Creative Systems: 19th Century To 21st

What was great about pre-20th century creativity was that the pace of technology was slow or even nonexistent. Things simply stayed the same all the time and was a stable environment for creating things—we didn’t feel like we had to be on the bandwagon about everything—have the Medium and the Substack, the Twitter following, and so on. All you need are the basic materials and perhaps a standardization of thinking. I know that has overtones of totalitarianism but what you want to do is to slow down enough to where you can work on one thing for several hours. In my experience, just warming up the creative process can take 3 hours, before anything gets racked up as being creative. In Beethoven’s time, people made things without technological change. Everything was local, and you had a stable atmosphere for creative work. I think we can still go back to something like that: where you have strictly local “sceniuses”. That’s probably hard to do now because things are all online and local communities were broken up during COVID lockdowns.

10/10/2021

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10/2026:

Back in the 19th century, people had large blocks of time where they could create symphonies, perhaps within a couple of months, working every day. But people aren't doing that anymore. Things are done as piecework. They can become a package of something later, but you’d have to systematize it. Making an album is a systematized process. It isn’t just a song here and there. At some point, you’d have to group them. Mozart's publisher eventually did that with the Kochel system.