Stepping Stone As Roadblock

Recently, I posed the following question on a bulletin board frequented by composers:

Can having a solid knowledge of theory be a hindrance to creativity?

Little did I know how passionately some would feel about the subject. Many people even took the question as a personal attack against academia in general and music theory in particular. I found it necessary to emphasize my academic background and love of music theory, lest I be labeled a beginner looking for a shortcut to compositional merit or justification for a lack of background. Here are a few of the less supportive responses I received:

Almost every person I have heard say they don’t want to learn harmony etc. because it will hinder their creativity writes, in my opinion, very, very conservative music. The more you know, the freer you are.

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If knowing theory is a hindrance someone's creativity, then he/she doesn't know really know theory very well.

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Only amateurs or people with a very low creativity, can feel knowledge as an hinderance. It's not the denial of the set of tools created in centuries of human cooperation (theory) that make you a "better" musician.

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And my favorite:

You don't write a lot of music, do you?

To be fair, there were many supportive responses as well, but I felt that the negative ones were so reactionary that the authors couldn't possibly have understood my question.

What I was attempting to get at was the conflicting roles of intuition and self-censorship in writing. The little voice on our shoulder telling us "open your mind, be free, just write some notes!" and the other one telling us "Too simple; too complex; too Mozart; not commercial enough; not innovative enough.... etc."

When I speak of knowledge being a possible hinderance, I am questioning what it takes to have a breakthrough. If we listen too closely to what we know, might we be spending too little time looking for the unknown? Is it possible to turn off, or at least somewhat quiet the analytical portion of our brain when we write, perhaps to let our knowledge guide us only at a subconscious level? This is something I strive for in my writing. Not to deny or discard any acquired theory, but to knock the accompanying little voice off of my shoulder. Perhaps to write things that are just outside of my own ability to analyze.

The development of music and theory took only one of an infinite number of possible courses during our history. The course it took left us with hundreds of traditions throughout the world, though most of us study only one or two of these traditions. But even if we could attain a solid knowledge of all of these traditions, we wouldn't have the merest fraction of all possible theoretical knowledge because there are an infinite number of valid possible musical theories. This should be the context for my question. It is not about denying theory, but whether or not believing too strongly that our theoretical knowledge is "enough" may stop us looking for new theory, existing or otherwise.

Knowing which tool to use is just as important as having the tool in the first place. But it's important to remember that the best tool for the job might be one we haven't invented yet.