ABSTRACT
The ontological issues discussed in Chapter 4 also impact our understanding of creativity. This chapter develops a theory of distributed creativity to account for the role of music notation within the improvised practice of the ICP. It interrogates what Tim Ingold has called the “hylomorphism” inherent in much thinking about musical performance, both composed and improvised. Instead of a model that approaches creative work as the giving of form to shapeless matter, this chapter describes how creativity is distributed both among musicians and among musicians and material objects such as instruments and notations. It combines the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell and creativity scholar Keith Sawyer to address the indexicality of all creative expression. This model is then illustrated with examples from ICP performances. These are used to show, first, how notations mediate musicians’ relations to their instruments, and, second, how musical form emerges from the interaction between musicians, instruments, and notations, rather than being determined by notations beforehand.
