What's Next?: Creativity in the Age of Entertainment

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Inspiration and Language

Art is a mystery. A mystery is something unmeasurable. e.e. cummings

I looked out into the audience as I took my place on the stage of the Hanoi Opera House. We were ready to perform Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring with an ensemble of American and Vietnamese musicians.

What was this experience? Was it an entertaining evening, soft-power diplomacy, a classical music performance, a healing event between former enemies, a demonstration of cultural leadership, an educational experience, or just another paycheck for the musicians?

Perhaps it was all of the above. Personally, it was an inspirational experience, one that would remain with me as a highlight of my life and an evening that I was proud to have created. The definition of the event and its purpose meant different things to each person onstage and in the audience; all were valid points of view. As we navigated through this remarkable cultural exchange project sponsored by the U.S. Department of State in 2010, language was paramount as we uncovered the meaning of the project and the cultural differences between east and west.

Language is key to understanding life’s experiences — how we define what we do can make a difference in our comprehension and insight. Sometimes the inability to find words is itself one meaning of inspiration, a drawing in of breath, inhalation, which often happens when we cannot find a way to describe how we feel.

Music is an art form that uses sound as its language instead of words. Few have the talent and ability to describe music through words, although many try. The visual arts and dance also operate on an experiential level through observation and movement, similar to music. Literature and theater are about the use of words and depend on language for creative expression. As a student gathers experiences, the arts’ role in understanding the world becomes very important.

In the 1960s, I received arts instruction as part of a well-rounded public school education. We grew up with the opportunity to experience ourselves and other cultures through the arts. The unstated goal was to find outlets for personal expression and to encourage enjoyable activities throughout our lifetime beyond our professional work. What everyone accepted without discussion was that the arts were the best source of inspiration to help develop and experience creativity.

I studied the violin and viola, learned to paint and draw, performed in school plays, and took ballet lessons — these activities were enjoyable parts of my day, which made learning fun, provided important skills, and created camaraderie with my schoolmates. When we attended professional performances and museums, I was often inspired to continue my studies to more deeply understand myself and experience the world around me.

I was fortunate to attend the Indian Hill Arts Workshop in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, during three summers as a teenager. Plays at the Berkshire Playhouse, concerts at Tanglewood, dance at Jacob’s Pillow¹ — all supplemented the development of our artistic crafts. Not everything inspired me, but the volume of exposure guaranteed that something would cause me to inhale my breath in awe. Even as a teenager it was obvious that the experience of art is very personal and means different things to each person.

As I reflect on those three important summers, it is clear that my inspiration came from mentoring by wonderful teachers hired by the directors of the workshop, Mordecai and Irma Bauman. The teachers were in the forefront of the exciting New York arts scene and colleagues of influential artists such as composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The experience of being taught by some of New York’s finest artistic talent inspired me to make the arts my life’s work. We didn’t often discuss our experiences but rather soaked them up like youthful sponges.

Young people today have few opportunities to develop skills for personal expression because arts education funding has been reduced during the past thirty years. The educational curriculum has been stripped of anything inspiring. Yes, in wealthy school districts, parents still insist on supplemental subjects or pay for after-school lessons, but most young people today use Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram as their main expressive outlets.

Without inspiration, it is difficult for students to be motivated to develop creativity skills. Inspiration and creativity go hand in hand. The Oxford dictionary defines inspiration as the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.

Most artists will agree that inspiration is often followed by creative expression. It certainly was in my case and for most of my colleagues. Much of the blurring of definitions — between art and entertainment, creativity and innovation, entrepreneurship and business skills — have made it difficult to focus on the importance of inspiration in developing creativity.

As I was inspired to pursue my dual artistic passions of drama and music in college, my expanding artistic talent made my experiences deeper and more rewarding. The work of composers and playwrights became my guides as I developed the ability to direct plays and perform music — the process of becoming a re-creative artist to bring to life a creative work. However, I had to face the realities of pursuing the arts professionally. My directing professor at Tufts University, Tommy Thompson, taught a reality class about our possible future, and advised that if we did anything else, we should consider getting out of the theater.

Fortunately in the long run, I was not accepted to attend a theater workshop the following summer and instead attended a summer music festival, the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. Maurice Abravanel ² conducted the orchestra and inspired all of us to find our way as musicians. Here I discovered that I had something else that I loved — music and the viola. I knew this would be a better path forward instead of pursuing more limited opportunities in the theater. I worked hard senior year and was accepted into a Master’s program to study with the eminent violist Walter Trampler at Boston University.

