A Short History of Genius

The first important thing to understand about the concept of genius is that it has a history. Indeed, Laura C. Ball describes a long history of use that has led to it acquiring “ multiple meanings over time, each describing vastly different phenomena” (2014, p. 4). An early-modern monk or nun, preparing devotional music for their religious establishments, would likely not talk of their work as a unique expression of their individual essence but an attempt to praise God within a particular tradition (Hanchett Hanson, 2015, p. 2). Originality, therefore, is the result of particular cultural currents and not a necessary way of understanding human creative activity. For example, there is a strong argument to be made that the cult of genius has links with the rise of capitalism: it masks structural inequalities by positing a level playing field and relies on modern conceptions of individualism. Marcia Citron sees the nineteenth-century conceptions of creativity celebrating “individual achievement, including economic fulfillment, in a climate of free enterprise” (1993, p. 201), ideas that are vital to capitalist expansion.

Humanization of Creativity. Vlad P. Glaveanu and James C. Kaufman argue that there is something of a standard historical narrative around the history of genius, with its emergence in the Renaissance, solidification in the Enlightenment, and take-off with Romanticism (2019). For Oli Mould the critical juncture for the term “creativity” comes in the Enlightenment. Before this, the “power” of the creative process had been “beyond human agency,” usually the result of some kind of divine intervention, or at least devoted to its service (2018, p. 11). The growth of humanism allowed a different perspective to emerge: that humans themselves might be responsible for their own powerful acts of creativity. Christine Battersby states that the 18th century gave rise to the belief that “[i]t was creativity, not reason or talent, that made man resemble god” while genius “was supposed to make the Art (with a capital ‘A’) that European civilization produced different from the ‘crafts’ (with a small ‘c’) produced by primitives and other lesser human types” (1989, p. 3). Genius and originality were, therefore, created as powerful tools of distinction, creating hierarchies between genres and freezing out those without economic means.

The humanization of creativity did not lead to a sense that just anyone could be an original, rather this is the beginning of the cult of genius that continues to hold significant sway on musical imaginaries. Indeed, the 18th century saw a change in meaning of “genius” as a spirit possessed, potentially, by all to genius as the precious preserve of a few.⁵ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that this idea persists today, with geniuses being seen as the “lucky heir to some unknown strand of DNA that made them in some respects super-human” (2014, p. 534). As seventeenth-century English poet John Dryden comments, in eminently quotable fashion, “[g]enius must be born and never can be taught” (1885, p. 60). For those without the special strand there is, it seems, little to be done.

Genius and Aesthetics. Kant and Hegel, who produced some of the most influential works in aesthetics during the 18th and 19th centuries, advanced this attitude to the fine arts and to the special status of genius. Kant states that “fine arts must necessarily be regarded as arts of genius,” while genius is the “innate productive faculty of the artist” rather than following some kind of scientific rule (2007, p. 136). He also argues that undirected genius is not enough and that “[g]enius can only furnish rich material for products of beautiful art; its execution and form require talent cultivated in the schools [ . . . ]” (2007, p. 115). The connections between genius and the privilege of training and education, therefore, are sown early on. Richard T. Eldridge believes that Kant has had a lasting influence, stating that “[f]or generations, teachers of poetry painting, music, acting, and dance have worked in this way, hoping for that magical moment when precursor work is all at once fully internalized, taken up, and actively transformed by the student as nascent successor” (2014, p. 120). This is the hope for the pastiche composition exercises that persist in much music education.

Hegel shares some common ground with Kant but adds that the context of the work of art, as well as the conscious work of the artist, is paramount. For Hegel, the work of art relates to something other than the subjective creativity of the artist genius. Artistic content, in the words of Eldridge, must “represent and express attitudes toward what a significant number of people who share a significant stretch of culture most deeply care about in common: romantic love, honor, family” (2014, p. 121). This brief comparison of Kant and Hegel brings forth a key tension in conceptions of genius, labeled by Thomas McFarland the “originality paradox,” which concerns the relationship between the individual genius and wider culture and tradition (1974): are the “great masters” sustenance for the artist, or a debilitating inheritance? That the debate persisted is demonstrated by T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” written in 1919 (1932), and debates around the “Anxiety of Influence” (see Straus, 1991, and Whittall, 2003).

The Romantic Individualist. By the late 19th century, the figure of the towering genius taming the powers of their rampant creative impulses becomes the dominant image of the romantic artist. Samuel Taylor Coleridge argues that poetry is the shaping of “deep feeling” in words with a “sense of novelty and freshness” (1906, p. 166); Percy Bysshe Shelley describes inspiration as “original purity and force,” directed by “labor and study,” thereby taking a middle road between the individual and tradition (1991, p. 228). Composers became more autonomous during this period, relying less on noble patronage, at the same time as the modern notion of the autonomous individual was cemented.⁷ This is no coincidence if the aforementioned connections between genius and capitalism are taken seriously. At the same time, “geniuses were deemed more individual than ordinary human beings, less likely to think and act by established conventions and norms, genuinely original and soft tone eccentric, or even mad” (Chaplin & McMahon, 2016, p. 3). For an intriguing number, becoming a composer was in itself a kind of rebellion, one against the wishes of their artisan or professional families (Plantinga, 1984, p. 5). The romantic notions of the artist present a very different beast from the composer apprentice learning a particular musical language through careful imitation of exemplars. Rather, the creative process is one of passion and the violent eruption of creative energy, finding its complete expression in the “Promethean” figure of Beethoven (Plantinga, 1984, p. 16).

