ABSTRACT
Musical creativity, widely regarded as a paradigm for many forms of musical experience, continues to permeate the act of musical composition with the ubiquitous infl uence of a myriad of creative approaches, perspectives, and constraints. This book is born of my belief as a composer that understanding the psychological underpinnings of creative experience in musical composition – not only the experience of composing a piece of music, but also performing, listening, and thinking about the creative musical act – can reshape our understanding of musical creativity. As it grew out of my compositional practice, this book refl ects my own creative work by delivering a psychological framework for an applied theoretical model of compositional creativity. From the perspective of a composer and scholar my book thus embodies these pursuits, whose interdisciplinary engagement has defi ned my view on musical creativity and has informed my research methodology. In turn, these concepts refl ect the pragmatic nature of my study, which can be further explained by the interdependence of the theoretical and practical aspects of music scholarship. Hence, the book represents a new development in my work where I seek to provide a fresh perspective on the creative processes and structures responsible for composing music in the tradition of classical art music. New, modern, or contemporary classical art music in this context refers to predominantly Western acoustic and electroacoustic music composed, arranged, or produced for conventional musical instruments, with or without the use of technology, and intended for live or broadcasted classical music concert performance (as opposed to pop, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, or folk music traditions). 1
On this ground in Embodiment of Musical Creativity I survey the psychological foundations of musical composition as I also redefi ne musical creativity using the framework of embodiment as its main unifying concept. Here I consider the embodiment as either the action or process of something or someone (a creative idea, pursuit, person, and so on) being or becoming embodied, as well as the awareness or state in which something or someone is or has become embodied. In this context, the issues of human agency and embodiment provide insights into the dynamic processes of compositional behavior and experience that directly refl ect the changing ways that musical creativity is understood and evaluated. Employing the tools of music psychology, philosophy, and music theory, and combining our knowledge of both composition and performance studies, I offer a new perspective
on compositional creativity, and a new way of looking at how the embodied creative experience contributes to what we know – and have still to learn – about the creative act of musical composition. Hence, my main goal in this book is to explore how composers create musical works and what psychological and physiological mechanisms are involved from the conception of a musical work to its realization.