Many of us can point to teachers who changed our lives. An inspiring musician through his teaching, personality, and performances, Walter helped me refocus my direction from drama to music. He took a gamble in his thirties, leaving his principal position in the Boston Symphony Orchestra to become a founding member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.³ His legacy was assured as soloist, chamber musician and teacher because he risked a preeminent career as an orchestral musician to launch a new organization in a starring role.

After I completed my degree with Mr. Trampler, my husband Jeff von der Schmidt and I met as musicians at the Tanglewood Music Center — a highly competitive fellowship program of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox, Massachusetts. I left my orchestra positions in the Boston Pops and Opera Company of Boston to move to Jeff’s hometown of Los Angeles and we were married in 1982. Our careers took the usual path of auditions, teaching, orchestras and freelance work that included Hollywood scoring sessions for television and film. However, we both came from self-employed families in the food business — we soon tired of playing movie scores and engaging in orchestral politics. We looked at other opportunities that could lead to our own self-employment, inspired by our parents’ examples. Jeff had formed an ensemble for the opening concerts in 1977 of the new Arnold Schoenberg Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He had always wanted to establish a professional ensemble to play contemporary music, similar to the London Sinfonietta ensemble. Although we were producing concerts as faculty members at Pomona College, Jeff felt we could do a lot more.

It didn’t take much to convince me that Los Angeles should have their version of the Sinfonietta or the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The finest inspiration was the example of Walter Trampler leaving a permanent and prestigious position to launch a new venture. At the time, there was no resident chamber music ensemble in Los Angeles, so why not give it a try? As we told one of our founding board members who asked what we would do if it didn’t work out, we replied, we would probably keep giving concerts anyway!

The inspiration was in place, and the passion for the music was easy to find. As I will detail later, putting the puzzle together to solve concert production issues, commissions for new work, recordings and tours kept us on our toes. After founding Southwest Chamber Music in 1986 and the LA International New Music Festival in 2012, we are fortunate to be recognized with two Grammy® Awards, nine Grammy nominations, prestigious grant awards, and support for international projects from our government, including the U.S. Department of State. We have performed on some of the finest stages in North America, Europe, and Asia, along with simultaneous careers in education, administration, fundraising, and production that have been extremely fulfilling.

However, the environment for the arts has changed dramatically since we began Southwest Chamber Music. Arts media coverage has diminished, arts education has been cut from many school districts, classical arts have declining audiences, entertainment has taken the place of art, and technology is the new means of self-expression. In the past thirty years, we have seen less cultural literacy, shrinking innovation, unmotivated students, and a society that provides few opportunities to understand its cultural legacy, much less gain inspiration from humanity’s greatest accomplishments. Everyone is clamoring for more creativity, but we have lost sight of the best ways to provide the necessary skills. The trickle down effect of poor education is getting more and more difficult to repair.

My teachers were very clear about what was necessary for success in the arts. Our craft was honed and polished to achieve the highest level of musicianship paired with a responsibility to our audiences to provide them with an inspirational experience. Our examples from creative leaders over the centuries were deep and meaningful artistic achievements that spanned the generations.

However, I have observed first hand that the current state of the arts and education is one of confusion. Serious problems in our society are the result of schools with irrelevant curriculum, academia that perpetuates its shortcomings, poor or non-existent arts education, arts organizations that have lost their way, entertainment that masquerades as art, and audience bewilderment caused by blurred definitions. Creativity is often missing in our potential artists, leading to imitative popular entertainment, faddish business innovation, and an educational system that does not provide students with usable skills. Our era’s focus on entertainment value instead of cultural knowledge is compromising our society’s accomplishments and inhibiting inspiration and creativity in our daily lives. If we can understand and improve creativity’s multi-faceted environment, perhaps we can find solutions for today’s creativity crisis.

The Age of Entertainment

We are living in the Age of Entertainment.

Today our lives are spent in the pursuit of entertainment. Chefs create dining experiences and technology entertains us through our cell phones and computer games. Sports teams are more important to some universities than academics while the media is focused on celebrity sound bites at the expense of journalism.

Why is this a problem?

