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Guest post by Jill Timmons, DMA

These days, Creativity is trending as the new fashionable buzzword and answer to the many challenges that we face in midlife. Be creative and you will find happiness! It has even become a kind of “rebranding” tool for product marketing: our school, our company, our products are grounded in a commitment to Creativity. It leaves one wondering what they are talking about.

Creativity, however, is the unique imprint of our humanity. And from this personal expression of our very essence, we can discover most powerfully at midlife a way to recast and renew our potent purpose and meaning in life.

By midlife, most of us have had our share of disappointments, losses, or abysmal calamities, engendering a kind of liminal space—betwixt and between. Moreover, in meeting the challenge of this turbulent time, we may discover that metrics from an earlier period no longer serve us. We can be thrust into an ardent search for new meaning and purpose. It is through the discovery and application of our innate creative nature that we can recast our life journey.

As musicians know, one’s mode of creative expression is a deeply subjective choice, and one that can morph over time. There are, however, principles and processes that are embedded in most any given art form. For example, I launch a creative act with first experiencing desire, noticing what I am drawn to, and where my curiosity lies. Something within me creates a spark of attention. There is energy, illumination, and clarity as to what attracts me. I want to explore, develop, form, craft, or generate something new. I feel a certain intensity or passion in following this engagement. Consequently, I discover a rightness to what I am doing. I cannot not do it. As a musician, for example, I encounter moments of grace and ecstasy that may be in tandem with frustration, doubt, or discouragement. Preparing for a performance requires long hours of study and rehearsal. Then in that temporal moment of live performance, I must be fully present to my rigorous preparation. In wrestling with this creative process, I discover, nevertheless, that there can be flow to what I am doing. Even though the way can often be uncertain, I bear a deep awareness of inevitability as the course of events unfolds. These are the markers of an authentic integral creative act.

You might ask, how does this matter? It matters because Creativity requires an intrinsic perseverance, faith in the eventual outcome however it manifests, and tensile strength to sculpt and sustain an artistic vision and plan over an indeterminant period. Aren’t these the essential qualities for artfully navigating midlife and into the elder years, creating a potent all-in life?

Everyone has a creative impulse. On the other hand, in our noisy distracted world it can sometimes be difficult to simply hear our own thoughts. If you are seeking a new creative vision, one that can reveal renewed meaning and purpose to your life, my recommendation is to first start by carving out a personal retreat for at least a few days. In my experience, this requires digital celibacy. Spend time in nature, notice your surroundings, and if you feel inclined, walk to nowhere. What do you notice? Write freely about this, perhaps in a journal. What would you do if you didn’t have to earn a living? In the quiet of your retreat and in answering this question, you will undoubtedly find a new creative path, something that has piqued your excitement and curiosity. From there, you can build the edifice of a strategic action plan.

As an additional thought, a few words about purpose. We often hear about the importance of purpose in life. Certainly, purpose can give focus to how we choose to live. But purpose without deeply held meaning can become stale, dry to the touch. Unchecked it can be the genesis and breeding ground for “burnout.”

For example, let’s imagine for a moment the following scenario. For many years, as a pianist I taught and performed as a university professor and resident artist. That savoury work became my professional purpose. Nevertheless, I discovered that the meaning of that purpose shifted roughly every seven years. Invariably, I longed for some fresh creative path, one where I could be newly challenged and inspired. Inevitably, the consequence of this search was an infusion of new meaning. While I have remained in the music profession, the meaning of how and why I serve continues to evolve.

Lastly, harnessing your own brand of Creativity may also extend your life. Recently, researchers from the University College of London analysed survey data from a long-term study in the United Kingdom which included some 3,500 adults who ranged from very engaged in the arts to those who chose minimal involvement. Professor Daisy Fancourt reported the research team’s findings: “We found in this study that ‘arts engagement’ was related to 4% slower ageing rates, meaning people were about a year younger, biologically, if they were regularly engaged in the arts. This is actually the same reduction in biological ageing that we saw for physical activity,” she says. These findings are published in the journal Innovation in Ageing.

