Shira Lee Katz
Copland1 wrote that many composers believe that the meaning of music is the music itself and nothing more. Yet what if, instead of analysing composers’ scores in an attempt to find meaning, we attempted to see what material or mental models were important to composers as they set out to write? This chapter analyses the writing process of three contemporary composers whose creative work is heavily influenced by content outside of the musical domain. In this context, the term ‘creative’ is a synthesis of Csikszentmihalyi’s,2 Gardner’s3 and Perkins’s4 characterisation of creativity, expressed in individuals who have forged new territory in a particular domain and have demonstrated tenacity in exploring the questions and problems of this area from different vantage points.
Knowledge about the creative process has increased dramatically over the last century, with a burgeoning literature on creativity together with a growing amount of research on the composing process. Despite this, there is still a gap in understanding the prototypical ways in which musical compositions come to fruition. What role do extra-musical factors play? Are composers even aware of the factors that influence their work? If composers do employ extra-musical influences as they compose, what is the role of this material in their work? In other words, there has been little investigation around the factors that inspire music composers when they write or about how initial ideas are synthesised as compositions develop.
In a research study, 24 interviews were conducted with composers, three of whom are the subjects of this chapter since they draw heavily from content domains outside of music. This chapter explores how non-music domains (for example, landscape architecture, poetry) influence the musical structure of these composers’ output, within sections or movements, and with two of these three
1 Copland, Aaron, Richard Kostelanetz and Steven Silverstein, Aaron Copland: A Reader: Selected Writings 1923–1972 (New York: Routledge, 2004).
2 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York, 1996).
3 Howard Gardner, Creating Minds (New York, 1993).
4 David Perkins, The Mind’s Best Work (Cambridge, 1981).
composers the more granular elements, such as instrumentation and chord choice, the smaller musical details.
For the three composers discussed in this paper, the extra-musical influences on their work are ones they have been familiar with and have valued for many years. In addition, they are characterised by a strong element of modularity, since they are already divided into discrete sections (such as architectural structures);
each extra-musical influence has a unique character or physicality such that they may provide a useful ‘frame’ as the composers organise inchoate masses of musical materials.
In addition to making an argument about the way composers map non-music models onto their music, this chapter also makes claims more broadly about models of the creative process, in particular, stage theory. Stage theory5 is a widely accepted model of the creative process that hinges on the idea that the creative process is propelled forward in large part during what is known as the ‘illumination stage’, after ‘preparation’ and ‘incubation’ stages, and is characterised by rapid insight and even abandon. In light of the findings from these three composers, it is argued in this chapter that the illumination stage may more aptly be described as a period when the creator incorporates models from his or her past as opposed to making wholly new insights.
Instantaneous Creation or Involved Process?
There are three key questions about the creative process which contextualise the discussion in this chapter. Firstly, to what extent does a creator revise and revisit during the act of creation; secondly, what prominent theories of the creative process describe the stages of creative development; and thirdly, what is the role of metaphor, lateral thinking and constraint in creative synthesis?
The first question is essentially concerned with whether groundbreaking works come about quickly, as if in a split second, or whether the ideas and impulses that feed these creations unfold over time. The Ancient Greeks believed that creativity was a gift of the Muses6 – that God was whispering into the ears of creators as if giving breath to their creations. Despite some lingering notions of the mystical surrounding the act of creation, there is far more agreement now that ‘logic, method, and techniques’ underlie the creative process.7 Gruber and Davis,8 in their
5 Wallas, Graham, The Art of Thought (London, 1926).
6 Dean Keith Simonton, ‘Creativity as a constrained stochastic process’. In: R.J.
Sternberg, E.L. Grigorenko and J.L. Singer (eds), Creativity: From Potential to Realization.
(Washington, DC, 2004), 83–101.
7 Simonton, Creativity, 83–101.
8 Howard E. Gruber and Sara N. Davis, ‘Inching our way up Mount Olympus: The evolving-systems approach to creative thinking’. In: R.J. Sternberg (ed.), The Nature of Creativity (New York, 1988), 243–69.
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case studies reviewing doctoral dissertations over a period of 20 years, argued that what had been thought of as creative breakthroughs could actually be seen in the earlier work or ideas of these creators.
While there now appears to be much agreement that the creative process happens to some degree over a period time, there are differing ideas about the way in which it unfolds. Wallas,9 in his stage theory,identifies four stages of the creative process based on creators’ autobiographical accounts: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Simply put, preparation is the period when a creator assesses the creative arc or problem to be solved. Incubation occurs when the creator takes a mental break from the problem at hand. Illumination is sometimes referred to as the ‘flash of insight’ when there are signs that a solution is imminent, and verification is the stage of further refinement and conclusion. While many studies are still premised on Wallas’s original stage theory, there are a number of theories that have since emerged to challenge his model. For example, Ghiselin10 argues that there is no such clear distinction between the stages. Cawelti, Rappaport and Wood11 postulate that many of the processes that are supposedly unique to each stage actually take place to some extent during all stages.
It is without question that composers work idiosyncratically, and that no one model can capture the full range of experience. For instance, in contrast to Beethoven, whose work was characterised by continuous and painstaking reworking, composers such as Mozart and Schubert seemed to write music, particularly the main themes and their subsequent development, ‘with great ease and rapidity’.12 Highlighting a dichotomy similar to that of Beethoven and Mozart/
Schubert, research by Galenson13 argues for a model in which creative works can be made either expeditiously or over long periods of time. Galenson examined the careers of pre-eminent visual artists, plotting their age against their productivity, and determining at what point during their lifespan they were most productive.