As our society has moved toward a culture of entertainment, we have minimized our ability to develop skills and solutions for a rapidly changing world. Since the 1990s, schools have become increasingly focused on tests and less on subjects such as the arts that are difficult to measure. We see the decline daily through unskilled workers, copycat fads, and less arts participation.

The focus on entertainment has also devalued accomplishments from the artistic world that have always inspired our culture. Depth has become unimportant. We seek pleasure over substance as our pastimes are chosen for their entertainment value. Cooking, news, media, politics, education, and the arts — everything has evolved to entertain. There is nothing wrong with entertainment; rather, it is entertainment’s central place in our culture that has become a problem.

Perhaps this daily overload of choices is numbing. One of my theater professors at Tufts University, the late Dr. Peter Arnott, once quipped about the difference between entertainment and art — art makes you think and entertainment keeps you from thinking.

In the Age of Entertainment, it is very difficult to find inspiration within our unlimited entertainment options. Students cannot devise solutions for situations needing fresh insight since they have had little direct experience with inspirational examples. Additionally, our K-12 educational system provides few opportunities to teach leadership or innovation skills. Entrepreneurship and business depend upon idea development. Even leading corporations worldwide have noticed and remarked about their workers’ lack of creativity skills.

In a 2010 survey by IBM, 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from sixty countries and thirty-three industries said that creativity is the most essential skill for navigating an increasingly complex world.⁴ Even earlier, in March 2006, UNESCO brought together 1,200 people in delegations from ninety-seven countries — UNESCO’s first-ever worldwide arts education conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The unmistakable message of the conference was about creative active engagement of learners. Presidents, ministers of culture, and educational leaders from around the world came to the podium with speeches that laid every social crisis at the feet of arts education, from an explosion of mental health problems in youth to poverty, AIDS, global warming, and worldwide economic disparity, with a plea to resolve problems by bringing creative engagement into the lives of the young.⁵

We need to find a way to transform the Age of Entertainment into the Age of Creativity.

There are many components that must be solved to find a solution to the lack of creativity throughout society. Today, much of our society has become divorced from the arts. How could it be otherwise when education focuses on testing facts and figures rather than teaching skills for self-expression or encouraging innovation through exposure to the greatest artistic accomplishments over many centuries? Students today rarely study the creative minds of their own culture. If they have any arts education at all, there is often only a limited Euro-centric focus in the United States.

In the past thirty years, I have witnessed declining arts literacy firsthand. Southwest Chamber Music’s older supporters, well educated with arts education as youngsters, actively pursue arts experiences at museums and the performing arts. Their children, also educated but with less arts education, occasionally partake of a concert or exhibition, but usually only the blockbuster show or rock concert. Youth today are more often engaged with technology. Lacking arts education, their self-expressive outlets are found online and not through cultural institutions. We have only begun to assess the results of the technological focus, and many are wondering how to encourage important skills that are lacking.

By refocusing on creativity, perhaps we can return to solutions for the problems identified by UNESCO and IBM. One solution is to expand the study of creativity to all fields throughout our educational system, beginning with our youngest students. Our greatest innovators agree about the broad importance of creativity. In a 1996 Wired interview, the late Steve Jobs explained:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. ...A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.⁶

As Mr. Jobs confirms, creativity is an important concept best expressed through its results. Creativity is defined as the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.⁷

This is only one broad definition among many, but we can strive to encourage creativity’s results. Creativity is the buzzword on university campuses nationwide with a new focus on creativity studies in numerous fields such as the arts, business, neuroscience, innovation and entrepreneurship. Many hope these programs will begin to address the deficiencies in our educational institutions.

While this is a good beginning, we are not considering the larger societal picture. Without understanding all of the components that have caused our creativity crises, it will be difficult to address creativity’s future implementation. In the Age of Entertainment, we stress profits and audience numbers over ideas and depth. We are recycling old formulas with new technological formats and calling it creativity. Innovation has been minimized through Hollywood formulas of sequels, copycat television and movies. Academic institutions direct visual artists to commercial pursuits of automobile and graphic design. Composers study pop music for their dissertations and dancers’ goals are to join Cirque du Soleil. Broadway shows are often rehashed Disney movies to sell products to children. Orchestra income is derived from television commercials, pops concerts, and backup to pop artists who earn millions. Public Television and Public Radio are worn out with rehashed British dramas, shows on financial management, talk shows, and concerts by aging rock stars.