At midlife and into our elder years it is through harnessing the power of our own Creativity that we discover a way forward in answering the search for new meaning, purpose, and greater authenticity. In doing so, we can also enrich the lives of those around us. Consequently, that purposeful life then becomes our legacy—a gift to the collective.

Jill Timmon’s latest book Variations on Life after 50: A Field Guide to Harnessing the Power of Creativity, Purpose, and Legacy in Midlife is available now. Find out more

Jill Timmons is a leading international arts consultant

www.artsmentor.com

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Guest post by Natalie Tsaldarakis

I came across a video of an exasperated ballet dancer talking about parents who had turned to AI to correct their children’s posture. It prompted this article, a response to the dizzying speed at which AI is infiltrating every facet of our lives. The uptake is so fast that the night before, I had been reading through people’s responses to a question about jobs they thought were safe from AI-driven redundancy. Several suggested cleaning or other manual work, apparently unaware of another post showing a robot slowly but methodically cleaning a house and neatly folding clothes. One thing is for certain: we still can’t grasp how our lives will change in the next few months and years.

Meanwhile, my path as pianist, teacher, musicologist has had a surprising turn: I am conducting a pilot study with Imperial College, on the biomechanics of elite piano performance and training, with access to resources provided by Steinway Hall and Goldsmiths College’s Deptford Town Hall. AI is not going to trail very far behind: there is 3D body imaging, motion tracking and data to analyse. In this narrower respect, AI is simply an augmentation of a computer’s abilities.

Since the advent of the internet, availability of information masks from view the more concerning shrinking of the new ‘reality’ into a colourful yet ‘flat’ experience: that of the phone, tablets and tv screens. Everything is one, or a few swipes away. In the case of a non-domain expert parent, i.e. someone who hasn’t trained in the same subject, AI can provide some background information fast, provided the right questions are asked and provided that the AI’s limitations are acknowledged. AI itself is not a ‘knowing’ entity, but a processing entity. The instigator and recipient of this knowledge is the human. A deceptive communication, which is actually cyclical: it reflects and engages with the human input in a seeming loop. So, yes, the information is available, but the context, in terms of indispensable layers such as aesthetic pursuits and creativity, is missing.

If we try to probe the matter deeper, AIs such as the general public uses, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, are actually language models. The basis of their functionality is that of predicting a probability distribution over next tokens and sampling from it to arrive at cogent and context-realistic verbal responses. And I am reminded of a very pertinent excerpt highlighting the process in humans, which connects internal thought processes with language, from Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited and with an
introduction by John B. Carroll, Foreword by Stuart Chase

The Greeks took it for granted that back of language [sic] was a universal, uncontaminated essence of reason, shared by all men, at least by all thinkers. […] Whorf flatly challenges it in his second major hypothesis. “A change in language,” he says, “can transform our appreciation of the Cosmos.”

Taken simply, internal processes of thought and experience go at least hand-in-hand with language. Although AI are language models, their output is not an interaction in the sense of having the initiative to communicate unprompted or the result of thought: the initial stimulus is the user’s thought and it is anchored in that. It could be that our over-reliance on AI ‘transforms our appreciation of the Cosmos’ in unintended ways. This is certainly
unchartered territory. What about the teacher’s concern over AI teaching movement without human supervision? Expert skill acquisition, such as required for elite ballet dancing or piano performance, is narrow and deep. The idea that anyone will do because ‘the child will not pursue seriously music’ is wrong on so many levels it requires a separate article. And I think that it is this attitude which operates in the background when parents think that AI can be a good substitute for a teacher or a sufficient supplement. The generalisations that come out of Google currently have to do both with data poverty and the fact that biomechanics, the abstraction of art to physical movement, are the necessary substrate of what we call Art, but these two cannot be equated. A good teacher is simply indispensable to instil the basics for specific outcomes to be achieved. Strategy is also not the strong point of AIs.

Teaching is an interaction, so the process is not just a passing down or the rehearsing of a physical skill, but a process within a social context. For non-expert parents, the necessary critical faculty to efficiently sift through sometimes conflicting information is lacking precisely because the requisite is not just information; it is lived experience. In her book Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos, Izabela Wagner writes about this very idea
in terms of “socialisation” in the arts: you need a human to transmit not only physical technique but also the lived experience of the milieu you are trying to become a member of.

