I wrote earlier about the two essential criteria for judging whether something is creative.

After I wrote the post, I began to get a feeling, a nagging sensation, that I was still missing something.

And then it came to me.

Of course.

The very idea of creativity presupposes that there’s a creator behind it.

That explains why a random collection of events or objects cannot be considered to be creative because there’s no evidence of a creator’s hand behind it.

And it debunks my earlier assertion that 4’33” is not creative.

Well, maybe not entirely.

If I were to go with just the earlier two definitions of newness and value, I still hold that it is not creative because it lacks aesthetic value (for me).

But if we consider its value not from the aesthetic standpoint, but from a philosophical one, it does fulfill all three conditions for creativity.

First, it is new.

Second, it has value from a philosophical standpoint. (It opens up our minds to what may or may not be considered music.)

Third, there’s a deliberate hand behind it.

And how about the other well-known artist with similar anarchistic tendencies, Jackson Pollock?

Can we consider his paintings to be creative because they seem be produced so randomly (by splashing paint on a canvas)?

When we consider that there’re an infinite number of ways to splash paint on a canvas, the fact he chooses one over another suggests that there’s deliberateness behind his actions, and that fulfills the criteria of deliberateness.

I love the sound of waves splashing on the shore. Or rain on the roof.

And watching the sun set over a smog-filled cityscape.

Do they fulfill the three conditions of creativity?

Newness? Value? Creator?

I’ll leave that for you to decide.

This is a continuation of my previous post, and expands on one of the points I raised in that post.

In a perfect world, learning occurs when a teacher imparts knowledge and a student receives that knowledge.

That’s all there is to it.

For years, this was the unwritten contract between teacher and student.

And teachers were especially wary of students who were not ready for instruction.

Martial arts lore is replete with stories of masters who would not accept students until they knew the student was ready.

I read about a martial arts teacher in Beijing who made a student exercise every day with him for three years (at a distance) before he would accept him as a student.

The great piano pedagogue Leschetitzky almost made Paderewski jump off a second story building to test his sincerity and eagerness to learn before he would accept him as a student.

But we live in a very imperfect world.

Being a teacher these days means many other things.

Now, we’re expected to become cheerleader, counselor, entertainer, babysitter, magician, parent, mentor, on top of our duties as ‘teacher.’

And the minute we assume the teacher mantle, we also become miracle workers – we’re expected to make students learn, no matter what.

And if students show no interest in learning, it’s our fault.

If they don’t do their homework, it’s our fault.

If they have low test scores, it’s our fault.

In other words, we teachers are one hundred percent guilty of any failings in the student’s education.

The student is blameless, the parents are blameless. The student bears no responsibility towards his own learning. The parents bear no responsibility towards their children’s education.

I’m not sure how and when this shift in perception of the teacher’s duties took place.

But suddenly we’re not just charged with imparting knowledge, we’re also charged with changing mindsets, we’re charged with making student receptive to our teaching.

And this is the crux of the problem.

That’s really not our job description.

That’s the parent’s job. That’s the parent’s responsibility.

It’s the job of parents to show an active interest in their child’s education, to make sure that homework is done, to provide a good learning environment at home, to encourage them, motivate them, fire up their ambitions.

In other words, it’s the job of parents to mentor their own children and make them receptive to learning.

If parents do this and step up to their responsibilities as parents, I guarantee test scores will go up across the board.

This is not rocket science, it’s just common sense.

Here’s a little anecdotal example from my own experience.

I went to school in a third world country. Classroom size was, on the average, 40 students per class.

And I remember some of the teachers were not the most enthusiastic and inspiring of teachers.

There was the science teacher whose idea of teaching was to copy endless notes on the chalkboard and we had to copy them down by hand. During tests, we had to memorize all these notes and regurgitate them.

There was the history teacher whose idea of teaching was to read from the textbook. He was so lazy, he didn’t even bother to read the book himself. Instead he would get one student after another to read it for him.

Not the most inspiring of situations. No fancy teaching techniques, no smart boards.

Just teacher, student, textbook, and chalkboard.

But did we learn?

As one famous politician is fond of saying, you betcha!

Because we were all fired up to learn. Yes, we still clowned around in class, but when the time came for testing and exams, we all knew we had to get serious.

The secret was expectations. Expectations from parents mostly.

If you didn’t do well, the shame you experience was enough to force you to study harder the next time. I remember having to show my ‘report card’ to my parents every term end. If the test scores were bad, it was more a matter of personal shame than any reprimand you could get from them.

Modern educators might shudder at the description I just gave.

But the proof is in the pudding.

Where are all these extremely ‘disadvantaged’ students now? Flung all across the globe, from New Zealand to Australia to Malaysia to Canada to the USA.

Engineers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, accountants, bankers, teachers, real estate developers, and yes, even a guitar professor in South Texas.