This is not solely an American problem, but one that is global, as noted in the IBM and UNESCO studies. As an early example of the blurring between art and entertainment, the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland invented the idea of a Festival Fringe in 1947 where their partnering Fringe offerings would be more accessible and open to the widest audience and types of participants, without the moniker of high art. The Fringe Festival today is a huge success, and copied around the world. However, the high art offerings are often marginalized to redirect larger audiences to entertainment focused offerings including the circus or uncurated amateur participants, separated from the alternative professional high art Festival. Tiffany Jenkins, in The Scotsman, explores her perception of the problem after attending the festival.

Today, even when you praise Shakespeare, you quickly have to qualify it. You have to praise the low-brow more. One common follow-up is the claim that The Simpsons sitcom is also funny and insightful, especially good at parody and irony. But the two are not the same. One involves complex reflections on the human condition. The other, at best, laughs at it, but no more. Another popular point made all too often is that videogames are the new great art. But thus far, even the most complicated, like Minecraft or Dear Esther — the experimental and interactive story of a shipwreck in the Hebrides — are well designed, well-written and engrossing, but they fail to explore profound questions about human life....

The difference between high and low is not an easy one to call. But essentially, it comes down to the distinction between reflective art and the more immediate work. Simply put: popular culture appeals to our instant emotions and tastes. It’s great, in its place. We like it because it is relevant to our lives, whether that means finding in it solace about love, or a recognition of the pleasures of partying. Entertainment satisfies our need to turn off, to relax and to escape. But it doesn’t stretch us or tell us anything new.

High culture, on the other hand, tends to move us away from the everyday and the mundane. It stretches and pushes an art form. And it often requires a bit of work on our part in reflecting on serious questions about the human condition.⁸

Ms. Jenkins observes the challenges of understanding the differences between art and entertainment. However, arts institutions themselves are blurring the lines. In the museum world, experience-based art is now the trend. Judith H. Dobrzynski wrote in the New York Times about experience-based art at the Cleveland Museum of Art where the curator described that a recent work

would ‘activate’ the museum’s east wing. In ages past, art museums didn’t need activating. They were treasure houses, filled with masterpieces meant to outlast the moment of their making, to speak to the universal. Visiting one might be social — you went with friends — but fairly passive. People went to see beauty, find inspiration, experience uplift, sometimes in a spiritual sort of way. Museums housed their heritage, their raison d’être....

In the world of commerce, this trend has been going on for decades. By 1998, two consultants, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, had coined the term the experience economy and were urging businesses to offer customers a memorable time, rather than a product or service. On that theory rest businesses like Chuck E. Cheese’s Build-A-Bear Workshops, Niketown, hotels as tourist destinations and virtually all of Las Vegas.⁹

The marketing of experiences has been a major factor in the public’s movement away from artistic experiences that by their nature are more thoughtful, take more work on the part of the participant, and are often challenging to understand. In the Age of Entertainment, the public, with little arts education, is very confused about the difference between art and entertainment, and probably no longer cares about the distinctions. But as we look for 21st century solutions and skills, this apathy has resulted in a declining ability to identify the quality of creative ideas. The media as well as academia puts everything into the same bag under the banner of Art, where all opinions of merit are subjective and part of personal taste. Look at most newspapers with their Art and Culture sections which include video game reviews, recipes and celebrity interviews. Or, a newspaper such as the Los Angeles Times places Arts and Culture within the Entertainment section of its website. This loose usage of the word art confuses the public about the differences between engaging in art and entertainment.

Entertainment and the arts are now linked under the same umbrella, but the experience of each is quite different. Even the New York Times correctly or incorrectly includes television, video games and pop music as arts. Eric Booth, one of the country’s leaders in arts education, sums up his view of art versus entertainment by writing in a blog response that

...entertainment and art live on a continuum. If successful, there is engagement across the continuum. But the quality of engagement differs. I think the variable is learning. At one extreme there is delightful confirmation of what one believes (entertainment), and the other extreme is transformative expansion of how you understand the world (a big arts experience).¹⁰

Southwest Chamber Music is familiar with this confusion. Many of our supporters have had so little arts education that they often misunderstand the composition of our ensemble or the type of music performed. Chamber music is defined as "one player per part, usually a