Free Play

Although I am around one third of the book "Free Play" by Stephen Nachmanovitch, I am willing to say that I love this book!! It seems to be written for me. Almost every sentence I read until now strongly appealed to me. One of the most impressive sections is following:

Creativity is a harmony of opposite tensions, as encapsulated in our opening idea of lila, or divine play. As we ride through the flux or our own creative processes, we hold onto both poles. If we let go of play, our work becomes ponderous and stiff. If we let go of the sacred, our work loses its connection to the ground on which we live.

Through this part, I contemplated musical flow - this does not mean the term FLOW by Csiksszentmihalyi - and expression of creativity. When I played with peers in our class, I totally concentrated on making music and followed our creative processes. That means I expressed my creativity freely. Without any obstacles, the music, which was in my mind but I didn't know the potentiality, came out at that moment. After all, improvisation is natural.

Creativity in Music

I reminded how wonderful creative performance in the Tuesday's class was. Before the creative performance, Dr. Gilbert asked all students, including me, to introduce the instrument they brought. I was a kind of warming-up. Although I brought a soprano recorder for playing, I thought piano was much better to freely express my creativity so that I made various sounds within the piano. For example, I did massive cluster in the keyboard and glissando by using the strings.

After the warming-up, all classmates divided into several groups played spontaneously. When I participated in making music with peers, I didn't have any fear to improvise music. I concentrated on each other's sounds and followed the flow. Others also seemed to be comfortable when they made creation. After all, our works of creativity in music were not difficult matters, but unblocking expressions. Sounds we made flied freely as like a ribbon in the sky.