Creativity and the 21st Century String Player
The challenge of the modern string player is in many ways no different from that facing Fortune 500 companies. We need to successfully evolve as creative musicians while doing something that has value to the world around us. Otherwise, we cannot survive.
Every creative journey starts with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We've worked hard but we've hit a wall.
— Jonah Lehrer, Imagine
Two Paths for the Modern String Player
For string players, this challenge often manifests as the sense that despite years of practice and preparation for a career in music, finding sustainable work feels impossible. Most string players will pursue one of two paths:
- Cultivate skills for existing opportunities — orchestra positions, school teaching, solo performance, chamber music, or alternative styles.
- Strike out independently — creating one's own ensemble, school, or performance opportunities through entrepreneurship and self-employment.
It is this second group that interests me most. When building our own path, it's natural to look at what others have done and hope their successful steps will yield similar results. But there is one unavoidable reality: regardless of how much we learn from those who came before us, we must ultimately create our own path in a way that is true to ourselves.
For some, this feels like a discouraging impasse. How do we appeal to audiences? How do we survive financially? What music, what venue, what ensemble arrangement, what combination of elements can work together?
The Science of Creativity and the Creative Breakthrough
While this impasse can feel deeply frustrating, the science of innovation has shown that we actually need to have wrestled with a problem — and lost — before a breakthrough can occur. It is at such moments that solutions arrive almost like a flash of lightning. The question is: how do these insights happen? What enables someone to transform a mental block into a breakthrough?
Mark Beeman, a young scientist at the National Institute of Health in the 1990s, asked these very questions. At the time, the prevailing belief was that the right hemisphere of the brain lacked higher cognitive function and was essentially useless. But Beeman noticed that patients with right hemisphere damage had significant cognitive difficulties even when the left hemisphere was intact — they couldn't understand jokes, sarcasm, or metaphors, had trouble reading maps, and couldn't interpret paintings.
These observations led Beeman to reconsider the function of the right brain entirely. What could connect such seemingly unrelated difficulties? One possibility emerged: perhaps the right hemisphere's function is to find subtle connections between seemingly unrelated things.
“The world is so complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time. It needs to see the forest and the trees. The right hemisphere is what helps you see the forest.”
— Mark Beeman
Left Brain vs. Right Brain: Literal vs. Associative Thinking
While the left hemisphere stores the literal meaning of words, the right side understands all the meanings that can't be looked up in a dictionary. As Jonah Lehrer writes: “When Shakespeare writes 'Juliet is the sun,' we know he isn't saying his beloved is a massive ball of hydrogen.”
We understand this metaphor by grasping the underlying connections between overlapping associations — just as the sun lights up the world, Juliet lights up Romeo's life. This nuanced understanding is the work of the right hemisphere.
Beeman found that the brain initially processes creative problems using the left hemisphere, searching for answers in obvious places. This process quickly becomes exhausting, and subjects soon report feeling stumped. Almost all the connections the left brain generates are wrong — there are simply too many possibilities to consider.
Why the Impasse Is Actually Essential
It is at this juncture that we hit what feels like an artist's block — the moment when there seems to be no answer and we're ready to give up. But this uncomfortable impasse is actually a critical part of the creative process. It signals that we must try a new strategy.
Instead of relying on the literal associations of the left brain, we must shift to a different approach — and the impasse itself is the brain's signal that this shift is necessary. Artists can draw real insight from these scientific findings the next time they find themselves stuck. The block is not the end of creativity. It is the beginning of a breakthrough.
by Rozanna Weinberger, February 14, 2014