Dialogue and Imagination in Creativity: reflections on the imagination in creative musical experience.

Creativity in Question Conference, Queen Magaret University College, Edinburgh, March 2002

Introduction

This paper is a reflection upon the imagination in creative musical experience. Based on a self-reflexive account or a 'dialogue' with my creative practice, it is an individualistic and experientially-based reflection on creative musical experience. Along with a pedagogical direction, it aims unpack something of the intuitive and more abstract dimensions of creative endeavour: a difficult area, within Western art discourses at least, due in part to the historic splitting-off of creativity to the mystical and romanticised realm of the specialist composer.

My own musical history started with teenage experiments on the saxophone and piano, then as my formal training took its course I moved towards more traditionally determined modes of performing and composing. Following an undergraduate degree in music, and after a return to experimental music making (this time in the more official guise of 'free improvisation'), I began DJing and working in the field of electronically mediated studio composition. I have gone from improvising child, to trained musician, to musical artist incorporating process-orientated methods within studio environments.

As an educator I now teach studio-based musical composition. Recent technologies and interlinked musical/cultural changes have brought with them a significant shift in the way composition can be taught. The traditional reliance upon the notated score and the emphasis of technique-through-pastiche is supplanted with significantly more fluid and real-time approaches. Being able to hear what you do as you work to shape and arrange sonic elements encourages a closer interaction with the materials and opens up possibilities for greater levels of processual engagement. Changes that can certainly be heard in some of the stylistic traits of some recent genres of electronic dance and ambient music; apparent, for example, in an openness to musical structure and in the emphasis placed upon timbre over-and-above melody and harmony - something reflected increasingly in the interests and competencies of new music students. Additionally, I teach the theory and practice of musical creativity more broadly; this includes performance practice and free improvisation as a practical discipline.

As a result of my specialisms and teaching duties I find myself in a highly reflective position; I have a need, drawing from my own practice and from student observations, for developing ways of talking about and categorising approaches to creative musical endeavour. It is these activities which have led to this presentation and the offering-up of myself as a case study. I am aware of the difficulties that talking with insight and critical distance about abstract and intuitively felt experiences can bring. Bearing this in mind, and relying on your patience through this self-indulgence, I will use my own music and critical reflections to say something about creativity in the context of musical experience.

This paper refers to the making of the following track:

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