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Creativity in Art Music Composition

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Creativity in Art Music Composition Richard Willgoss Creativity in Art Music Composition Sydney Conservatorium of Music The University of Sydney A thesis submitted to fulfill requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 2018 1 Acknowledgments I wish to thank my supervisors who have helped me formulate my ideas into the finished form of this thesis: to Professor Anne Boyd for question formulation, to Dr. James Wierzbecki in shaping and communicating esoteric thoughts through good English and to Associate Professor Goetz Richter for his philosophical rigor in helping me find an understanding of creativity in music amongst competing intellectual influences. Many thanks to the University of Sydney for providing an academic environment within which I could research my topic of interest. I also promise my wife Sue that the decorating will be done … soon. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. Richard Willgoss 2 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 4 1. Introduction 5 1.1. A Starting Point 5 1.2. Musical Compositional Creativity 11 2. Conceptualizing Creativity 18 2.1. A Scientific and Computational Model 26 2.2. Creativity as Process and System 34 2.3. Psychology and the Normative in Music 39 3. Conjunctive Concepts 46 3.1. Creativity, Genius and Inspiration, as Behavior 48 3.2. Creativity, Expertise and Intuition, as Understanding 56 3.3. Creativity, Beauty and Imagination, as Aesthetics 63 3.4. A Philosophical Approach 75 3.5. An Integration via Disruption 81 4. Creativity through Phenomenology 83 4.1. Aesthetic Judgment and Experience 85 4.2. A Phenomenalist Viewpoint 90 4.3. Dealing with The Ineffable 95 4.4. Lived Time 99 4.5. Merleau-Ponty and the Creative ‘Body Subject’ 102 5. Method 112 5.1. Choosing a Context 112 5.2. Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis as a Method 116 6. Evidence Via Interview 121 6.1. The Interview as a Communicative Medium about Composers 122 6.2. Interview Aims 128 6.3. Interview Technique 130 7. Essentials 133 7.1. Composers’ Responses to Questions 137 7.2. An Intuited Thought Pattern 142 7.3. Presuppositional Understanding 144 7.4. Expectational Outcomes 150 7.5. Corralling Properties 155 8. Conclusion 158 Appendix: Interview Data 164 References 210 3 ABSTRACT This thesis investigates what it means to call art music composition creative. Research into the concept of creativity has taken place mostly in science-based disciplines and is reviewed for its relevance. Discussions on what may constitute the foundations of creativity in music are conducted. Musical creativity is not bounded by normativity, consistency, truth-boundedness, optimization or effability for its recognition and is largely aesthetic. Current research methods are seen to be mainly explanatory, objective and analytic, and necessarily fall short in understanding musical creativity. It thereby undermines the validity of these methods when used to justify one’s understanding. The undermining invariably takes place by disrupting logical and reasonable expectations. The significance of this research is that it attempts to find and describe essences of the subject matter, creative musical composition, the effect of which actually disrupts grounds for finding essences in the first place. It no longer seeks to explain creativity in musical composition. Accordingly, this thesis argues that creativity in art music composition may be better understood through philosophical phenomenology, more than through analysis. Evidence seen as experience and description naturally includes aesthetic considerations. What composers say is regarded as being potentially helpful to understand their musical creativity. They are approached using an interview technique where problem solving, truth-boundedness, optimization and reasonable causality are set aside as essential precepts. Responses are interpreted intuitively to reveal essences present. Trains of thought that reveal essential properties in interview content are intuited. They show that communication is a prominent essence to motivation for being creative. Perceptual attitudes and experiences are often provoked by disruption to sonic expectation. Creativity in art music composition then becomes a generic initial step in the way it communicates and inspires through playing with musical expectation. 4 1 Introduction 1.1 A Starting Point As each new art music composition is created and launched by the composer before interested peers and public, it undergoes a journey. That journey includes performance, reception, judgment, explanation and description, implying an anticipation of it finding some place of acceptance in the musical world. In both conception of the work by the composer and reception by players and listeners, the concept of creativity is used. Creativity is often cited as present throughout the art world in many contexts and normally in a positive regard. A description with such a word must sit in support of understanding a music that can speak for itself. But describing music through words remains important as it aids appreciation and understanding in social and cultural contexts. A fascinating interchange or sharing takes place, including affect and effect. What the composer creates and how its performance unfolds causes reflection and comment from all those who interact with the music. That sharing can be seen as a form of communication too, one that continues in re-performance and through an on-going critique. The critique can be quite independent of a sense of definitiveness in terms of problem-solving or truth-telling. This scenario already suggests that to be definitive about one’s understanding of creativity in the musical context could invoke unnecessary circumscription to the content and meaning of what is shared. The aim of this thesis is to understand what we mean when we describe the composition of art music as creative. The aim provokes questions as to what sort of presuppositions and enquiry could give confidence in being successful when taking on the task. Presupposing creativity is potentially present in the musical domain and a shared property enables any knowledge about it to be communicated. A structured and rational method might be found efficacious to some degree. But of special interest in understanding musical creativity is the challenge that it provokes by showing itself through properties such as the unusual, unpredictable, unexpected, non-contextual and perhaps anti-conceptual.1 The subject matter does not have to invoke reason or logic2 in 1 Michael Inwood, “Adorno,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderick. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8. Inwood thinks that Adorno’s negative dialectic aims “to dissolve conceptual forms before they harden into lenses which distort our vision of, and impair our practical engagements with, reality. … When concepts fail us, art comes to our aid. … Art, especially music … represents a demand for freedom and a critique of society.” 5 its understanding. To pick out such properties is to perceive the disruptive aspects of what is put before us. The disruption is regarded as non-pejorative by being seen as interrupting the normative.3 Disruption is of particular significance in philosophical terms. Michel Foucault brings this aspect of evidence and perception to the fore in The Archeology of Knowledge, when saying: Beneath the great continuities of thought … beneath the persistence of a particular genre, form, discipline, or theoretical activity, one is now trying to detect the incidence of interruptions. …they suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge …4 David Lapoujade, in reviewing the work of Deleuze, calls that review Aberrant Movements.5 Deleuze is seen to break away from Kantian Idealism and eternal returning advocated by Nietzsche, a move that creates ‘lines of flight’ that disrupt the normativity assumed in intellectual modes of thought. Calling music creative welcomes and invokes disruptive properties, rather than treating them as aberrations or as a failure to support hypotheses. Disruption also gives rise to the perception of newness, often seen as unpredictability. The many and varied ways in which the word creativity is used tends to gloss over recognition of the importance of these properties. Perceiving and saying something or somebody is creative latently suggests the properties are present as phenomena. It is as if we valued creativity because of them, but with little thought as to why. Of course, the case is often made that treats these properties as defining aberrations. The goal in that case is emphatically one of finding only a consistent understanding of creativity. However, being musically creative requires attention to experiencing and describing such phenomena and the effects they have upon us, as best we may if we wish to wrestle with eventually explaining music with a consistent understanding. We also need to start from a viewpoint that, because the focus is on creativity in and from musical composers, the source is human. This then ushers in another challenge 2 Logic is being used as it refers to traditional logic but may extend to philosophical logic as well. 3 Sandra Rosenthal and Patrick Bourgeois, Mead and Merleau-Ponty: Toward a Common Vision (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 4. Rosenthal and Bourgeois automatically link continuity to creativity in an opposition dualism, in effect saying creativity is disruptive of normality. 4 Michel Foucault, The
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