Creativity

Human creativity fascinates me.  To generate an idea, then to make, mold, bend, shape it, seems miraculous.

In my field, music, a composer must imagine a musical idea, nurture and develop it with lines and dots of varying size on a page—the simple tools of our trade, but infinitely manipulative—and then send it on to other musicians to recreate.  But it doesn't stop there.  How do they—we—recreate it?  We study it, bring it to life within ourselves and our ensemble, and then send it on to an audience.

But it still doesn't stop there.  The music wings its way into the souls of the listeners, burrows in, and (hopefully) creates a response in them.  If no response is produced, it seems to me the music is stillborn, the creative process not complete.  It can be something simple, such as enjoyment, or more profound: transcendence, sadness, awakening, bliss.  A conductor once described to me the intense anger of a man who attended an operatically staged production of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.  He was angry because it brought the story to vivid life, and he DID NOT want that!  He wanted it to remain safely on the stage, not become something that might affect his life.  Now that was creativity in action!

But let’s not leave out the music makers themselves.  They are the music’s creative instruments.  They rehearse the music for weeks, live with it, nurture it within themselves and as a group, but they receive it as well.  Master Chorus Eastside just finished our Christmas concerts, which included a newly published Chanukah work in Hebrew as well as familiar carols, and I became curious about the responses initiated in the singers.

Here is what some of them had to say.

“In my mind, the concerts seemed like a diamond with many facets, each sparkling with light of its own, that fired a neural path to something special, as in:

A faith large enough to take on the challenge of eight songs in the Hebrew language

A direct connection to happy times in grade school singing We Three Kings

A recognition of the need singing fills for each of us, when a man who lost his wife said he found solace in songs

A wish that Fum Fum Fum was longer because it was so fun to sing”

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“O Nata Lux, shimmering lightly, eruptive, just below the surface....peaceful joy.”

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“As a student of languages, it was a thrill for me to learn and perform in the Hebrew language—this ancient and modern language which so eloquently expresses our human condition.

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“I'm experiencing some sense of loss finishing the Chanukah pieces, and the catchy tunes (not

those words!) are running though my head.  Focusing so much on a piece to then put it aside feels like a jolt and a loss.”

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“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas affected me while we were singing it.  When we got to

the part, "from now on we all will be together, if the fates allow" it made me so grateful to be

with our daughters, son-in-law and granddaughter this Christmas.  However, I began to think

of all the previous Christmases with our parents and other relatives who are no longer with us, causing me to choke up a bit.”

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 “The two pieces that moved me the most were O Nata Lux and Have Yourself a Merry Little

Christmas, the latter because of nostalgia (I saw the original movie in 1944), and it reminds me of our child whom we lost 10 years ago.”

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Does creativity really end?  Perhaps it lives on as we revisit the memory…

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic director and conductor

Master Chorus Eastside