Welcome to 5025 Creativity & Problem Solving
Welcome! This is the landing page for the A&HM 5025 Creativity & Problem Solving course led by Dr Randall Allsup.
5025 Creativity & Problem Solving – Fall 2016
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Reading Maxine Greene’s words of wonder at experiencing the unfamiliar in the arts, I find myself thinking about the resistence, discomfort, and even resentment that I have felt when I have been challenged to do the same. Like most people I know, I use music to influence my emotions. I know what kind of music produces the emotions that I want to feel–joy, peacefulness, amusement, freedom, liveliness–and I generally avoid the music that inspires the emotions I dread. So imagine my chagrin one day two months into a wonderful class on jazz during my freshman year of college, when the professor introduces us to bebop. Unlike the swing music, crooners, and New Orleans style bands we have been listening to all semester, which have consistently filled me with delight and a feeling of safety, this music is frenetic, atonal, strident, and completely alien to me. I am overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety and stress. I am also irrationally angry at the professor for facilitating an environment in which I suddenly have to deal with feelings of discomfort, and annoyed by my classmates’ quick embrace of the music that is making me miserable.
Fast-forward five years later, and here I am reading Greene’s article. Since my fateful jazz class, I have continually experienced that same collection of emotions when encountering something new in the world of music that jarrs me and excites others. Encountering Arnold Schoenberg for the first time during my junior year is on my greatest hits of musical experiences that have disturbed and infuriated me, while inspiring rhapsodies from my classmates. I have mellowed since then, and no longer throw an inner tantrum when encountering music that disturbs me, but I still feel closely connected to the person who sulked grumpily because she had to experience something new.
I am amazed by the gratitude, awe, and humility that Greene expresses in response to this very type of experience. It strikes me that for a person to be so open to the unfamiliar in art, she also most be open to a wider range of emotions, including those that are uncomfortable. I believe that exposing oneself to art that is unfamiliar is a way to practice emotional courage, to learn that discomfort is part of a healthy and expansive life, not something to run away from.
Sorry, I posted this in the wrong place! I just copied and pasted it to the other place, but I can’t figure out how to delete this one.
In Sheehy’s article “Children and Sound,” we learn in Chapter 1 that determining whether a sound is music or noise has a lot of do with the circumstances when were hearing it. If we are tired, restless and exhausted, a loud honking may be annoying and upsetting so it may not be musical. However if we are in a well rested, settled and peaceful state of mind, normal sounds like a bird chirping or an engine speeding by may be welcomed. This makes total sense to me, since I recall feeling at ease at the sound of birds chirping when I have had a full nights sleep and have an open schedule, and in contrast feeling angry and personally offended by birds loudly chirping on the morning I got two hours of sleep and have a full day of work and deadlines.
Also, reading about how our past experiences and learning affects our feelings about sounds brought me to a new realization; since I was was trained in classical music, jazz or pop music was always a bit foreign sounding, since I wasn’t used to its patterns. Children whose poems, “Sounds of the City” were published in the NY times in 1957 explains how children experience sound differently and more openly, simply because they are not as judgmental as adults can be. Adults tend to gravitate more toward the sounds that they are used to producing such as adult conversations, and like I have always been more keen to certain kinds of music, it has made me wonder about all of the new possibilities available to me with this new awareness.
Sheehy reminds us that as adults studying music, we need to still be open and excited to the sounds around us, since music is the result of sounds being put together. We have to teach ourselves before we teach others and bring back the imagination that we as children possessed. We also need to observe what our young students are hearing and are interested in, and begin with that, tapping into their own creativity. Primitive man made music by experimenting and playing with inanimate objects, which brings me to believe, like the author points out, that children can learn to play music the same way they learn to talk- by listening and experimenting. All children have music in them, regardless of if they become virtuosi or not.
In Chapter 2, we learn that babies love to make sounds, especially when they learn that their actions create change, stirring up reactions from adults. When they begin to make noises that have meaning to us, like “mama” or “dada” they continue to be encouraged to make more sounds. Children also love words or phrases with rhythm, such as “bibbidi bobbidi boo” because its contagious alliteration is something children want to repeat and continue to explore, with different tones and pitches. I am beginning to see through my own exploration with untraditional objects that we don’t always need a piano or a song book on hand to make music; children find music in everything and adults can too, even if they don’t realize it. Simply allowing oneself to sing openly when cooking, for example, helps to bridge the gap between what is considered noise and what is considered music.
In Chapter 3, Sheehy’s discusses how we need to be objective when judging how children play and interact with music. Children like percussive sounds, as exhibited by their interest in banging on a drum or hearing a rattling sound. When kids learn the power they possess through making sound, such as when a child drops a spoon from a high chair and sees an adult bend and get it for them, they enjoy this interchange and want to do it again and again. They also like the sounds made from when they drop an object and it hits the ground, and then when the parent picks it up and places it back on the high chair table. They thrive on interest and approval, so if a mom not only lets her child play with pots and pans, but also plays with him or her, it brings this experience to a whole new joyous level.
Oh my… I seem to have done the same thing! Sorry for any confusion