My creativity advent calendar 2024: Day 22.
I started this series quoting from Quincy Jones book, 12 Notes: On Life and Creativity which, as a jazz fan is hardly surprising.
Creating music is probably one of the earliest forms of creativity. The oldest discovered musical instruments in the world (flutes made of bones and mammoth ivory) are over 40,000 years old. But instruments and song are probably far, far older. In his book The Descent Of Man, Charles Darwin wondered whether our language abilities had started with singing, and if that was the reason for our pleasure in music.
Have you ever wondered why some people prefer one kind of music to another? Apparently there have been lots of studies on the subject — all of them inconclusive.
I don’t know why I like jazz. It just connects with me in a way that no other music does, so I was interested to read recently that more than 450 well-known jazz solos have been studied by physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization together with psychologists from the University of Göttingen and they have unravelled the secret of what makes jazz different to other forms of music.
They were able to demonstrate that jazz musicians use certain systematic deviations in timing that gives the jazz its unique rhythm — but that they use them unconsciously. Co-incidentally, many years ago, Charlie Watts (first and foremost, a jazz musician) was surprised to discover that this is what created the unique sound of the Rolling Stones.
Last night I watched “The Nutcracker” a ballet created by Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve. The plot is an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 short story The Nutcracker, itself a retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.
What struck me most is how disciplined ballet is as an art form. Every step is carefully choreographed, the movements learned and reproduced over centuries.
How can one art form — music — give rise to so many varied branches and interpretations?
Are you a freestyle sort of music fan or do you prefer a more disciplined and organised style?
