Introduction

Goals

Why Middle School Students

The Nature of Creativity, by Christopher Schuck

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THE NATURE OF CREATIVITY
BY CHRISTOPHER SCHUCK
English department chair and former co-director
of the middle school at La Jolla Country Day School

The exploration of creativity conducted by trombonist and UCSD professor George Lewis in the series entitled "What Creativity Means" invites students and teachers alike to join an ongoing conversation about the nature of music, the nature of creativity, and, in the end, the nature of the human soul. For in a variety of ways the joy and wisdom offered by Professor Lewis and his guests keeps pointing toward this: the impulse to create is inextricably and unavoidably present in all of us; our task is to give the impulse meaning by acting upon it.

When Professor Lewis asks percussionist and UCSD colleague Steven Schick where creativity comes from, how he knows when he is creating, Schick turns to the middle school students in the studio. He has just completed a demonstration on a variety of percussive instruments gathered in equal parts from the far corners of the world and the back corners of his kitchen cabinets: drums and frying pans, a "reco reco" and a flower pot. Schick asks how many of the students are imagining at that moment what lies around their homes waiting to become a percussive instrument. Nearly all raise their hands, illustrating Schick's point: we are all creators, we are all inspired by creativity, we can all learn to honor our desire, our need to create.

Each video in the series is a conversation conducted by Professor Lewis, the musicians he has gathered, and a small group of students. The videos work best if they are used to initiate, or to highlight, a classroom exploration of creativity. Teachers and students will feel comfortable continuing the conversation along the lines established by Professor Lewis and his guests, but they will feel most deeply rewarded if they take the cue given by Schick and begin doing the work of a creator. The videos then can give class members a way to talk about the issues they encounter as they strive to create something personal and new.

To approach an investigation of creativity through music offers special rewards, and can be supplemented by the efforts of poets to identify the forces which give rise to musical creation. Two favorites of mine, quite well-received by middle and high school students, are Rilke's "On Music," and "Transformation" by UCSD professor, Quincy Troupe.

ON MUSIC
Music: the breathing of statues. Perhaps:
the silence of paintings. Language where
language ends. Time
that stands head-up in the direction
     of hearts that wear out.

Feeling . . . for whom? Place where feeling is
transformed . . . into what? Into a countryside we can hear.
Music: you stranger. You feeling space, growing
away from us. The deepest thing in us, that,
rising above us, forces its way out...
a holy goodbye:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as amazing space, as the other side of the air:
pure,
immense,
not for us to live in now.

TRANSFORMATION
catch the blues song
of wind in your bleeding
black hand, (w)rap it around
your strong bony fingers
then turn it into a soft-nosed pen
& sit down & write the love
poem of your life

Further cross-disciplinary opportunities arise in Anthony Davis's thumbnail sketch of the history of the slave-trade as he discusses his opera AMISTAD, Schick's geography of percussion instruments, Bertram Turetzky's efforts to make the contrabass produce the sounds of the sitar and other non-Western instruments, and elsewhere.

Teachers will do well to plan exploratory and creative opportunities for students fairly immediately after viewing. If the students listening to Professors Lewis and Schick are representative of middle school students everywhere--and I do not doubt that they are--then viewers of this series will want to watch, listen, perhaps converse a bit, and then get up and get going at the business of creating.