Individualism certainly continued into the 20th century, as did the sense of the past as a burden, most notably theorized by Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. For him, being a composer meant engaging with the contemporary state of the “musical material” and is, therefore, dependent on the state of this material at a particular time. Importantly, Adorno does not expect artists to reproduce the past but to engage with it, to tease out its contradictions, in order to find some kind of artistic truth. This leads to statements such as: “Art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself, right into its innermost fiber” (1997, p. 2). This is no cozy relationship with the past but a constant self-questioning and struggle. The results of this, alongside the philosopher’s critique of what he saw as the dehumanizing effects of popular culture, are some true artistic heroes and villains in his writings (Mould, 2018, p. 16).

The Artistic Hero. The artist hero, therefore, continues with the advent of modernism, though now engaging—or even vanquishing—the titanic forces of history and, in some conceptions, holding fast to the idea of musical progress. In music, key figures often towed a perilous line between narratives of revolutionary fresh starts and statements that encouraged a view of them as the next in a line of canonic figures. Arnold Schoenberg is particularly revealing in this respect, as is French composer Pierre Boulez. The former is well known for stating that his serial technique—a radical, though not unprepared, break with traditional compositional method—would “ensure the dominance of German music for the next hundred years” (in Danuser, 2004, p. 280). He looked to the future, therefore, but he was also keen to point out continuity with great figures of German art, such as Bach and Brahms.⁸ Boulez famously called for the destruction of the opera houses as inert bastions of tradition, though he quickly became a cornerstone of French bourgeois society.

Genius and Myth. Originality and genius, therefore, are an inheritance from centuries of artistic practice and, to some extent, artistic myth-making. Conflicting discourses of revolutionary new ideas and century-old artistic lineages are fused together, with the idea of the canon figuring extensively. Such discourses have not gone uncontested, though it took until the late 20th century for scholars to problematize these notions in depth. These more recent positions will be the focus of the next section. Before moving on, however, it is important to highlight the cultural specificity of this historical narrative of genius. It is, after all “fundamentally Western and, to a large extent, European and American.” Control over what constitutes creativity is a power to potentially dismiss whole cultures of artistic practice. Western societies “deliberately depicted other people and other cultures as noncreative, traditional, or stuck in time” (Glaveanu & Kaufman, 2019, p. 14). Creativity as a “power” to be conferred may no longer be said to come from God but its application is still highly unequal.

Critiques of Genius. While the latter part of the 20th century saw many critiques of genius, it is notable how many of its trappings are still taken for granted in, particularly classical, music practice. The figure of the composer, or the “maestro” conductor, still looms large, both in the consumption and marketing of classical music and in the portrayal of—even contemporary—musicians. So, while this section focuses on critiques of genius, it is worth bearing in mind the persistence of ideas from the 19th century. In 1994 Tia DeNora and Hugh Mehan argued that the “ideology of genius . . . remains, in spite of attempts to deconstruct, powerful and persuasive” (p. 167). There have only recently been serious efforts to open up what kind of person the composer might be, resulting in various schemes championing women and composers of color, yet questioning of the value of individual creative energy that the composer represents has had far less coverage.

The Need for Originality. Starting with the more recent manifestation of genius, that within modernist discourses, there has been criticism from a number of angles that questions its originary expression and its relationship with history. In 1978 Rosalind Krauss famously railed against the apparent omnipresence of the “grid” in contemporary visual art (1985), pointing to its presence in a diverse range of artists: Mondriaan, Sol de Witt, Josef Albers, Agnes Martin, etc.⁹ The implication is that the grid is almost a placeholder for original artistic contribution, even when so many artists make use of it. At the same time, more recent research on the rituals of acceptance into creative fields—and their poor representation of society—have pointed to the various, supposedly non-artistic, skills and networks required for success as an artist in contemporary society (El-Ghadban, 2009; Smith & Thwaites, 2017; Brook, O’Brien, & Taylor, 2020).

The concept of genius received further criticism from currents often understood as postmodern: collage, the mixing of high and low art, and interdisciplinary practice. Originality suffers here because of a wholesale critique of authorial intention. It appears not only as a myth in this understanding but essentially irrelevant, as attempts at new expression may seem doomed before they have begun. When any “text” is only ever made up of other texts and the author is “dead,” artistic intention is fundamentally problematized (see Barthes, 1977). More immediately damaging, however, have been the critiques that come from gender, race, and postcolonial perspectives, relating to the cultural specificity of genius. These argue that the figure of the genius is inherently male and Eurocentric with inbuilt prejudices against others and presuming stringent hierarchies within the arts. Indeed, the concept of “the arts” has itself come under fire (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2020).

