I have been re-engaging with the work and person of Glenn Gould recently - a recurrent activity in my life ever since I discovered him in autumn 1978.
Something that crops us is that Gould, in some sense, "wanted to be a composer"... but never quite got around to it (producing a small handful of apprentice or light pieces merely); despite circling around this idea for some thirty-off years, and despite being par excellence somebody who did what he wanted the way he wanted.
This could be regarded as an example of "composer envy" that afflicts many of the more thoughtful performing musicians - including the greatest conductors; who perhaps get nearest to composition without actually doing it.
There is, it is often assumed, a scale of creative activity, in music that has the great composer at the top (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven etc); great conductor next (e.g. Toscanini, Stokowski, von Karajan); and then the great performers of the various instruments - with piano pre-eminent.
But this is the top end of another common assumption among those who appreciate the arts; that to be nay kind of creative artists is intrinsically "more creative" than... anything else. So that a musician is a creative activity - as is novelist, poet, painter or another of the arts.
So there is an "artist envy" among those who are not artists - on the basis that artists are more creative than non-artists.
However, none of this is really true at the individual level. By my judgment; Gould was actually far more creative a person than any of the classical composers of his era. Great Classical music was not being composed in the second half of the twentieth century.
I mean that the actual, recognized and prestigious, classical music composers from the 1950s onward, do not succeed in their creating to anything like the extent of Gould himself.
Creatively-speaking; Gould really had nothing to envy among his contemporaries among composers.
A similar situation exists with respect to poetry. I think there still exists a kind of poet envy among writers - I mean the idea that "everybody really wants to be a poet"... (Or, if not a poet, then a novelist or playwright.)
And yet, the actuality is that there has not been (IMO) a great poet in our Anglophone Western culture in the past half century (and very little real poetry of any kind or quality) - so what is there to envy? ...
Nothing; except an unearned reputation for creativity in poets, residually found among the poetically ignorant or insensible?
To circle back to Gould; what his example teaches is that our greatest creativity is found by pursuing our personal gifts and motivations - and not by trying to fulfil society-wide notions of creative activity.
Gould succeeded in leading an exceptionally creative life - mainly as a performer, but also there was a mosaic of other and complementary creativity in his radio documentaries, and his rhapsodic essayistic writings - and even in his interviews.
That is one thing.
Secondarily; Gould was able to that communicates his ecstatic states, insights and perspectives to a very high degree. That is why he the fascinating figure that he is; among those in sympathy with his nature and ideals.
This ability to communicate was rooted in Gould's exceptional abilities as a pianist, which were both technical pianistic, and also a very high aptitude as "a musician" (I mean the capacity to understand music).
The lesson from this secondary aspect of creativity is that high aptitude is not generalizable (almost by definition)
More significantly, the capacity to communicate primary creativity - to share one's own creativity with others - is something that cannot be depended-on: or, more accurately, something that we ought not to build our creative endeavours around.
In other words: is not a matter of particular activities, jobs or roles; but instead something that is an aspect of our real selves.
Everybody ought to be creative, ought to live-creatively - and creativity is a reality.
Creativity is, ultimately, to live from-oneself in harmony with divine creation.
It is a matter of contributing the consequences of our uniqueness of nature to divine creation.
What that actually means - for you and me, in actual practice - should be calibrated inwardly. Because creativity is not a social role; half-baked - yet pervasive - notions of artist-envy must be seen-through and set-aside.
To be-creative is not (not for many people, only for a few people) to be one or other kind of socially-recognized artist or other creative type. And even within creative types (musician, writer, visual artist) there is no objective hierarchy.
However, the whole business of living creatively is often, I would say usually, muddied and corrupted by conflating it with the business of being appreciated and recognized by other people.
In the Western civilization now and for several generations; to be an appreciated and recognized "artist" of some kind is close to a guarantee of low-level or utterly-absent creativity of living; when creativity is correctly understood.
Real-inner creativity and acknowledged-outer creativity are almost wholly dissociated.
This fact needs to be recognized if we are each to live as well as we might.
