CGC 089 : Laura Snowden on Creativity

In this lesson

What makes a performance feel alive? For guitarist and composer Laura Snowden, the answer involves more than playing the right notes or choosing an attractive tone. It begins with imagination: asking what a musical moment means, finding a reason for each gesture, and discovering that meaning afresh when you play.

In this conversation with Simon Powis, Laura explores creativity and emotion in classical guitar performance through acting, composition, dance, improvisation and her studies with Julian Bream. She also speaks candidly about the concentration this work requires—and why even an accomplished performer cannot expect to feel completely free and inspired all the time.

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CGC Podcast 089 · approximately 36 minutes · published in October 2019. The article below draws on the interview, with short quotations and practical reflections. Tour dates, course announcements and events mentioned in the recording refer to that period.

Explore the conversation

Read the themes below, or use these approximate timestamps to jump into the recording.

• 7:06 — Imagination, acting and musical intention
• 9:50 — Connecting musical analysis with emotion
• 13:24 — Letting an interpretation evolve
• 14:55 — What reaches the listener?
• 17:34 — Dance, movement and musical gestures
• 18:52 — Improvising with actors and dancers
• 24:03 — Curiosity and children’s creativity
• 26:42 — The effort of staying present
• 27:40 — Short practice sessions and reflection
• 28:53 — Playing creatively with a piece’s material
• 30:48 — Julian Bream: character, colour and silence

Imagination is something you can practise

“I think in a way the imagination is something that can definitely be trained.”

— Laura Snowden, 7:06

Laura’s opening thought offers an encouraging starting point: imagination is something to cultivate through practice. Her example comes from An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski, a book that influenced how she thinks about intention and the experience of an emotion in the moment.

She recalls a scene in which a student actor must stop someone from entering a house. The teacher questions the exaggerated display that comes before the action. If the situation were real, would the person pause to demonstrate alarm, or simply act? Laura connects this with finding a reason for what happens in music, then trying to experience that reason truthfully each time.

For a guitarist, this raises a useful question about expressive choices. A crescendo, a hesitation or a change of colour can have a purpose within a phrase. What is growing, what is holding back, or what has changed? The musical intention gives the gesture a reason to exist.

Laura also describes the connection with composing. She might begin with an imagined colour, light, stars or a sense of hope, then look for a musical idea that conveys it. Interpreting an existing score takes her through a related process in the opposite direction: she encounters the music and searches for the feeling or image within it.

Connect harmony and rhythm with something you feel

Laura pays attention to the materials of musical expression: tension and resolution, the shape of an interval, the character of a rhythm, and the direction of a harmony. In the conversation, she suggests that a falling minor third can have a melancholy quality, while a rising major sixth can feel aspirational. These are examples of how she hears musical gestures, rather than a fixed emotional dictionary for every piece.

The next step matters just as much as identifying those details. She tries to connect them with something that means something to her. Knowing the name of a chord or recognizing an interval can support interpretation; the question is how that understanding becomes an experience in sound.

Her account of learning the guitar is reassuringly candid. When she was younger, the physical challenge of playing could make music feel less emotionally direct than writing a story or drawing a picture. Finding an expressive connection was a process she had to develop.

A listening experiment: take a short phrase and notice where the harmony seems unsettled and where it arrives. Sing it, then play it. Explore how the arrival feels with different amounts of space or emphasis. This is one way to bring the conversation’s ideas into your own practice, rather than an exercise Laura prescribes in the interview.

Keep asking questions about familiar music

“And I think the ideas kind of clarify and change over time.”

— Laura Snowden, 13:24

Another example from Stanislavski concerns a student playing a tree. What kind of tree is it? Is it alone? Are there other trees nearby? Is anyone watching it? The apparently simple task becomes more specific as the questions accumulate.

Laura uses this as a way of thinking about musical exploration. A piece may have a particular meaning at one stage of her life and a different meaning years later. Sometimes the questions—or their answers—change the next day. An interpretation can remain open even after the notes are familiar.

This helps explain why returning to an old piece can be valuable. You may already know how to get through it, yet still have things to discover about its character, direction and contrasts. Curiosity gives repetition a purpose.

Laura also describes having once suppressed visual associations because she worried they might be considered unmusical or simplistic. She now allows those connections more room. An image does not have to provide an explanation of the entire work to be useful; it might illuminate one phrase or a single change of harmony.

The audience does not need to see your exact picture

“I think I intend for my intention to have some kind of resonance with the audience, but not necessarily that they will imagine the specific things that I imagine.”

— Laura Snowden, 14:55

Simon raises an important difficulty: musical images and emotions can be deeply personal. If a performer imagines a particular scene, how could an audience possibly know what it is?

Laura’s answer leaves room for the listener’s own experience. Her aim is for the intention and immediacy of the performance to resonate. The audience does not have to reconstruct the private image behind it.

The practical implication is liberating. You can use an image to focus your playing without needing to prove that it is the one correct meaning of the piece. What matters in performance is what that image helps you communicate through the music.

Let movement reveal the shape of a phrase

Asked about a waltz by Barrios, Laura describes imagining aspects of a dance: a couple, a turn, a slight lifting motion, and changes in the dance’s character. These associations can belong to small moments rather than a single story imposed on the whole piece.

She also explains that she sometimes physically makes up dances to pieces in private. Movement offers another way of exploring what a musical gesture does, alongside playing, singing or describing it.

