Creativity in music Flashcards
What is creativity?
- novely/ originality
-Effectiveness and utility, has to be original but also have value
surprise/ unpredictableness
Creativity in psychology
- the cognitive process involved in creative production
- individual differences in creative ability
Creativity in music
- Individual composers producing work
- more recently- recordings of new music, studios and technology
Simonton 1980?
- The originality test- investigated 10 major composers and analysed melodic originality
- most successful composers had the most unusual combination of notes
- “biographical stressors”- stress periods in life effected production- biographical stressors led to more original work
- composers ‘tailed off’ towards the end of their lives- ran out of originality, got complacent
The swan song phenomenon
- Contradicts the originality test- which found a linear trend of a drop in originality
- “people go out with a bang”
Originality in popular music
Pre 1960’s- teams of songwriters behind the scenes, originality was a product of the songwriters
Post 1960’s- the star usually songwrites and produces, expresses their own creativity
Tribute bands; different sort of creativity, authenticy reproduction
Guilford- divergent thinking
- Brick test used to test creativity
- list uses for a brick- to be creative they should be novel and useful
Sowdon et al (2015)
Dual processing model- two ways of achieving creative thinking
Type 1: unconscious knowledge, inspiration, flashes of insight ie Mozart
Type 2: Methodical and Systematic, conscious process ie Beethoven
Sowden argued that you have to have both types
Sloboda- enquiring compositional process
Identified 4 ways of enquiring compositional process:
- Archival material- Sketchbooks etc
- Accounts: Interviewes, biography
- Observation: Observing composers at work- rare
- Improvisation- Usually in Jazz
How important is expertise to creativity?
Ericson argued the importance of practice
Simonton studied 911 operas, with 59 composers
- looked at success of the composers
Findings: domain expertise of composer could explain 15-20% of the variance in success
- he found the same inverted J as simonton- decline in success
OVERALL: composers who rote lots of operas were more successful
Triangular theory
- context is important when thinking about creative output
- Argues about defiance, three functions of defiance:
1. Against the crowd- friends family and fans
2. Against the self- creative people tend to be versatile
3. Against dominant paradigm- general tradition
Criticism of triangular theory
Thinks of creativity as being a single person against the world
Systems model of creativity
- part of a board system, a habitus
- songwriters are immersed in a musical environment
- media imposes constraints and opportunities to creative thinking- immersed in charts, trends
Beatles “yesterday” and the dual processing model
- McCarthy claimed that the tune was part of a flash of inspiration- Mozart style (type 2)
- researchers has identified that he has been subconsciously been inspired by certain stimuli
- Lyrics to the song were worked on- part 1 of dual processing
criticism of dual process:
Beyond the dual process model, McCarthy had other stuff in the background that enhanced creativity
Creative performance
- in performance, creativity is defined by expressive variation
- study of 7 repeats of baths concerto, pianist claimed to perform the same every time but there were slight changes between songs
- third performance was the best