Sense and Sensation

If imitation is the first step towards developing a creative vocabulary, then variation is the first step towards developing one’s own voice. (See the Taxonomy of Creative Design .) So what does this look like in a classroom? A number of years ago, a colleague created an assignment for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde .  The assignment asks students to rewrite the novel’s opening paragraph describing the main character, Mr. Utterson, using precisely the same grammatical construction as Stevenson, but varying the vocabulary and subject matter to match members of their families. In this way, Stevenson’s opening sentence, becomes, as one student wrote, The students identify grammatical structures, literary devices, imagery, and patterns in content, but they experiment with variations to create their own meaning. The results are not perfect, but through variation, they take steps towards increasingly complex original work. In cla...

(Katy Perry and Arnold Schoenberg) We experience art in two ways: aesthetically and intellectually--and making this distinction radically influences our ability to understand and assess it.   We feel it first; we have a physiological response to it.  It happens instantly.    The physiological response happens when the sound of a piece of music pleases us or it doesn’t.  Or when the movement across the stage, the palette of colors on the canvas, or the expression of the dancer evoke sadness or joy, anxiety or anticipation.  This happens automatically, biologically, like a snap judgment.  And then we experience it intellectually; it makes us think.  We explore it cognitively.  It takes time, deliberation.   With time, we have the opportunity to evaluate or consider the intellectual experience of the work, the techniques, conventions, or significance of the composition, choreography, or direction.  We can explore how the work...

When U2 first wrote the song “ Vertigo ”, the song had different lyrics, a different name, and a different arrangement.  The song, then called “ Native Son ”, was inspired by one Native American's experience brushing up against the law.  The band loved, absolutely loved, the raging guitar hook, but struggled with the way the song came out--because of the sensitivity of the lyrics. Bono felt uncomfortable singing it in front of audiences--and so the band spent days and days revising and reworking the song, jettisoning the lyrics, keeping the guitar hook and the basic melody, rewriting the lyrics entirely, reorganizing and remixing the song.  They worked and worked at it, and without this work refining the song, “Vertigo” likely wouldn’t have topped so many charts around the world. But to say that creativity is only about work is misleading--and a little pedantic--because play is also important. So how do we reconcile this deliberate, often-grueling work with ...