Modeling Creativity—Part 1

Making time

---

“Modeling Creativity” was written by John Vogel in conjunction with ParentSounds. We recommend reading it as one whole piece but have broken it into five parts due to length. Here are the other parts: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

---

During the lifetime of my almost 6-year-old child (as of this writing), I’ve gone on a deep dive into the psychology, neuroscience, and sociology of music. But not through a typical schooling trajectory. I did this through what I think of as the Good Will Hunting style of schooling, derived from one of Matt Damon’s lines in that movie: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” That price is about $80,000 short by today’s tuition rates, but the idea still resonates. I think of Good Will Hunting University (GWHU) as the sister school of YouTube University.

My whole journey diving into the science of music began with a few intense experiences with music that, when I snapped out of them, made me think, “What the fuck what was that?” Starting with public library copies of This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin and Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, I slowly descended into the rabbit hole of neuroaesthetics with transformative psychology and mystical experiences in my periphery.

While working part-time at a University of Pennsylvania institution, I noticed instances when I’d look up books that were not in the Philadelphia public library only to find out that copies were around $140. I’d put in hours at work just to get my card renewed and check out those books. And, hey, I’d also get some money for working; sometimes the library access was a bigger reward than the payment for work.

It was often kind of weird to read these books through the lens of child development, which I was also studying at GWHU with on-the-job training as a stay-at-home parent. When I read about the comparison of rhythmic isochrony (a steady beat) in speech versus music in Aniruddh Patel’s Music, Language, and the Brain, I thought, “But music’s steady beat relates to the heart, not language.” And I started thinking about the heart as the most dominant thing that an in utero baby can hear. Does the steady beat of music unconsciously bring us back to that?

By the time my son was born, I was well on this path. During bedtime when he was a toddler, I would read him stories before my wife, Olivia, would brush his teeth and dress him. During those brief minutes to myself, I would pull out my phone and read a free PDF of The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, edited by Isabelle Peretz and Robert Zatorre. However, most often my accumulated tiredness as a parent would start to get the better of me, and I would fall asleep during those small breaks instead of keeping up with my burning desire to read.

I still haven’t recovered the energy level that I had before being a parent. Whereas my days used to be 17-hour chunks of time that I could split up according to my needs and then sleep for seven hours, after having a child, those chunks turned into undifferentiated blurs when I was stealing moments to eat, shower, or get anything whatsoever accomplished. Now that Henry is in kindergarten, things are starting to return a little, but most days I still feel overwhelmed and exhausted.

‘I Just Don’t Have the Time’

I often hear adults express two things:

1. That they don’t have time to read

2. That they lament no longer playing music or that they never grew up playing music, but they want their children to be exposed to it

To the first point, my reaction is, “You don’t eat? You don’t shit?” Because those are the main times when I read. I very rarely sit down just to read. If I’m doing anything when I could also be reading or have a break when I can’t start something else, then I have a book at hand.

I have similar feelings about music. If you really want to, you should be able to carve out 15 minutes a day to plink around on an instrument. And, honestly, that will help a lot in terms of getting rid of those feelings of lamentation and getting you back into the pleasure of playing and making music.

But the standard move that I see play out when it comes to exposing children to music is to start music lessons.

I think it should be pretty obvious by my proselytization of GWHU that I have a disdain for formal education. To be more blunt, I personally hated school and never want to go back.

I grew up in a public school that had a very good music program. My band director and private teacher was the principal trumpet player for the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and Opera. In this TW podcast episode, which I recorded with musician Jamey Robinson, I question how I feel about the presence of art in schools because connecting with and learning music through the music that you love is so much more powerful than learning music written by other people in the classroom setting. Although I agree with this, I will also say that growing up in a school that deemed music important gave me the implicit message that music can be considered a priority. So, even though I’m about to rail on formal arts education, I want to emphasize up front that I think any inclusion of arts in school can help foster the idea that art is worthwhile to include in your life, which to me is always a positive.

The main drive in music education is not how to create music, experiment, or express your own feelings—it’s about learning music that has been written by someone else and approved by an education board. So, not only does it do nothing toward fostering creativity, it also usually forces you to learn music that you don’t enjoy. In high school, I won the John Philip Sousa award despite disliking his music. While I’ve always loved music, I don’t think that I truly enjoyed playing it until I was writing my own alone and with friends in college.

Thanks to my recent reading, the chapter “Amateurs” in David Byrne’s How Music Works has hugely influenced my thinking. This chapter was highly influenced by John Carey’s thorough rebuttal of objective aesthetics, What Good Are the Arts?, a book Nick Hornby called his new bible.

In “Amateurs,” Byrne makes a great case for changing our notion of music making from consumerist to participatory. A major factor of our current idea that art is something to consume rather than create for oneself was recording technology. As Byrne writes:

In his book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Mark Katz explains that prior to 1900, the aim of music education in America “was to teach students how to make music.” The advent of the record player and recorded music in the early twentieth century changed all that . . . . Of course people have always been able to go hear professional musicians performing in big cities. Even in small towns, paid entertainers played at dances and weddings, as they still do in many parts of the world. Not all music was played by amateurs. But a hundred years ago most people didn’t live in big cities, and for them music was made locally, often by friends and family.

This point is also bolstered in Daniel J. Levitin’s The World in Six Songs, in which he writes:

Today, music is produced by few and consumed by many. But this is a situation of such historical and cultural rarity that it should hardly be considered. The dominant mode of musicality throughout the world and throughout history has been communal and participatory. We’ve seen the change even in a few generations. One hundred years ago, families would gather around after supper and sing and play music together to pass the time.

This social aspect of music is extremely rare at this point, and I’m in complete disagreement that the current situation of one-way music listening “should hardly be considered” because this is where we are, and the effects are incredibly palpable.

---

Go to Part 2.

And don’t forget to check out our Parenting Roundtable with

Bekka Palmer

,

Toya Gavin

, and

Matthew Buccelli

.

---