The Arts are quintessentially the means of probing the eternal questions that torture us, to echo nineteenth century sentiments, a time when many of the canonic works of classical music were composed and are heard regularly on concert stages around the world to this day. More to the point, unlike science which seeks to prove and to know, the Arts seek to engage, no matter what the answer might be, or even when the ‘answer’ represents, like Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893), an expression that cannot be ‘answered’. It just is. Uniqueness would be the other identifier, discussed in connection to seemingly artless or mundane, now iconic, works such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962): the ability to reproduce it, underlines its emphasis away from the skill of the craft and on the effect on its unsuspecting audiences. This then supplies the third aspect of human artistic production, the intent to communicate and the decision to take action towards this direction. This is what parents of young learners miss: to develop a real relationship with the arts is to engage with socialisation which cannot be abstracted or equated to ‘interaction’ with a machine and ultimately to connect through one of the most fundamental of human needs: love, and belonging.

1 Benjamin L. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited and with
an introduction by John B. Carroll, Foreword by Stuart Chase (The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York London, 1956) Foreword, p. 8.

Natalie Tsaldarakis is a Greek concert pianist, researcher, and co-Artistic Director of the PianoPlus International Recital Series, now in its 4th edition. Her research sits at the intersection of biomechanics and piano pedagogy, currently underway in collaboration with the MSk Lab at Imperial College London, and she is completing a forthcoming Routledge publication on the pianist and pedagogue Gordon Green (1905–81). A graduate of Royal Holloway, where her teachers included Chopin scholar Prof. John Rink, she performs internationally as a member of the Ivory Duo Piano
Ensemble and Convivium Label Artist, and is a published author (Classical Music in a Changing World, eds. Kramer & Nones, Vernon Press, 2021).

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Guest post by Frances Jones

As a big fan of Poulenc’s music, I’m delighted to see his Concerto for Two Pianos on the Proms programme this year. It’s an exciting piece, both for performers and audience alike, and great to see in concert. But it’s the solo repertoire that occupies my thoughts at the moment, as I try to get to grips with another of his Nocturnes. I mentioned in a previous article back in May that I was working on the first Nocturne and although I haven’t made as much progress as I might in learning the rest, snatches of these sublime musical portraits have been flitting around my head like moths around a camp-fire (more on moths later).

There are eight Nocturnes, composed between 1929 and 1938 when Francis Poulenc was in his 30s. Some of them have descriptive titles, suggesting glimpses of civilised nocturnal scenes, and they alternate between the serenely beautiful and the fast and furious.

Number 1 falls into the first category; Poulenc’s ability to write a beautiful melody is proven in the opening bars, and he uses the range of the piano and takes unexpected harmonic turns as the music progresses. It is at once original, with an edge of melancholy, and also deeply comforting to listen to. Despite the discords, the music always resolves but almost never to a straightforward major chord; there’s always a note that ‘jars’ slightly with the rest. I like to think this is Poulenc’s way of telling us that, whilst there might be great beauty in the world, there is no such thing as perfection in life and his music does not intend to escape this.

Number 3, ‘Les Cloches de Malines’, gives us the bell-like sound promised in the title. He sets up an almost-repeated bassline to represent the bells, switching from 3 time to 4 time and back so it feels out of kilter; with Poulenc, there is always a twist. After being lulled into a false sense of security with the bells’ gentle music, there is a bar of complete silence, followed by a passage of brash accented chords, marked agité. It is as if the bells have gone rogue, and reminds me of one of Charles Dickens’ Christmas stories, in which the traveller is tormented by incessant ringing and imagines climbing up the church tower to the bells which have taken on frightening forms. He awakes in the morning and, of course, it’s all been a dream. So it is in this nocturne; after the clanging and clashing there’s another bar of silence and the familiar bassline of the opening returns; all is well, and normality has been restored.

The fifth nocturne is a portrait of moths (‘Phalènes’) and, as the music is both presto and staccato in the opening section, these insects seem to be clamouring around a light; a street-lamp perhaps, or a glint from a window. The music is animated and there’s no real let-up until the end. It switches between pp and f, even ff, from legato to staccato, until finally coming to rest with a big sforzando chord.