Galenson identifies two major types of creators: Experimental Innovators and Conceptual Innovators. The work of Experimental Innovators evolves gradually over time and involves constant revision, while Conceptual Innovators’ work is characterised by efficiency and decisiveness, demonstrated most commonly earlier in their career.14 Galenson’s theory may provide two modes of working, but Wallas’s is probably more useful for examining how works are created from start to finish.
9 Wallas, The Art of Thought.
10 Ghiselin, Brewster, The Creative Process: A Symposium, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1980).
11 Scott Cawelti, Allen Rappaport and Bill Wood. ‘Modeling artistic creativity: an empirical study’, Journal of Creative Behavior, 2(26) (1992), 83–94.
12 Howard Gardner, Art, Mind, and Brain (New York, 1982), 359.
13 David W. Galenson, ‘The two life cycles of human creativity’, National Bureau of Economic Research Report (2003), Research summary, http://www.nber.org/reporter/
fall03/galenson.html.
14 For more detail, see Chapter 2 by Aaron Kozbelt.
The discussion presented thus far centres on whether the creative process happens precipitously or extends over time, and also how different phases of the creative process are characterised. Some researchers have considered the influence of initial inspirational factors on the whole of the creative process. For example.
Beardsley15 offers a dichotomous framing of initial inspiration, encapsulated in his ‘Propulsive’ and ‘Finalistic’ theories. According to Propulsive theory the first stage of the creative process dominates (or has the most influence) over the rest.
In Finalistic theory, the creator defines his or her end point and then allows the preceding steps of creating to be driven by this aim.
Similar in conclusion to Beardsley’s Propulsive theory, Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels16 point to the importance of the initial conceptualisation of works of art in a study focusing on fine art students training at top art schools in the USA. The artists were asked to make still-life drawings. The authors found that much of the experimentation that students did before committing to a direction was a good indication of the ultimate novelty of students’ artwork, more so than continuous reworking that might take place over a longer period of time. In a three-year case study of a single composer, Collins17 found that what they wrote during the beginning stages of composing highly influenced the work’s ultimate development. Collins collected the composer’s scores at different stages of the writing process and interviewed the composer several times to chart progress over time.
Metaphor, Association and Constraint
In addition to investigating how compositions unfold over time, it is also important to understand more about the mental models that creators employ since many draw from concepts and material that are not obviously related to the musical material themselves. In fact, some composers draw from extra-musical domains as sources of inspiration for their pieces18 by using metaphor to connect information within and between domains. Gruber and Davis describe metaphor as a synthesising agent – helping to express the relationship between two different realms.19 They argue that metaphors are not simply a linguistic
15 Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘On the creation of art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23/3 (1965), 291–304.
16 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jacob W. Getzels, ‘Discovery-oriented behavior and the originality of creative products: A study with artists’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 19/1 (1971), 47–52.
17 David Collins, ‘A synthesis model of thinking in music composition’, Psychology of Music, 32/2 (2003), 193–216.
18 Louise Duchesneau, The Voice of the Muse: A Study of the Role of Inspiration in Musical Composition (New York, 1986).
19 In Andrew Ortony, Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, 1979).
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phenomenon, but are a conduit for connecting and mapping concepts onto one another in which an aspect of the initial domain is preserved when considered in the context of the target domain.
De Bono20 also discusses a way of thinking that highlights making connections across domains as opposed to thinking within one domain. De Bono refers to this as ‘lateral thinking’, problem solving with information that is not overtly related to the initial problem or solution.
Metaphor and association, in making a bridge between seemingly disparate information, can help creators define what is and is not important. It is shorthand of sorts, and is perhaps a way of making the creative process more economical.
In 1988, Calvino21 spoke of six themes he believed would eventually be considered common to the great works of literature as we approached the year 2000: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency.
Calvino’s conceptualisation of ‘quickness’ in particular relates to the desire for efficiency. He argues that one of the most salient characteristics of folk tales is their economy of expression: folk tales move along efficiently against time as the protagonist swiftly defeats the villain or neatly identifies a ‘moral lesson’.
Calvino’s prediction is relevant to this discussion of metaphor and lateral thinking, as it underscores the importance of efficiently zeroing in on what is most important in a creative setting. Schoenberg22 explains too how he actively thinks about economy and efficiency in his own writing; in what is now referred to as 12-tone music, he saw himself efficiently imposing constraints on his process. He explains:
These forms became possible because of a limitation I had been unconsciously imposing on myself from the very outset – limitation to short pieces, something which at the time I explained in my own mind as a reaction against the “extended”
style. (262)
Upon reflection, Schoenberg realised that he was trying to create the building blocks of a style and had to identify the most essential features of this form before it could be extended. He describes this impulse or decision as a ‘question of economy’.23
In sum, claims about inspiration have historically hinged on the question of whether creations evolve gradually or instantaneously. As I have already pointed out, psychologists have come to believe that this activity is best characterised as a ‘drawn-out’ process. Furthermore, from Wallas’s stage theory to research from
20 Edward De Bono, Lateral Thinking. (New York, 1970).
21 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA, 1988).
22 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Opinion or insight?’ In: L. Stein (ed.), Style and Idea (Berkeley, CA, 1975), 258–64.
23 Ibid., 262–3.