Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by Lera Auerbach
It is undeniable that creativity is one of the most important aspects of any
profession. For an artist being creative is a matter of life or death. If you
are not creative, you can't be an artist. Music emerges from silence,
poetry from a white page, painting from a blank canvas. The artist brings
to life ideas, sounds, images, giving form to that which was formless
before. Yet that silence, that blank page or canvas - it is not empty, it is
full of infinite possibilities.
I remember the first time I performed a piano concerto with an orchestra. I
was 8 years old and very excited. Standing backstage, I was waiting for
the orchestra to finish tuning. The chaotic, wild roar of the symphony
orchestra tuning felt miraculous to me; it was my blank canvas as it
contained limitless possibilities of music-making.
But the world of infinite possibilities can be also frightening, confusing and
intimidating. The blank page can glare at you and leave you incapacitated,
immobile, shrinking with each passing minute. How can one deal then
with limitless freedom when everything appears possible, yet full of
invisible walls that stifle your imagination?
The craft of an artist (and here I mean any artistic expression, be it a
musical composition, literature or visual arts), requires building forms,
structures within which a work of art can operate, the frames of space and
time which it can inhabit. It involves creating certain restrictions within
which the work can be free to emerge, and against which it can rebel, in
other words, creating frames which can be altered, but nevertheless allow
for creative thought to flourish and realize itself.
So, how does one sustain creativity in art when the Muses themselves
are known for their disloyalty and fickleness? In my case this involved
acting against the advice of my teachers, and following my calling against
all odds.
I began playing piano and writing music when I was 4 years old. Soon my
teachers presented me with a Solomonic dilemma: "Do you want to be a
composer or a concert pianist?" I was told that in our age of specialization
one cannot be both a virtuoso performer and a serious composer so I had
better choose soon and focus." When I was 12, I wrote my first opera,
which was staged and toured in Russia. When I mentioned this opera to
my piano professor, who was a wonderful teacher by the way, he said
rather sternly: "I don't want to hear anything about it. I don't care what you
do in your spare time as long as long as it doesn't take away from piano
practice."
Perhaps as a reaction to this, I started writing poetry and prose. Soon
enough, my publishers informed me that I can't be publishing both poetry
and fiction, that doing so would only confuse the readers and I would not
be taken seriously. At the Juilliard School in New York, the pressures to
choose only grew. Even today, after countless performances worldwide