As I wrote earlier, teaching is a two way street.

For the transfer of knowledge to take place, the teacher must be willing and able to impart knowledge and the student to receive it.

And if the student is ready and receptive, learning will take place, even under the most adverse conditions.

Being a teacher is a thankless task.

Students have little respect for you, administration thinks you’re shirking your duties and are constantly evaluating you, and politicians use you as a punching bag.

Take the recent appearance of Michelle Rhee on Tavis Smiley.

Her basic message was simple:

If students are not doing well, blame the teachers (and their unions).

It’s the same old refrain that bureaucrats have been echoing for years. As a teacher, I’m frankly sick and tired of hearing it.

Because amidst these debates, one point seems to be consistently missed.

Learning is a two-way street between teacher and student.

It can only occur when both parties participate fully in the process.

Zen masters like to compare teaching to pouring tea into a teacup — if the cup is full, no amount of pouring will make the cup accept more tea.

To expand on that analogy, if the cup is closed, no amount of pouring will make the tea go into the cup too.

And that’s the problem facing most of us teachers.

Despite our best efforts, if the other party (the student) refuses to participate in the process, there’s not much we can do.

No amount of coaxing, cajoling, and teaching gimmicks will make the student learn when he/she has closed their minds to learning.

But these days, it’s fashionable to blame teachers for all the failings in our school systems.

When schools fail and test scores are low, blame the teachers. Fire them, make them jump through more hoops, subject them to endless evaluations, require them to keep copious records of students’ progress.

Most educators in the trenches know that this is just so much smoke and mirrors. Mere posturing and theater. Administrators trying to look busy and engaged in their jobs. Politicians looking for an issue.

Because despite these fancy measures, standards have continued to decline.

I say it’s time for a new approach.

And that approach is to work on the receiving side – to open up students and make them receptive to learning.

Let me qualify that by saying that no, I’m not suggesting that all teachers are blameless. Good teachers are few and far in between, just as good doctors are few and far in between, just as good pastors are few and far in between. (Is there any profession or vocation that does not have their share of deadwood?)

But learning can take place even when the quality of the knowledge that is being poured into the cups is sub par (I can attest to that, having had my share of disengaged and disinterested teachers in my life), just as healing can take place even under mediocre doctors, perhaps just not as fast.

All we need are receptive students and for that, the responsibility lies squarely on the parents.

Parents have to get involved. They have to take an active interest in their children’s education. They have to encourage and motivate their children to learn, and provide a good environment at home for that learning to take place.

Until that happens, students will continue to be disinterested in learning and test scores will continue to be low.

To quote another old saying, “You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” You can bring a child to school but you can’t make him/her learn.

Back to the Tavis Smiley/Michelle Rhee interview.

Until October of 2010, Ms. Rhee was the chancellor of DC public schools. Soon after she left the school district, she formed a new student advocacy group, Students First.

One of the stated goals of the organization is to recruit one million members and raise $1 billion dollars in five years. (Yes, that’s $1 billion.)

This is an inordinately large amount which Tavis Smiley was quick to point out.

He asked her, does this amount suggest that she believes that lack of money is the problem for our schools?

To which Rhee provided a rather startling answer, the money is not going to schools or students. Instead, it will be used to pay lobbyists.

According to her, teachers’ unions and the AFT are spending $500 million a year on lobbyists, so if Students First wants to counteract their efforts, it has to spend at least $200 million a year on lobbyists too.

Brilliant solution! Only in America.

To put students first, pay $1 billion to lobbyists.

I’m sure test scores across the country will skyrocket with that bold and visionary move.

I do a lot of my thinking when I’m doing nothing, like driving recently from Tucson to Corpus Christi in one day. Fifteen nonstop hours and one thousand miles. That’s a lot of thinking.

And of course much of my thinking dwelt on my recent obsession – creativity.

Somewhere between Willcox and Lordsburg, I came up with two basic criteria for determining whether something is creative or not

First, the thing has to be new.

Second, the thing has to have value.

Last week, I decided to open up the book, Mega Creativity by Dr. Andre Aleinikov that’s been lying on my bookshelf for the past year.

I had never heard of Aleinikov until I saw the book at a secondhand bookstore last year. I was so impressed by his chapter on how to define the essence of things that I purchased it immediately. But like the other two thousand books on my bookshelf, I had decided to save it for future reading and future reading turned out to be last weekend.

Imagine my complete surprise and delight when I found he had arrived at a similar definition of creativity, but with one slight difference – he omitted my second criteria.

Putting it through his rigorous steps of defining the essence of things, he concluded that the essence of creativity is newness, that’s it.

To me, there’s just one problem with this.

Not everything new is creative.

For instance, you can simply draw a bunch of random lines on a sheet of paper and it will be a new creation, but is it creative?

