Getting Unstuck

Nothing will happen until you lift up your hands

One evening in the spring of 1997, while working late at the Computer Music Center (CMC) at Columbia University, I made a discovery that still serves me to this day. At the time, I was a doctoral student in composition, deeply immersed in the heady maelstrom of graduate school. But that night, with a piece of music due the following day for a class on postmodernism, I stared blankly at the computer display. My creativity had deserted me.

My plan for the piece had started well. I’d come up with what I thought was a suitably self- referential postmodern approach to my composition. I asked my classmates whose first language was not English to teach me how to count to ten in their native tongue – French, Farsi, and Afrikaans, to name a few – which I recorded documentary-style with my mistakes and their corrections. I envisioned a piece of electronic music that evolved from struggling to speak to, well, sounding like music. So postmodern in my graduate student mind. I had a concept and made the recordings. While I was excited by the project, the piece wasn’t coming together in the studio that evening. I had a deadline, and I was stuck.

This scene played out in Prentis Hall, a former milk bottling factory located at the far west end of 125th Street, where a maze of long corridors led to the CMC and the School of Art studios. Despite its drab institutional trappings, the building had a storied past. Until 2004, it was a nuclear safety testing lab, a history that contributed to many apocryphal stories about the building’s connection to the Manhattan Project. For all its shabbiness, it was an intensely creative place for the graduate art and music students who often worked into the morning under the flicker of fluorescent lights. The walls may not have exuded radioactivity but were witness to much extraordinary art and music-making.

Founded in the 1950s, the CMC was formerly the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Studio. As it was one of the first significant studios dedicated to electronic music research, most of the leading figures in electronic music either taught or were guest composers there, including giants like Edgard Varèse and Luciano Berio. While the CMC is a leader in digital audio arts today, it also a museum of its analog past. The original tape machines and synthesizers remained, often in the position of last in use. Nothing ever got thrown away. As I looked around at all that equipment from those early years used to create masterpieces, I tried to evoke a composer-ancestor for guidance.

But no help came. I sat there hoping in vain that the material would magically arrange itself into a miraculous piece of music. When I am frustrated or disappointed, I often hear the voice of my mother or my grandmother roll out some pithy phrase, helpful stuff like “Whoever promised you a life without pain?” or “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Then I heard a clear voice in my head, might have been either a great-great-grandmother or a long-deceased Pulitzer Prize-winner, “Nothing is going to happen until you lift up your hands.”

As simple as it sounds, this was the breakthrough. All I had to do was bring myself to put my hands on the computer keyboard and, in those days, the mouse. Through this simple action, I experienced something small but powerful. That something serves me in my professional life, but it takes commitment. Let me show you.

Back in the studio that night, the music emerged by thinking with my hands. As I began moving the material around, rather like a kid playing with building blocks, I was composing before I knew it. This is the first step – allow yourself to play.

What was holding me back? I didn’t allow myself to make a mess. Somehow as an adult, I had become set in the idea that creating was orderly and methodical. I had forgotten how to play. But it’s more than that. Play invites curiosity. Combining this with that generates new ideas. Tipping my ideas out onto the floor and getting my hands dirty somehow wasn’t even an option. Creating had become an entirely intellectual process. I was literally sitting on my hands.

I had discovered that making art means arranging through action. I was at play, as I did as a child making music up at the piano. Back then, it was easy. Freeing myself momentarily from the expectations I have as an adult, I rediscovered that play leads to curiosity. The hard work of creativity requires your body as well as your mind. More specifically, creativity needs action. But for those fragments of ideas that we have to come together, you must bring them into the world through action. No one else can do this for you. This is the second step – invite curiosity.

To be clear, by virtue of lifting up your hands doesn’t guarantee the work will be good, but you can guarantee there will be something to work with. That’s a world away from staring blankly at the screen. Here’s the thing: Once you begin work, with an idea, or without, with inspiration or without, you might find yourself in uncharted territory – with surprising results.

What is the third step? First, you allowed yourself to play, taking notice of how ideas form and reform. Without realizing it, you’ve already taken the second step – you find your curiosity. Observing your own play – without judgment – allows your observations to turn into questions, leading to creative solutions. And it’s here that you must be a super-observer, like Einstein. In this moment, you will experience moments of fleeting joy. This is that small but powerful experience I had back in the studio at Columbia all those years ago. A brief but tangible experience of joy. This book is about finding your way back to joy. However fleeting that experience is, this is the path to a long creative life.