Creative Thinking and the Compositional Process Flashcards
What is the brick test?
People are asked to come up with as many uses for bricks as they possibly can (novel, surprising & useful uses - e.g., using a brick as a tealight candle holder)
What is the brick test a measure of?
How creatively one thinks
What are 2 cognitive processes that work in (and are necessary for) divergent thinking?
Type 1 - sensory knowledge, unconscious knowledge, works by providing ‘flashes of insight’
Type 2 - conscious process of making music, involves methodological thinking
What model proposes that there are 2 cognitive processes that work in divergent thinking?
Dual-process model (Sowden et al., 2015)
Who looked at the Compositional Process in famous composers?
Sloboda (1985)
What did Sloboda argue about the compositional process?
There are 4 ways that we can go about finding out about the compositional process itself
What 4 methods can we use to find out about the compositional process, according to Sloboda (1985)?
Look at archival material such as the original composer’s sketchbooks etc. - more difficult today if people use software to compose
Look at personal accounts - interviews, letters, biographies etc. that people produced and talked about how they composed
Observing a composer at work (rare, not always possible to directly observe composers at work)
Improvisation (e.g., in jazz performances)
Who did Sloboda (1985) compare when looking at the compositional process?
Mozart and Beethoven
What did Sloboda (1985) argue regarding how Beethoven composed?
Composed methodologically
Worked in a systematic and conscious way
What did Sloboda (1985) argue regarding how Mozart composed?
Mozart was an inspirational composer who was unable to declare his methods
Mozart’s best ideas came to him in a ‘flash’ and in an unconscious way.
Mozart would suddenly feel inspired because something would just come to him in a ‘flash of inspiration’.
What has ink analysis suggested in terms of the way that Beethoven and Mozart composed?
Looked at the ink that Mozart used.
Able to restore previous versions of ink on manuscripts etc. (written over or rubbed out)
Recovered previous versions of Mozart’s work
Suggests that Mozart wasn’t a spontaneous composer that was assumed. He had previous versions of scripts that he went over the top of and rewrote previous bits of work. Conscious.
Can we be creative without being experts?
People who wrote more operas experienced decline in creativity, but were still better than those who wrote few operas. Found by Simonton (2000).
How important is expertise to creativity?
Simonton (2000) looked at 911 operas from 59 composers and found that ‘domain expertise’ explained 14-20% of variance in quality (success)
What is domain expertise?
How much expertise the composers had in composing opera could significantly explain a chunk of the variance in quality (14-20%)
What was quality measured by?
How successful the operas had been