To take it to a more ludicrous level, going by that definition, every time you go to the bathroom, it’s a creative event too.

No, to me, value is an essential element of creativity.

Value can be anything you like. It’s totally subjective of course — what’s of value to me may be totally valueless to another — but that’s besides the point.

As long as it has value to someone, it’s passed that creativity threshold for that somebody.

It reminds me of an argument I had with a colleague many years ago about whether rap can be considered music. My colleague was adamant that rap is not music to which I responded that millions of young people would probably disagree.

The problem lies in how he perceived value in music. To him, rap music possessed zero value so it was not music. But millions of rap music fans obviously feel otherwise, because their perception of what is value in music is different.

So let’s apply that newness and value criteria to various creative pursuits.

(A word of caution: this is totally subjective and reflects my very personal bias.)

When someone produces a painting and it’s just a reproduction of another painting, it hasn’t passed the newness criteria so it’s not creative.

When a musician simply copies another musician, it’ not creative either, because it’s failed the newness factor.

When someone writes a poem filled with random words that have no meaning (and consequently no value), it’s not creative because it’s failed the value test.

When someone writes a few instructions to a performer to open a piano lid and sit there silently for 4 minutes 33 seconds, it’s not creative because it has failed the value criteria. (Someone looking for a philosophical statement and musical theater will probably disagree with me here.)

Newness and value – for me, these are the two essential criteria to determine whether something is creative or not.

I’ve always been fascinated by the painting by numbers phenomenon.

You’re given a board or sheet of paper. All the areas to be painted are already mapped out and numbered. And all you have to do is apply the prescribed colored paints to their respective numbered areas and voilà, an instant masterpiece.

When I first found out about it, my first thought was ‘only in America.’ The ultimate democracy, so art has to be democratized too.

But then, I started thinking deeper.

And I realized, isn’t this what art is all about? Following some prescribed rules and applying them in some formulaic way?

For instance, Chinese brush painting is mostly about formulaic techniques.

There’re specific ways to paint mountains, rocks, flowers. The famous Mustard Seed manual is a good source for all these techniques.

That’s why most Chinese paintings look the same — to me anyway — the same serene misty cloud covered mountains and squiggly lined streams.

But then I probed even deeper, and I realized that western watercolor painting share the same traits and characteristics too.

For example, one of the most influential watercolorists of our time, Edgar Whitney is famous for teaching his calligraphic strokes (that’s the word he uses).

His approach is remarkably similar to the Chinese. Each object is represented by a calligraphic marking, a specific technique. There’re different calligraphic strokes for every object — trees, water, houses, etc.

So is this art? Or is it just formulaic reproductions, just a little less constrained perhaps than the painting by numbers approach?

More to the point, is this creativity or is it just mindless reproduction, or rearranging of the same formulaic elements?

It’s hard to say.

Some musicians seem to think that all they have to do is play a piece accurately, exactly as notated, and they have an interpretation.

Others seem to think that interpretation is about reproducing faithfully what the composer ‘intended.’ So they faithfully go back in time, and by analyzing contemporary writings, try to determine the ‘performance practices’ of the time.

Yet others think that performance is about reproducing what their favorite concert artist did in his/her tenth recording of that same piece.

To each his/her own, I guess.

Those people who paint by numbers, they’re proud of their work –  I’ve seen them even framed up in their living rooms.

So do all those Chinese brush painting enthusiasts; so too, those happy weekend watercolor warriors.

In fact, arguing about whether these are creative pursuits or not becomes almost a moot point, and even smacks of elitism. Who’s to judge what’s creative and what’s not?

Perhaps it comes down to that famous saying by Judge Potter Stewart:

[I can’t define what it is.] “But I know it when I see it.”

I’ve been thinking about creativity a great deal lately. Some of the impetus, I must say, have been provoked by the slew of publications I’ve found on the subject.

You don’t have to go far to find these publications. Thanks to google, all you have to do is type in ‘creativity’ in the search box, select ‘books,’ and you’ll see the whole gamut. Some of these books are over 400 pages long.

I actually have some of these books in my possession.

And I’m still waiting to dig into them. Somehow, the thought of having to wade through over 400 pages of scholarly discussion about creativity does not seem, in itself, to be a very creative thing to do so I’ve been avoiding it.

The question is, can creativity even be taught?

And that’s where I differ with these creativity experts.

For example, did anyone teach Bob Dylan to be creative? I’ve seen the documentary “Don’t look back.” He just sits with this typewriter and bang away at the keys. What’s driving him and providing him with all that creative energy?

Or Glenn Gould recording the Goldberg, singing and humming away, baring his soul to the world. Did someone teach him to come up with his unique and breathtaking interpretation of the work?

