ABSTRACT
In The Body of Sound , Holger Schulze (2012) argues that thinking of sound and the senses implies a dynamic reciprocity between the “sensory of specifi c, individual or bodily auditory experiences,” and the “actual experiences of intermodal and transmodal sensory perception” (Schulze 2012, 204-205). This connection between the body as the represented intentionality of sonic manifestations suggests a comparative approach to the perception and cognition of music (Carterette and Kendall 1999) that, as a result of these interactive processes, becomes multimodal in the sense of the intentionality that bodily mechanisms impose on the creative acts of making music. From the perspective of a composer, and understood as a central part of the human experience, I conceive of musical creativity as a multidisciplinary investigation into the structure of composing music: a creative endeavor defi ned by an interplay of psychological mechanisms. It is on this ground that I explore the creative ways and associations through which composers engage with musical sound. By starting with a discussion on how various concepts of creativity might be understood and related to each other, I thus propose a multimodal approach to the study of musical creativity by offering a theoretical framework within which the ideas of this study have been developed. This approach will enable us to view musical creativity “not as a single unitary process but as a product of many types of mental [and physical] processes, each of which helps us to set the stage for creative insight and discovery” (Finke, Ward, and Smith 1996, 2).