A useful extension for practice is to step away from the guitar and trace a phrase with a hand or gently mark its pulse. Notice where the gesture gathers energy, changes direction or settles. Then return to the instrument and listen for whether your playing communicates that shape. The movement is a prompt for listening, not a choreography you must perform on stage.

Improvisation makes direction and character immediate

Laura describes working with actors and dancers, improvising in response to what they were doing. Their movement left little time to censor herself or deliberate over individual notes. Her attention went to direction, character and rhythm.

Even a single note could participate in the action if it had the right energy and direction. She recalls dancers spinning while she played faster, each responding to the other as the moment developed. The experience brought a particularly immediate quality to the music.

This matters even for guitarists who mainly play written repertoire. Laura says she tries to develop an improvising mindset in her practice: asking questions and feeling the sensations afresh. The score can remain familiar while your attention to what is happening stays active.

Play with the material before returning to the score

Later in the interview, Laura describes another approach she encountered in a guitarist’s talk: exploring a piece’s material without always playing the piece exactly as written. You might retain the harmony but let the melody move upwards where it originally moved downwards, or try a different third chord after the first two.

These are experiments within practice. They give you something to compare with the composer’s choices and can renew your awareness of the original. After an experiment, return to the score: what now feels distinctive about the actual melody or harmony?

Make room for the curiosity of a beginner

Laura finds inspiration in the children she teaches. A child who has barely played the guitar may try something she would never have thought of herself. She also describes the imaginative responses children give when asked what a piece makes them think of.

The conversation suggests a useful balance for adult learners: alongside the care needed to develop reliable technique, allow some time for exploration before judging the result. A musical idea does not need to be polished before you try it.

This connects with Laura’s interest in composing with young students. Creating even a small amount of music gives them opportunities to make decisions about sound. For an adult guitarist, inventing a short response to a phrase or experimenting with two contrasting sounds can provide a similarly manageable starting point.

Being present takes effort—and it is not a permanent state

“None of this is to say that when I’m on stage, I’m totally in the moment and totally free. It’s more that that’s my aim.”

— Laura Snowden, 26:50

Laura is frank about sometimes wanting to play automatically rather than investigate further. The expressive freedom she describes is an aim she works towards. She does not present it as a state she inhabits throughout every concert.

That distinction is helpful when applying her ideas. Another demand to feel inspired at every moment could easily become a source of pressure. A more useful aim is to give a particular phrase your full attention, notice when that attention fades, and return to it.

Preparation still matters. Laura observes that having thought deeply about a piece makes certain choices likely to emerge in performance, even while she seeks a feeling of freedom. Detailed work and spontaneity can support one another.

Use breaks to reflect and begin again

To support that concentration, Laura describes practising for around 20 minutes at a time, or a maximum of 30. She recalls an Alexander Technique teacher suggesting a 20-minute session followed by a 10-minute break that includes lying down, acknowledging something positive, attending to the body and setting aims for the next session.

The positive observation can be modest—even getting the guitar out and attempting the piece. This is Laura’s account of a practice approach she uses, rather than a required timetable for every player. Its broader value is the deliberate pause: recognize what happened, recover your attention and decide what comes next.

Julian Bream: let the musical idea lead the sound

Laura’s recollections of studying with Julian Bream bring the conversation’s themes together. She describes sessions in which he showed, in considerable detail, how he would work on a passage: what the music was doing, what a particular chord felt like, and how playing it differently could communicate that quality.

“It was more always based on the kind of feeling of what was going on at that moment, and then almost like trying to enhance it with how you play the guitar and perhaps the colour and touch of it.”

— Laura Snowden, 31:28

In her account, the sequence began with the musical character and led to a choice of sound. A bright or mellow colour had a purpose within the passage. When Simon asks whether the concept came first and realizing it on the guitar came second, Laura agrees.

She recalls Bream drawing on the sound of an E-flat clarinet for a moment in Britten’s Nocturnal, and describing a line near its beginning as weary and falling. These examples show how specific an expressive idea could become. She also remembers his beautiful, extended explanations of silence and its importance.

The invitation for your own playing is to connect tone production with a musical reason. Before deciding where to place the right hand or how to change the touch, ask what you want the moment to convey. Include the space between sounds in that question.

Take these ideas into your next practice session

The following sequence is a suggested application of the conversation, rather than a routine quoted from Laura.

1. Choose a phrase you already know. Give yourself enough familiarity with the notes to listen closely to what they are doing.
2. Find one expressive detail. Notice a harmonic tension, a leap, a rhythmic change or a silence. Ask why it matters in this phrase.
3. Explore an intention. Try an image, a movement or a description of the character. Let it influence your sound, then listen to the result.
4. Test an alternative. Ask a different question, imagine another character, or briefly play with the musical material. Return to the written phrase and compare.
5. Pause and reflect. Name one thing that became clearer. Give the next attempt a specific purpose.

Laura’s conversation offers a way to keep familiar music open to discovery. Musical understanding grows through close attention, imagination and a willingness to try things—and those are qualities you can bring to a short phrase as readily as to a major concert work.

Continue exploring

• Explore lessons on phrasing, rhythm and musical expression
• Find a repertoire lesson to bring these ideas into your playing
• Discover more musical inspiration
• Listen to more Classical Guitar Corner conversations

For a structured path through your playing, explore the free Fundamentals of Classical Guitar course.