there.
I overcame this problem by altering my path of choice of sounds. Whereas I had previously asked myself, “What note/sound should come next?” I began asking myself, “How are sounds naturally arranged?” So I started to focus on the natural harmony between sounds; all I had to do was choose a detailed situation of naturally occurring harmonies, and that situation would choose the notes. For instance, I thought of a man and a woman in one room responding, according to a text, to choices a child would make in playing in another room; the text would indicate the sounds. Or I hid various instructions around a room, and performers would act according to those instructions as they found them, interpreting them to their whim according to the rigidity of the instructions. In short, I merely tapped into the desire of others to choose. I had found the method to choose sounds, but I deferred the preference of sounds to others.
The natural consequence of this style was that the “music” seemed to be more like events or plays; and since I had to come up with performances that did not require specific melodies, and since performers were generally not oriented towards any certain instruments, the sounds derived from texts, and in the end, the recordings of the pieces seemed more like prose than anything else; even though the necessary element of sound was still there (unless someone was merely reading a score) the audience’s focus became the literature.
As one might expect from my indicated lack of preferences, I allowed this trend to continue freely. Also, I allowed the trend to guide my own focus of composition, which became not the sound required in music, but the harmony required. As an extension of this idea, I explored natural harmonies, and often neglected the sounds. As you might guess, my art really did turn from music to literature as I became interested in the harmony of psychology rather than the harmony of noise
But even in literature the author generally uses his preferences for certain psychological harmonies to guide composition, and after the novelty of literary composition wore off and I had no way to prefer literary situations, I became apathetic of that media, too (but luckily the same disaster doesn’t occur with essays!) This time, the focus shifted from harmony to metaphor, and since I still enjoyed creation, if not preference, I automatically looked for another way to express metaphor than with literature. Painting became the new mode.
This could go on forever, I thought. I will paint until preferences of color leave me bland, and then what? Maybe I will turn to choreography.
But no; instead of moving from medium to medium, I was lucky enough to realize that what was just as necessary in composition as choice was the awareness of its corresponding feeling. That which is enjoyable in composition is the feeling that choice occurs naturally, hence the concept of the muse: when choice occurs naturally, it seems that the situation chooses the author, rather than the author choosing the situation. In any piece of art you see or read or hear, be aware of anything that signals the author’s belief that (s)he was chosen, anything that signals the enjoyment of choice, rather than the choice of a situation enjoyable to the audience. This is the “why” of composition. It separates the author from the audience because the audience does not believe that choice plays a role in reading or viewing, because the experience of choice belongs to the author. In order to enjoy art fully, one must be aware of a composition as an author is aware of his own composition, one must be aware of his relationship to his choices.