The Imagination of Experiences

Musical Invention, Collaboration, and the Making of Meanings

Alan Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000374766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Aimed at lay, student, and academic readers alike, this book concerns the imagination and, specifically, imagination in music. It opens with a discussion of the invalidity of the idea of the creative genius and the connected view that ideas originate just in the individual mind. An alternative view of the imaginative process is then presented, that ideas spring from a subconscious dialogue activated by engagement in the world around. Ideas are therefore never just of our own making. This view is supported by evidence from many studies and corresponds with descriptions by artists of their experience of imagining. The third subject is how imaginations can be shared when musicians work with other artists, and the way the constraints imposed by trying to share subconscious imagining result in clearly distinct forms of joint working. The final chapter covers the use of the musical imagination in making meanings from music. The evidence is that music does not communicate meanings directly, and so composers or performers cannot be looked to as authorities on its meaning. Instead, music is commonly heard as analogous to human experience, and listeners who perceive such analogies may then imagine their own meanings from the music.

1The redundant genius, who won’t lie down and die

Introduction

And so, to knock down the idea of the genius composer yet again when it has been so discredited by modern research? Such an exercise might seem pointless after the demolition jobs by Clarke and Doffman (2017) and Cook (2018) in their recent books. However, the view of imagination as a characteristic just of special individuals still has a powerful hold over the way musicians are seen. I therefore don’t think it would be credible to propose an alternative, as I do in Chapter 2, without first explaining why the genius myth is based on an inaccurate view of the imagination.

I start by looking at the arguments of writers who show that the genius concept, and the idea of the musical ‘work’ to which it is linked, do not fit with the evidence of how musicians imagine and how music is made and performed. An important alternative view has been proposed called ‘distributed creativity’, which is supported by evidence that music always depends on the creative contributions of many people rather than just a few exceptional individuals. I follow this with a critique of the concept of the musical work, seen as the creation of composers working alone.

I then examine the nature of the genius myth as an ideology which influences both audiences and the self-perception of musicians. Evidence contrary to ideologies such as this may be resisted or rejected by those who believe in them. There are also aspects of how the imagination works which can lead artists to think that ideas arise just from their own minds. This is an illusion, but it is one which can make it harder to shake oneself free from the ideology of the lone creator.

The last refuge of the scoundrel genius¹

Western Art Music is described by Sawyer as ‘… the one remaining bastion of the solitary lone genius myth.’ (2014, 285). It is certainly my impression, as a back-row viola player in my local symphony orchestra,² that most of my colleagues and our audience see the famous composers whose music we perform in this way, but the evidence is that this view does not correspond with the nature of compositional work.

The work of composition

The idea of the composer genius has been roundly criticised in academic writing, for instance by Hayden and Windsor who describe the erroneous view of ‘… an isolated, possibly unhinged, genius, struggling at the piano or desk.’ (2007, 28) and Harley who writes of the ‘… nineteenth-century image of the wilful composer creating music in tortured but inspired isolation …’ (2008, 129). I have nothing to add to or take away from the arguments of these writers, or those I mentioned at the start of the chapter, and so it is best to summarise the main elements of their case as I see them:

1.The creativity required to produce music does not just come from a limited number of people, the composers. Music, like all art, results from the direct or indirect creative contributions of many people, extending beyond composers and performers to those who have influenced them and those in the past who contributed to the evolution of each style of music and performance. The term ‘art world’ is used by Becker (2008) for this constellation of people. He studied how a wide variety of pieces of art were made and found in every case that their making depended on many people. He concludes that ‘Every art, then, rests on an extensive division of labour.’ (2008, 13). The same view has been put forward by Sawyer and DeZutter (2009), Clarke and Doffman (2017), and Cook (2018), and termed ‘distributed creativity’ on the grounds that art depends on the creative contributions of many people.

2.Even in the part of the process called composition, the evidence from sketches, manuscripts, and accounts by composers is that their work consists mostly of the painstaking application of craft skills. In a sense, anyone can make up a tune or motif, but it takes great skill, and skill which can be learned and practised, to make something of it. Written evidence of composers imagining music complete and then just writing it down, as Sawyer (2006, 225) and Cook (2018, 96–108) note, has been shown to consist of forgeries created to propagate the idea of the spontaneous genius. The reality is that composition consists mostly of hard work.

It might be objected that, even though a great deal of work is required to complete a composition, the genius composer is a person who can invent remarkable musical ideas to start with. However, much of the greatest music is based on simple ideas, such as the four-note motif which Beethoven used for most of the first movement of his 5th Symphony. It may take a composer a great deal of work to arrive at exactly the right version of a musical idea after an initial thought, and they apply their craft skills until they happen on a version which satisfies them. We know that Beethoven repeatedly sketched ideas before choosing a version he was happy with, for instance making more than two hundred sketches before settling on the theme of the Ode to Joy (Konečni 2012, 148). His distinctiveness consisted of working hard till an idea was just right, rather than in the brilliance of his initial inventions.

3.Composers have always worked with other artists, and have been stimulated by their input, rather than imagining music on their own. The historical record is full of examples of composers showing drafts to other people, asking their opinion, and making changes, as I will show in Chapter 3. Creativity in art, as Novitz argues, is often ‘… the result of interaction between minds, not the result of a single mind working in isolation.’ (Novitz 2003, 189).

