Dancing across bridges
how structure helps creativity
I teach an engineer who applies everything he’s learnt about structures and systems and design and patterns to learning to play piano and understanding music theory, and it works brilliantly.
He feels confident making creative leaps because he knows the structure is sound, and that if he falls it won’t be very far.
It doesn’t stop him mumbling under his breath or outright swearing when he makes a mistake, but it’s always done in the spirit of ‘let’s see what happens’ and ‘I’ll just give it another go’.
It’s like building a bridge, I guess, and knowing it will carry your weight when you dance across it.
And when you trip or fall.
Building a house
I tell my younger students that we’re going to build a house, but that it’s a good idea to start building the frame first before we try to put in the windows and doors, or before we start arranging the furniture.
We can decorate our house however we want, I say, once we know it’s not going to fall down around our ears.
They laugh and mime falling to the ground, but I can see they get the point.
So that’s what we aim to do.
It’s always a process of trial and error, of doing things again and again, of getting things wrong and of forgetting and remembering, of risk and frustration, and so so much uncertainty. But it’s also a process of immense satisfaction, of joy and laughter, of thinking and problem-solving, and all the rest of it.
This is just how it is when you learn something new and when you are being creative along with it. And why can’t it be all these things at once?
You trip and sometimes you fall, but each trip or fall is also another step forward, another brick in the wall of the house we are building.
The structure is sound
Back to my engineer, his fingers shaking just a little when he first sits down at the piano, because it feels like with the first note he is, indeed, taking a huge leap into the dark.
What if the note is wrong? What if they’re all wrong? What if he’s forgotten everything we talked about last time? What if something he creates is so awful that the piano begins to crumble beneath his fingers and and and and?
But then it’s as if he feels the hardness of the floor beneath his feet, the solidity of the keys beneath his fingers, and remembers that if he makes a mistake, trips and falls, neither of those things will disappear.
And so we begin.
I loved this! ❤️