In Process: Conscious and Unconscious, Embodied Knowledge and Being in Flow

Historical and contemporary accounts of creative experiences in many disciplines include multiple examples of moments when an idea or solution seems to appear out of nowhere. Graham Wallas (1926/2014), one of the earliest creativity writers, encouraged the practice of working hard on a problem or project and then stepping away to let the mind continue to make connections, which was when creative ideas would occur. Peter Webster’s model of creative thinking in music (http://peterrwebster.com/pubs/model. jpg) includes time away as part of the core creative process.

These twelve composers described moments when solutions to compositional conundrums occurred during time away. Mari Esabel Valverde explained, “When I’m writing music, sometimes I obsess about something that I can’t figure out. It’s like a Rubik’s cube. I’ll go to bed, and then I’ll wake up and (snaps fingers) I’ll know it” Anne McGinty described a similar phenomenon, “There have been pieces where I get up in the middle of the night and change something. It’s all in [my head] and playing back like it’s on a loop. I could hear a rhythm that was wrong while I was sleeping”

Several composers consciously leverage the power of the unconscious to generate ideas. Jessie Montgomery described a journaling process, noting, “Ideas come when I have time to sit and reflect. I do a lot of writing . . . my own version of theorizing.” Anne McGinty noted, “I think my backyard has produced most of my pieces. I’m just fussing around pruning a plant or watching the clouds and I’ll just start whistling or singing something. And I go, ‘Oh, there’s a motif I can work with.’ ” Eric Whitaker advised:

Fill your head with all kinds of different things—not just pieces of music, but poetry and art and science and math and food and whatever you can experience. Then find someplace and get very bored. I mean really bored. You can’t have a phone, you can’t have a computer, walks are good, but there can be no input. Then the mind starts to wander. It takes an idea here and an idea there, and suddenly a connection gets made. That’s where the truly original ideas come from, though it’s hard to manufacture that moment.

Some composers described a sense of not being in control at times, or of different compositions coming to fruition in different ways. “I’ve written pieces that were not easy to write, that I feel as though I went through hell with,” Mari Esabel Valverde recalled, “And then there are other pieces that I wrote quickly—like the piece composed itself.” Anne McGinty described a similar sense: “Every time I sat down to write I didn’t know the notes were in there until they started coming out. I don’t think they’re just mine. I don’t think that I’m in control of everything.” Eric Whitacre also described a sense of being led by the music:

There’s this very delicate part of the process . . . I’ve got the perfect analogy: Somebody told me once that when your child is born you have about a year to figure out who they are, and then you raise the kid you’ve got and not the kid you wanted. It’s exactly the same thing with a composition. You start to dance with the material. You can force it somewhat, but frankly, when you’re doing it well it feels more like guiding or a tango. It’s a dance between the two of you. Maybe you’re leading, but you’ve also got to listen to it.

Some of what these composers experience is similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990/ 2008) description of flow—experiences of working hard on a project, being unconscious of the passage of time, and reveling in the feeling of what happens as well as what they produce. Peter Bernstein described it this way:

There would be moments where I’d start at eight in the morning, and now it’s six in the evening and I had barely gotten up except to use the bathroom and have a sandwich. Those 10 hours would go by unnoticed. I would stop to have dinner. And after dinner, I would go over what I had written and sometimes the light bulb moment would happen. I would think, “Wow, I wrote that? Really?” Because you’re so in flow, which is an interesting thing about composition. I don’t know how you teach this, but you have to balance consciousness and unconsciousness in this process. You have to be able to go back and forth to assess, and then let something flow, and then assess, and it’s not necessarily an easy thing.

While these composers are conscious of their flow experiences and the power of their minds, they also described the power of embodied knowing—the knowledge they held in their bodies as music-makers and how that physicality might help, or hinder, their creative work. “I’m a violinist first,” Jessie Montgomery explained, “And the tactile response of playing an instrument and hearing sound is something that I’ve always had” She described learning the tools of composing by composing—physically getting ideas into one’s body by writing or drawing or moving, similar to the way in which a violinist learns the physical techniques of playing the violin.

Mari Esabel Valverde is aware of how her sensibilities as vocalist and pianist inform her creative work. “If I have a keyboard in front of me and I put my fingers down, I’m going to think of harmonic ideas,” she explained, “So if I’m trying to focus on a single line, having easy access to vertical sonority is a distraction. When I’m trying to write a vocal line, I want to be away from the keyboard. It just feels different. When I’m away from the keyboard I’m literally feeling the breath move past my voice” For her, this sense of embodied knowing applies to writing for instruments as well. “I sing all the time when I’m composing, even if there’s not a vocal part,” she explained. “If it’s a bassoon I will make sounds to help me understand what I’m hearing in my head. I need to know where I’m breathing and where my bassoonist is breathing. I need to sing it, because I need it to be human”