ABSTRACT

In constructing plots and completing the effect by the help of dialogue the poet should, as far as possible, keep the scene before his eyes. Only thus by getting the picture as clear as if he were present at the actual event will he find what is fitting and detect contradictions. (…). The stories, whether they are traditional or whether you make them up yourself, should first be sketched in outline and then expanded by putting in episodes. I mean that one might look at the general outline, say of the Iphigeneia, like this: (…). Not until this has been done should you put in names and insert episodes: and you must mind that the episodes are appropriate, as, for instance, in the case of Orestes the madness that led to his capture and his escape by means of purification. [……] Now in drama the episodes are short, but it is through them that the epic gains its length. The story of the Odyssey is quite short. (…). That is the essence, the rest is episodes. [Aristotle, Poetics, XVIII]

This is a totally different opinion from that stated by Plato in his Ion:

I do observe it Ion, and I am going to point out to you what I take it to mean. For, as I was saying to you just now, this is not an art in you, whereby you speak well on Homer, but a divine power, which moves you like that in the stone which Euripides named a magnet, but most people call ‘Hereclae stone’. (…) In the same manner also the muse inspires men herself, and then by means of these inspired persons the inspiration spreads to others, and holds them in a connected chain. For all the good epic poets utter all those fine poems not from art, but as inspired and possessed and the good lyric poets likewise. [Plato, Ion}

With the rise of cognitive psychology, Aristotle’s view is more and more accepted as that likely to bring about progress in understanding the creative process, whether totally correct or not. This has resulted in research into compositional processes in different areas: writing, architecture, industrial design, musical composition and many more. In this paper I compare results in those fields and apply those in the field of musical composition.