Gendered Genius. Christine Battersby’s Gender and Genius (1989) is an early and sustained exploration of the way that the concept of genius is tied up with all kinds of exclusions. She points to the curious way in which romantic geniuses were praised for having many supposedly feminine qualities, yet at the same time excluded women almost completely. Battersby writes that the “genius was like an animal, a primitive, a child or a women; but, of course, this likeness was deceptive” for the “genius’s instinct, emotion, sensibility, intuition, imagination—even his madnesses—were different from those of ordinary mortals” (1989, p. 4, emphasis in original).¹⁰ Almost like the “uncanny valley” of contemporary artificial intelligence, the closer women came to genius, the more unnatural and disturbing it became. In the Romantic period in particular, the idea of human creativity becoming a violent eruption, rather than a slow and careful nurturing, was reflected in language that directly linked creativity with male sexuality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, defined the creative impulse “physiologically” as the “creative instinct of the artist and the distribution of semen in his blood” (1968, p. 424).

It is a mistake, however, to think that artists and public were bound irreparably to the language they inherited. Exclusions required rigid policing. The stories of active female composers and the moralizing backlash they faced against their compositional efforts from within and outwith compositional practice has now been well documented (see, for example, Battersby, 1989, and Beer, 2016), while there is white bias and gendered exclusions baked into the philosophies of some of the chief aestheticians. Kant, for example, admits that the “fair sex has just as much understanding as the male,” yet—fatally for the female genius—i t “is a beautiful understanding” while male understanding should be “deeper” (1960, p. 78).

Creativity and Economics. Finally, there is a criticism of the term “creativity” in relation to neoliberal economic models that place the emphasis of “success” onto individuals and their apparent ability, or inability, to adapt to changing economic conditions. The present status of Western capitalist societies, it is argued, is directly reflected in our view of creativity. Mould argues that the “system that causes homelessness—and other related injustices: precariousness, racism and the emboldening of fascism, massive inequality, global health epidemics and the rest—is the very same system that tells us we must be ‘creative’ to progress” (2018, p. 10). This is seen most notably in the burgeoning quasi-self-help creativity literature. A book like Adam H. Grant’s Originals (2017)—which seeks to analyze the way that creative individuals in business and technology operate so that we might learn from them—is for Mould just a symptom of the “language of creativity” being “subsumed by capitalism” in a vision that sees everything in the world as monetizable (2018, p. 23). The blurb of the book Normal Genius makes this more or less explicit: “The fact is that we live in a world of competitive job applications, zero-hour contracts, institutionalized ‘self-employment,’ career insecurity, startups and constant exhortations to be entrepreneurial. People are increasingly left without support and having to fend for themselves in a brutal and intimidating market.” Mould does not argue that there is nothing to be retrieved from notions of creativity, merely that genuinely creative, resistive practices can all too easily be ignored and suppressed.

Transforming Originality. Thus far, critiques of the originality principle have been heard from various sources, such as art and literature criticism, education, and aesthetics. Yet it is worth highlighting that there has been a current in artistic practice that has questioned the enlightenment, romantic, and modernist notions of who an artist should be and what they should produce. This group contains all manner of site-specific experiments, socially interventionist art, work that problematizes the work concept and single authorship, and work that involves the audience as a core part of its “material.” Birgit Eriksson, Carsten Stage, and Bjarki Valtysson claim that “since the social turn in art and aesthetics in the 1990s,” there has been a “strong interest in participatory art practices that both transform the role of the recipient and engage art more directly in society” (2019, pp. 2-3). In Artificial Hells (2012) Claire Bishop presents an overview of such artistic maneuvers, from the public and extreme to the private and almost—from the point of view of an audience— unknowable. Bishop summarizes the approach of the works she explores, in which “the artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end” (2012, p.2, emphasis in original). That these efforts are (still) rarely seen as mainstream artistic activity is an indication of the power that concepts of originality still hold in contemporary art worlds.

Only a few composers feature in Bishop’s story, though some do quite spectacularly such as the “Hooter Symphonies” that “aimed to turn the whole city into an auditorium for an orchestra of new industrial noise” (2012, p. 65). Yet, in recent years there have been many pieces that were written in community settings, that rearranged the orchestral set-up to create immersive musical spaces, that engaged the audience in the manner of a debate or game show or have had other dramatic or participative elements.¹¹ What is important to grasp is that the critiques of originality and genius have been reflected in artistic practice for some time and that their effect may have even greater impact in the future. Though music is somewhat late to the party, collaborative and socially- embedded models are finding growing traction amongst funders, in Europe at least. If it is the job of teachers to prepare students for the future then it should be borne in mind how different it might look and sound