Number 7 is another of the faster pieces but this one is joyful from the outset. It was written in August, 1935; perhaps the composer was enjoying a summer holiday in the country or at the coast – but this is speculation. The music runs up and down the keyboard in a friendly chase. Even the middle section, steady and perhaps somewhat cautious if a depiction of a character was intended, lasts only a short time before the carefree melody of the opening returns. This nocturne has no title; it’s up to the listener to make their own conjectures.

The final nocturne, Number 8, was written as a coda to the collection. It’s another lyrical melody, but concise; a final moment of gentle beauty after the antics of the previous piece. Number 8 brings the cycle full circle, using the ending of the first nocturne to draw the piece, and the collection, to a close. Having listened to these pieces countless times, I feel I’ve gained a glimpse into the composer’s life. But only a glimpse and, after all, that’s what these nocturnes are; sounds of the evening, auditory shapes in the twilight. I like that about them; the titles of some give us ideas but, for the rest, we can make our own suppositions. I haven’t yet come close to learning all eight, but I feel much better acquainted with them, and that’s a good start.

Frances Jones read music at York University followed by a PGCE at Cambridge. She teaches piano in SW London.

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Guest post by Noah Bradley

AI has caused a bit of a fuss in Art. Classical music has long subsisted on a few immortal masterpieces a century. Before long, will we be swamped?

I think most people would agree that classical music is an art of a different kind to pop music, advertising, and cooking. To compare Beethoven and Michelangelo is fair enough, but Beethoven and fried chicken less so. The word we have for the former kind (the latter would be “pre-concert KFC”), is “high art” which sounds perhaps a little pretentious, so we shall simply call it “art”.

With Beethoven as a starting point, it becomes clear that Bach is really the same sort of thing, and that Stravinsky is too. And Hucbald of St Amand? Well not really. Nonetheless, it has been traditional to lump all four of them together; sharing as they do, a place in the history of European music.

Of late, it has seemed rather arbitrary that Hucbald gets to be associated with “classical art”, whereas Ravi Shankar doesn’t. So nowadays (because of its extraordinary refinement) we call that type of Indian folk music “Indian classical”, and classical “Western classical”. I believe this has muddied the waters, and I shall explain why.

This takes us to 19th-century Munich, where “kitsch” was invented to describe paintings that were very clearly not art (it has since taken on another meaning). The difference between “art” and “kitsch” the theorists say, is that kitsch doesn’t need a soul; it doesn’t need refinement or sincerity, only lustre.

Which brings us to our first distinction, that real art has a soul, and that if something is utterly soulless, then it is not art. I can hear a soul in Bach, but in a (average) pop song, only lustre. Now our second distinction; that there are two types of art- one where you can feel cultures, and another where you can feel individuals. The first type is called “folk art”, whereas the second type doesn’t really seem to be called anything.

There is a bit of a grey line, because in a work of art you can sometimes feel a culture and an individual. In other cases it is simpler: of all the great cathedrals of Europe, none are by a single hand. They were also designed according to tradition- one of the main precepts of folk art.

But isn’t it common to hear it said that Mozart and Haydn sound rather similar? And isn’t Bach unimaginable without the heavy air of Protestantism? Well even if Mozart and Haydn share twinkly melodies, simple harmonies, and regular symmetry, they both have their own, separate, heartbeats. The trappings of the eighteenth century or the atmosphere of German Protestantism is not what moves us; what does is the soul of the individual.

If all this sounds terribly abstract, it is a comfort to know that it is true in practice. No computer, no matter how many instructions you give it, will ever make a real work of art. It is all mediocre because the surest route to mediocrity is copying. Composers who do nothing but copy, do not write art, they write kitsch. And if in Saint Hildegard you can hear the cold damp air of Eibingen Abbey, and not her own heartbeat, then maybe she is a folk artist. But it is important not to confuse clarity of thought with mediumship, and I only hope to make such subjective judgements a little clearer.

Noah Bradley is a young composer, writer and polymath, deeply passionate about the art of music. He has written for Music Teacher magazine and InterludeHK

Self Portrait by Noah Bradley