Is anything really new? What is the source of the creative imagination? A related article on Suite 101, Searching for Inspiration, surveys theories that “the muse” originates from within, either from a spiritual or from a physical source. Spirit and Experience looks at approaches combining internal and external influences, including insights from Buddhist meditation.
This article considers arguments that knowledge, tradition and environment are the wellsprings of artistic innovation.
The Artist in History
In his book William Blake and the Age of Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), J. Bronowski argues that poet William Blake was a product of his age, the era of the French, American and industrial revolutions. Far from being an “untaught and remote mystic whose poems lay quite outside his times and our tradition…[Blake’s] inspiration was both more robust and more universal than this”. Bronowski contrasts Blake’s work with the “Victorian calm…in the gracious bombast of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”
What could be described as a contextual understanding of sources of creativity places a large emphasis on the creator’s circumstances, including the intellectual environment; on learned knowledge; and on artistic tradition, of which the innovative person is (to some extent) a product.
A “Systems Approach” to Creativity
In his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Innovation, M. Csikszentmikalyi argues: “To say that the theory of relativity is created by Einstein is like saying that it is the spark that is responsible for the fire. The spark is necessary, but without air and tinder there would be no flame.”
Csikszentmihalyi considers that a creative output arises from many sources and not only from a single mind. In his view, the innovator is provided with symbolic rules by a culture, and requires a “receptive audience” to validate the creative product.
And because creativity requires a lot of hard work, it is more likely in regions or cities where cultures come together, or other places where the artist isn’t required to make as much effort to have others appreciate or understand his new ideas.
Knowledge and Tradition
In addition to the hard work—the learning of language or musical notation, for example, Joseph Dillon Ford stresses the significance of artistic tradition in sparking the creative imagination. (Mnemosyne and Apollo: The Role of Memory in Musical Creativity.) Ford quotes legendary German writer Goethe: “Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons….My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature…”
Ford takes issue with modernist composers who have an “ambivalent” or “hostile” relationship to the past. He considers that this attitude “stems from a fundamental psychological conflict in which the composer’s survival as a creative artist seems to depend on escaping the influence of those very memories that form the central core of his/her musical identity.”
The role of memory in artistic creativity is further explored in the Suite 101 article “Spirit and Experience”.
 |
