Lots of people say they’re not creative – but they are!

Rick Rubin’s book “The Creative Act — A Way of Being” has many contradictions but the thing I like most about it is the assertion that “We are all creative” and that creativity is about our relationship to the world.

Two unusual examples of how we hear music found me while I was thinking about this: Dame Evelyn Glennie’s declaration that “The overload of visual stimulus is so loud that it is thwarting our ability to listen”,  and Dark Sounds, (a production of We Are Sound) which creates extraordinary, live, sound experiences in total darkness — for both audience and performers.

So while Dame Evelyn creates her music from a world of deafness, Dark Sounds urges us to listen without sight. What does this do to us when we experience these similar art forms in very different ways?

If, as Rick Ruben says, creativity is about our relationship to the world, are we being creative by listening and turning those sounds into meaning? In the same way that Ursula Le Guinn explains that a writer is nothing without the reader interpreting the writing and creating their own meaning from the words, people experience different things when listening to the same piece of music – with or without sight – so in that respect both reading and listening are both acts of creativity.

We *are* all creative.

“To ask what sort of art one should practice is to ask what sort of being one is. It follows that before we rush to answer the first part, we should consider the second. What sort of beings are we? Contingent; capable; conscious. What sort of art should we make? Communion.” (From Joseph Braun’s description of a conversation with Seth Braverman)

This is part of a series of posts on Questions about Creativity. The rest of the series can be seen at: https://annhawkins.com/creativity