Books Worth Reading IX

One more book before I go in a new direction: Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.

 

I’m fascinated by creative people in other arts than music. Since I’m married to a visual artist (who loves music, luckily), I often get cross-pollination of ideas from another viewpoint (and she has good ears, too!).

 

Twyla Tharp is a choreographer who’s done work that ranges from her own company, choreography for other companies (premieres of 16 of her works at the American Ballet Theatre), Broadway (particularly her successful show based on Billy Joel songs), and film (she worked with Milos Forman on Hair, Ragtime, and Amadeus).

 

Her underlying point is that creativity is a habit, a product of preparation and effort, and she then explores the exercises she does to create ideas.

 

She begins each day going to the gym. As she tells us, rituals of preparation are important to the creative artist—the habits we build. She says the ritual is not the exercises she does, the ritual is the cab. “The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual. . . . It’s vital to establish some rituals—automatic but decisive patterns of behavior—at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.” She gives examples of different artists’ rituals, including Igor Stravinsky, who played a Bach fugue at the piano every day when he entered his studio.

 

A list of chapter headings is vague, but will give you a few ideas:

As “recreative” artists we may think that the kind of creativity needed by a choreographer, visual artist, playwright, author, composer, or architect has little to do with what we do. But we have to “re-engineer” the compositions we perform, imagine them through the composer’s mind and spirit. Programming is a mightily creative act (or should be)! And, although I’ve spoken of rehearsal technique as craft, it is also art when we’re at our best. With one of my choirs right now I’ve needed to re-think aspects of how I normally rehearse—and the creative energy I put into planning those rehearsals will ultimately affect what I do in other ones. There are so many ways in which creativity is at the heart of what we do. Following a great creative artist such as Twyla Tharp through her process, seeing her “toolbox,” and getting inside her mind is enormously helpful.

 

I hope you get a chance to enjoy and learn from it!