End-gaining in the Arts

Listening to Ray Charles sing is a great joy. Listening to Ray Charles imitating Ray Charles, or trying to meet his perceived expectations of what the public thinks Ray Charles should sound like, is a great disappointment. He does the latter when he sings "Over the Rainbow," for instance. When doing so, he end-gains.

End-gaining is a universal and pervasive habit present in all the arts - indeed, in all areas of human endeavor. Let's take an example from the movies. "Sister Act" features Whoopi Goldberg as a singer who, while evading a sticky situation in her personal life, finds refuge in a convent, where she coaches the resident choir and transforms a bunch of tone-deaf geeky nuns into a competition-winnin', soul-liftin', hip-swingin' chick ensemble. The movie is inspiring, funny, tightly constructed, well cast, and well directed. "Sister Act Two," the sequel, features Whoopi Goldberg as a singer who… well, I don't need to describe its plot. The sequel is mindless, pointless, implausible, and peopled by imitations and caricatures of the original's cast. It tries to reproduce the effects of the original by manipulating the creative process, which becomes not an organic act of the imagination but a mechanical pushing-of-buttons and pressing-of-levers. It's end-gaining from beginning to end, and utterly annoying - worse than annoying, it's actually dispiriting.

In this essay I plan to discuss the creative process in all the arts and the infinite levels of possible end-gaining present at every juncture of the process, using examples from the visual arts, cinema, music, literature, and architecture. I believe that, on one hand, Alexander teachers and students can gain a deep appreciation of the arts by sensing how great artists manage to avoid the pitfalls of end-gaining; and, on the other hand, such an ever-greater understanding of the phenomenon of end-gaining may well lead teachers and students to work with the Alexander Technique in a more thorough, effective, and creative manner.