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You gotta move: duration, systems theory and musical creativity

Citation: UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

In this presentation I offer a critique of the kind of intellectual frameworks typically used to explain creativity in music (for example the kind of research questions typically asked of a student commencing a music project at postgraduate level). These questions are typically analytical, say around the conventions of a genre and how they can be used to produce new work, but they fail in my view to acknowledge creativity as a process, analytical questions being more suitable to assess a finished work, not one that hasn’t even started yet, or is in process. The conventional academic wisdom is that the “new” is a revoicing or recombining of the familiar, but in this formulation, the “new” remains essentially untheorised. I use concepts around creativity as novelty from Henri Bergson, such as duration and movement, to offer a critique of systems theories of creativity (Toynbee, McIntyre and Csikszentmihalyi) that seek to reduce the creative process to a series of “choices” between different pre-existing creative possibilities. In its place I propose a focus on novelty, duration and movement as aspects of creative process.

Item Type: Paper presented at a conference, workshop, or other event which was not published in the proceedings
Uncontrolled Keywords: Bergson, duration, creativity, popular music
Subjects: M Music and Books on Music > ML Literature of music
Depositing User: Matthew Bannister
Date Deposited: 01 Oct 2015 03:41
Last Modified: 21 Jul 2023 03:41
URI: http://researcharchive.wintec.ac.nz/id/eprint/3894

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