Jacob Collier talking to Eric Whitacre about creativity. (Everything that follows is a quote…)

How do children learn how to be funny? Well, a child doesn’t learn how to be funny by reading a book, or watching a tutorial, or even necessarily planning very much of it. I think that children learn to be funny by observation and experiment. And so you look around as a child and you think, “that makes me laugh – I don’t understand why but I’m gonna follow that because I like that feeling, I’m gonna follow it”.

I think that humour is one of the things that has lasted longest in the world without trying to be understood. It’s gone so far without people trying to understand it. Because you feel it and it’s difficult to understand humour because it’s so multilayered and it’s so ingrained in our past. And so I think that, when it comes to delivering a joke, for example, how you deliver the punchline, the amount of time you take before you deliver it, what you do with your body, where you’re looking, whether you’re looking the person in the eye, or whether you’re being sarcastic when you say it, or whether you’re being strong…all these nuances. It pains the brain to think about the amount of nuance in how to express something, but it’s so intuitive in children when they watch and learn.

And so I find myself in a place with music sometimes where I think, well, it’s a bit like that process of learning how to be funny or learning how to be effective, you have to know the extremes before you learn the nuance. You can’t skip to the nuance before…you know…so, it’s like, okay, you’ve got one note [plays middle C], and then you’ve got all the notes [plays all the notes]…okay, well that’s fine, so now what? Now what is there? Well there’s a triad [plays triad], and there’s a bunch of triads [plays bunch of triads] and we can explore them and they’re interesting…and once you’ve got a triad you have a dominant chord, so you add a seventh [plays seventh] and that resolves [plays resolution]. And what other notes can you add? Let’s add every single note [plays cluster chord] and then try and resolve them all just so we know what happens. So the first time you try and do it you’re kind of guessing in the dark and the second time you do it you’ve learnt from the last time you did it so you’re guessing not in the dark but you’ve got maybe black and white figured out and soon you figure out grey because grey is the choices that you make between black and white. And then there’s this whole other spectrum of colour which I think comes really from…[sighs]…

Emotions are so interesting when they’re compound emotions and choices are so interesting when they’re compound choices so it’s not necessarily “I’m going to add notes” or “I’m going to remove notes” it’s almost like “I’m going to intend to add notes” and then I’m gonna not add them or I’m going to add lots of notes and then take out the ones that remind… that are actually the ones that are important so that all that’s left is this skeleton of a chord. But your ear…

the expectation matters and the intention matters a lot I think to the process of learning and composing and so I think that I find myself defying and re-fying all of those kind of experiences and thinking “how can I outgrow this choice?”.