Or closer to home, if you’ve seen a young kid on the beach, making sand castles, or just playing with the sand. Did you see any creativity expert nearby telling him, “Here, sonny, this is how you make a sand castle”?

Creativity is an urge, a hunger, an obsession. It’s pure energy.

It can’t be taught just as you can’t teach someone to be hungry. All you can do is foster that energy, and give it an outlet.

I live in a city where people are constantly having to whitewash walls.

Now, I’m not condoning any acts of vandalism. Defacing public property and other people’s fences is not a fun matter for those having to clean it up.

But what drives young people to go out at night and spray paint public property? There’re many motivations, I suspect, but one of these has to be that creative energy bursting inside all these young hearts, just wanting to be expressed.

Although many of these expressions are just random territorial statements, some of them are incredibly beautiful.

Talking about graffiti, I’ve heard that graffiti is a serious crime in Singapore which is punishable with many strokes of the cane.

And I’ve also heard that Singapore is at the forefront in fostering creativity. They’ve recruited Edward de Bono and Andrei Aleinikov (two experts who I happen to have the greatest respect for) to help their citizens become more creative.

Now I wonder whether there’s any connection here.

So there I was again, in the heart of Borneo, browsing through another bookstore, this time in my old hometown — Sibu, when my eyes fell upon another book.

Encrusted in dust, this book looked like it’s been sitting there for the past three decades, just waiting for me to pick it up.

I’m not sure why it attracted my attention, certainly not because of the title, ‘How to Overcome Competition.’ But I started reading it, and I was hooked. I loved the direct style of writing, it’s something I’ve been trying to cultivate so I bought the book.

Once home, I decided to google the author’s name, Herbert Casson. I found he was a Canadian who lived mostly in England at the turn of the twentieth century. He started out as a minister and ended up an authority on business practices.

What got me excited was his seeming obsession with efficiency. He founded a journal named after that very subject and published a number of books on it.

Efficiency, of course, is a pet subject of mine. It is an integral part of virtuosity — much of virtuosity has to do with streamlining your task, refining it and making it as efficient as possible.

But what got me really excited was a book of his, titled ‘Lectures on Efficiency’ which I found in digital format here:

http://ia700304.us.archive.org/15/items/lecturesoneffici00cassrich/lecturesoneffici00cassrich.pdf

On page 4, he divides work into two parts, details and principles. Here’s an excerpt of the text:

Here are the details and here are the principles. If a man learns the job himself and does not read books, or travel, or listen to lectures, he only knows the details. He does not know the principles at all. You learn details by what you do yourself; I could not teach you details. There are no two jobs alike, and so you must learn your own details.

But there is something else besides details in every Works, that is, GENERAL PRINCIPLES, which you cannot learn yourself, because it is a very different thing. There are the two halves of a circle. A Works is like an umbrella, the ribs are the principles, the cloth is the detail; it takes them both. If a man only knows details, he sees his job at the small end; if he only knows principles, he is a theorist and a dreamer, and he cannot do anything at all.

Well, you get the general idea.

His explanation of principles is something right after my own heart. It’s practically the theme song of my life.

Ever since I was young, I had always understood that there’re principles and there’re techniques. And principles have always been of greater importance to me than techniques because they give rise to the latter.

When I saw an athlete run, I wanted to know the principles behind his speed. When I watched a small kungfu master beat a hulking boxing champ in a sparring match, I wanted to know the principles behind his strength too.

To me, it’s all about principles. because once you understand the principles, you can create any details (techniques) you want.

The AOV is essentially a compilation of all the principles I’ve learned. These principles are so fundamental and universal to good technique, it still amazes me no one had thought of compiling them before.

What I read in the ‘Lectures’ by Herbert Casson was a validation of the rationale and purpose of the AOV.

So the next day, I went back to the bookstore again to see if there were other books by him. I did find another book, equally encrusted in dust and so old, it literally fell apart as I opened it. I bought it too, although I doubt I would be applying the principles in that book anytime soon. It’s called, ‘Window Display.’

I’ve been doing some video taping. My priority this past year has to get some of the concepts I’ve written about here on video.

Well, it’s not easy. Quite apart from the tech problems – I finally figured out how to set my camera for low light situations – it’s also the off-the-cuff speaking which I’m still getting used to.

Here’s one of my attempts at trying to explain and show the concept of walking the fingers. The audio is on the soft side which is just as well, as I don’t sound all that coherent, but the main thing is the video.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

What the video doesn’t show is the actual sensation at my fingertips, and as I’ve written before, I focus all my playing at my fingertips, there’s a sense of forward motion in the fingertips, they feel as if they’re being constantly propelled forward. The focus also is on finding the next string rather than on the actual plucking, in other words, on the pre-plucking rather than the plucking.

Here’s Etude #1 by Villa Lobos — a good piece to practice the walking fingers exercise.