{"id":1057,"date":"2011-10-27T10:24:59","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T14:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2011-10-27T10:24:59","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T14:24:59","slug":"teenage-creativity-unheard-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=1057","title":{"rendered":"Teenage creativity… unheard of!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The full article was in our paper this morning, but here’s a snippet<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The 17-year-old senior is the drum major of the school\u2019s Lightning Regiment Marching Band. For a Governor\u2019s School project, he took the complicated music based on Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy and rearranged it for a marching band.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

He took a 30-minute piece of music, composed for a symphonic band, and came up with an 8-minute score for the band\u2019s competitive field show.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is completely unheard of in a regular school setting,\u201d said Ryan Addair, band director at Chancellor. He added that bands typically pay $1,000 to $3,000 for original music.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I certainly don’t mind an article that showcases anyone’s art. But this sort of article bothers me because it makes teenage musical creativity seem too<\/em> special, when it’s not. At all. One need only to search around on YouTube for a few minutes to find plenty of young composers sharing their original work. I think such creativity is unfortunately not as common as it could be, but I think that’s because adults, both parents and teachers, are terrible at encouraging and supporting such creativity in young people. The kind of creativity that is supported is usually restricted to the confines of a specific assignment. Such as: “This month, class, you must work in groups of 4 to create 10-minute documentary videos! Yay, I’m encouraging creativity!” (As wonderful as Nerds in the Midst<\/em> is, it’s not exactly exemplary of my creative ambition.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps most people don’t really understand the nature of creativity; perhaps it’s thought of as some sort of mysterious elusive trait that you either have or you don’t, you’re either born with or you’re not. That’s why creativity is often only encouraged in students who have already shown their creativity. Now, there is some justification for that, since the students that show their creativity on their own time are obviously more interested, but I can’t help but wonder how many more would<\/em> be just as creative if (as corny as it sounds) adults actually believed in them, and encouraged and fostered their creative potential instead of filling their evenings with paper and pencil homework. Perhaps many adults don’t even really believe in themselves?<\/p>\n

The truth is: everyone<\/em> is creative. Everyone creates new daydreams and plans and sentences on a daily basis. Some forms of art, like music arranging or painting or piano playing, involve skills that require more concentrated practice, and that can be difficult and time-consuming (especially when you have to write some useless essay), so most people avoid it. But if you put in the practice hours (real<\/em> practice, not just going-through-the-motions practice), you can do just about anything you desire.<\/p>\n

So, as nice as it is that a teenager can be recognized for a musical arrangement, it’s a truly sad reflection on the utter stupidity of our local parents and teachers (or maybe just newspaper article writers) if such projects are truly considered “unheard of.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The full article was in our paper this morning, but here’s a snippet: The 17-year-old senior is the drum major of the school\u2019s Lightning Regiment Marching Band. For a Governor\u2019s School project, he took the complicated music based on Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy and rearranged it for a marching band. … […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[101],"tags":[126,78],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-h3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}