4.Composers always work within artistic traditions and draw on pre-existing styles and approaches. As Carroll points out, the judgement that an artist is exceptional is not based just on their personal abilities, but on ‘… how the art work behaves against the background of tradition.’ (2003, 231). He sees the dependence of artists on the traditions they have inherited as inconsistent with the idea of that ‘… godlike individualism …’ (2003, 211) which is the essence of the idea of the creative genius. Even when a composer makes an apparently revolutionary break, this can be seen to grow out of previous developments. For example, Schoenberg came up with the radical idea of a 12-tone series, and this enabled him to overcome the creative block he experienced after his participation in the First World War. This technique may seem like a complete break from previous styles based on musical keys but it in fact developed from the increasingly chromatic style of his previous music, which had already become almost detached from musical keys. As Adolfe shows, he was writing virtual 12-tone music before he invented the theory (2001, 80). Schoenberg saw 12-tone technique as a natural development in his work and denied that he was a revolutionary (Schoenberg 1975, 137).

5.We know that composers were responsive to their social and political environments, rather than writing as solitary individuals with no context. For example, in his book Mozart and the Enlightenment (1992), Till describes the arrival of freemasonry in Vienna, the increasing involvement of the bourgeois and progressive aristocrats in the movement, its relationship to the reforming monarchy of the time, and Mozart’s involvement and eventual decision to join a lodge of specifically Catholic masons (1992, 117–29). He describes how Mozart was deeply engaged in contemporaneous social movements and ideas and links the development of his music to the evolution of his thinking within the context of freemasonry, Catholicism, and absolute monarchy. Similarly, McClary describes Bach’s relationship to the intellectual and artistic currents of his time, explaining that he was an outsider as a German in a society which had been culturally colonised by the musical styles of Italian opera and French absolutism. He drew on both sources in developing his music but, she argues, he ‘… chose to maintain his marginalized position, to appropriate all available musical discourses while clinging fiercely to his own German heritage, and to forge perhaps not so much a unified tonality as a set of eclectic hybrids.’ (1987, 20).

None of this, it should not need saying, takes away from the fact that the best-known composers were highly skilled, or that their pieces are remarkable achievements. However, we should see their music as having been written within a context, with its creation and character directly and indirectly influenced by their involvement with the society and people around them, and by others in the past. Their pieces are not timeless masterworks created by geniuses who cannot be questioned, but historically-situated art which we can appreciate more fully through a better understanding of its context.

I hope that I have said enough to show that the genius myth does not fit with the evidence on how composers imagine. The findings of research on two further subjects are also inconsistent with the idea of the composer genius. These are:

•Distributed creativity, mentioned at the start – the view that music always requires the creative contributions of many people.

•The concept of the musical work, seen as the expression of the composer’s imagination.

Distributed musical creativity

This term is used by Sawyer and DeZutter (2009), Clarke and Doffman (2017), and Cook (2018) for the view that music, and other art, results from the direct or indirect creative contributions of many people rather than just a few creative geniuses. As an example, Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 while working closely with its first soloist, Joachim. Both of them were working within a tradition which had evolved through the contributions of many others. Schwarz (1983) describes how Brahms wrote with Joachim’s performing style in mind, consulted him in detail on passages, accepted or responded to his suggested changes, and made further alterations after the first performance. There have been many similar studies of artists working together, for instance by John-Steiner in her classic book Creative Collaboration (2000). In recent years, numerous studies have been published of composers and other artists working together on new pieces.³ The pieces were not created by the composers alone, or even by composers supported by others who had merely functional roles. In every case, the composers worked closely with their artistic partners, and within traditions and idioms to which many people had contributed, with performances requiring the creative contributions of further people to bring the music to life.

This area of study has been taken forward in a series of books from the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP). The first that is relevant here is Beyond the Score by Cook (2013). He explains how the study of music has focussed on written scores as the expression of the composer’s intentions, and so music has been presented as if it were a text-based art produced just by composers. By contrast, the experience of music is that it is what is heard rather than written. Cook examines a wide range of examples which illustrate his argument that, even for music performed from detailed notation, the printed notes are not the same as the experience of the music. It follows from this that music as heard depends on the creative contributions of many people.

Earlier, Sawyer and DeZutter (2009) described how research on creativity initially focussed on identifying the characteristics of creative individuals, but how attention shifted by the 1980s to the study of collaborative creative relationships (2009, 81–2). Their own study was of five improvisatory theatre performances, and they describe the creative process as ‘distributed’ since it was one ‘… where collaborating groups of individuals collectively generate a shared creative product.’ (2009, 82). In other words, they present creativity as capable of arising from the interaction between artists working together directly.

A second book in the CMPCP series, Distributed Creativity by Clarke and Doffman (2017), consists of a series of studies which illustrate how music results from a process influenced by or involving a variety of people. The editors describe the ‘… increasing recognition of the extended and distributed character of music’s creative process.’ (2017, 2). Taken together, the contributions in the book add up to a convincing case that music usually results from creative inputs by many people, each influenced by their wider environment. In the final book in the CMPCP series, Cook (2018) takes the discussion on distributed creativity further. In his first full chapter (2018, 15–68), he argues from a wide range of examples that music...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The redundant genius, who won’t lie down and die
• 2 The musical imagination as dialogue
• 3 Sharing imaginations
• 4 Making musical meanings: The imaginative listener
• A final word
• Index