This post is the fourth part in a series about deliberate practice, structure and creativity.

• A Simple Exercise (Part 1)
• Exploring the Simple Exercise (Part 2)
• Deliberate Practice and Structured Activities (Part 3)
• Creativity and Structured Activities (Part 4)
• Three Reflections on Creativity (Part 5)
• Three Reflections on Structure (Part 6)
• Three More Reflections on Structure (Part 7)
• Structure and Education (Part 8 )
• Structure, Society and the Arts (Part (9)

- – - -

In case you missed it, check out the previous posts where I imposed and explored the rules of an improv exercise.

Quick recap: As you impose more rules and more structure, the number of creative choices made available to a player diminish, but in doing so, players can focus more on managing these choices, improve their intuitions and establish a foundation for more difficult exercises.  This is the essence of discipline, deliberate practice and creativity.

In the previous post, I explored the relationship between deliberate practice and structure.  In this post, I’d like to explore the relationship between creativity and structure.

- – - -

What rules would I have to impose to take away all possible creative choices?

In the context of my improv exercise, this is easy.  I can instruct the player to play only two notes, over one chord, for one measure.  It would have to look like this:

As far as the notes, the chord and duration are concerned, there’s zero opportunity for creativity (You could improve this slightly by adding a third note and increasing the duration to two measures).

What about the other extreme?  What rules and structures would I have to remove to allow full creative freedom?  This is more difficult for two reasons.

First, it depends on the player’s skill level.  Creativity is dependant on one’s ability to process and react to all this information.  To improve this we impose rules, and then remove them.

The second reason can be expressed using Stravinsky’s words from the Poetics of Music:

“…my freedom  will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength.  The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”

This seems counter intuitive.  To optimize creativity, one may think the best way would be to simply remove all rules, structures and boundaries.  But you can’t take this too far. In the context of my improv exercise, yes, you could remove all the rules I outlined in the first post.  But as it turns out, no matter how many rules you remove and loosen, the choices a player makes will always be governed by other structures, boundaries and “unwritten rules.”  I’ll write about these later.

The point is that creativity can be hindered by structure, but it also requires structure.  The inverse is also true, if you replace “structure” with “freedom.”  Creativity can be hindered by freedom, but it also requires freedom.

Considering all of this, the dynamic between creativity and structure can be expressed in a graph.  It would look something like this:

I’ll be exploring and modifying this graph over the next few posts.  Stay tuned!

Related posts:

1. Deliberate Practice and Structured Activities
2. Exploring the Simple Exercise
3. A Simple Exercise
4. The Culture Bubble
5. Priorities in Music Education – Classical, Jazz, Jazz Nerds and More (Part 1/2)