Tracking the creative process in music: New issues,new methods

A rapidly transforming field

Not long ago, the creative process in music seemed perfectly clear: the act of composing was the creative process. Its study was divided into two distinct domains: on the one hand, musicologists with a background in music history and analysis handled sketch studies; on the other, psychologists and education science scholars undertook empirical studies of creativity. Sketch studies scholars would usually focus on white male western composers from the late 18th-century to the 20th-century avant-garde, sometimes devoting their entire life to the transcription and interpretation of working documents from one single composer. Empirical researchers would look for basic compositional skills in cohorts of [white, male] music students, or [white] children practicing music at school, and tackle issues of creativity, learning, and social skills by using creativity ratings and coding patterns of behavior. This landscape has changed dramatically in the short space of a decade.

First, we have moved beyond former theoretical and disciplinary frameworks. Several sketch studies scholars have called for an epistemological reworking of their domain, prompted by their interdisciplinary dialog with the “genetic criticism” of literary works, as well as with the social and cognitive sciences (Donin, Grésillon, & Lebrave, 2015; Kinderman & Jones, 2009). From the psychological perspective, the Introduction to Deliège and Wiggins’ collection on musical creativity claimed that it was time to “get rid of creativity and look at creative acts” (Deliège & Richelle, 2006, p. 2: emphasis in original), in order to bridge the gap between creativity as measured in a lab and real-life creative activities. One editor of the present issue has proposed to “cross-fertilize” empirical and historical musicologies based on his work on contemporary compositional processes (Donin, 2012).

Second, new research objects have emerged. The study of musical performance has become one of the most rapidly growing subfields in music studies, with strong institutional support and visibility thanks to two successive UK-funded Research Centers: the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM, 2004–2009), and the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP, 2009–2014). The art of record production is another vibrant area, at the edge of popular music studies and sound engineering theory and practice (Frith & Zagorski-Thomas, 2012). Lying somewhere in-between, the analysis of the creative process in improvisation has also been investigated (see, e.g., Solis & Nettl, 2009). Although they do not think of themselves as scholars of the creative process or creativity per se, specialists in these growing research areas have obviously been facing crucial issues in the analysis of the creative process, from the need for ecological validation of data collection to the challenges of comparing successive versions (or takes) of a piece (or song, or performance).

An increasingly complex image of the creative process in music has thus emerged. Composition remains, of course, a major part of the study of the creative process, but equally performance, improvisation, sound engineering, as well as many other areas and roles, are key to its understanding. Creativity is not just the stuff of western art music: virtually any genre or culture can be rich terrain for its study. We also need to investigate the psychology of musical creativities instead of thinking of creativity as a monolithic category (Hargreaves, Miell, & MacDonald, 2011). Moreover, the boundaries between disciplines, objects, and methodologies have been blurred. For example, does the case study by Clarke, Doffman, and Lim (2013) pertain to the field of psychology, anthropology, [real-time] historical musicology, or research in composition? To situate it under just one category would be misleading.

The TCPM conference: An interdisciplinary forum

Over the past five years, all these changes have been traced and discussed on a biennial basis in the international conference Tracking the Creative Process in Music (henceforth TCPM). TCPM serves as a forum for the best research on creative processes, as well as a tool for fostering interdisciplinary dialog within and beyond musicology. The first edition of TCPM was held in Lille, France, 2011, co-organized by Nicolas Donin and Vincent Tiffon. ¹ The second edition was held in Montreal, Canada, 2013, co-organized by Nicolas Donin, Michel Duchesneau, Jonathan Goldman, Catherine Guastavino, and Caroline Traube. ² The third and most recent edition was held in Paris, 2015, co-organized by Nicolas Donin, Hyacinthe Ravet, and Jean-François Trubert. ³ The fourth edition will take place in Huddersfield, UK, in September 2017.

The present issue is intended to reflect, at least partially, on how the aforementioned changes, especially current developments in the study of performance as and in the creative process, affect the very definition of our objects and methods. It draws on empirical research presented at the 2nd TCPM conference and is published jointly with a collection focused on music history and analysis of 19th- and 20th-century repertoire (Goldman, 2016), also derived from the conference.

The TCPM’s 2013 edition was held jointly at the Faculty of Music, Université de Montréal, and the Schulich School of Music, McGill University. It was organized with support from the Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique (OICRM), the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC/CRSH).

The scientific committee comprised the following scholars: Joseph Auner, Rémy Campos, Pascal Decroupet, François Delalande, Irène Deliège, Michel Duchesneau, Daniel Ferrer, Jonathan Goldman, Philip Gossett, Catherine Guastavino, Antoine Hennion, Martin Kaltenecker, William Kinderman, Serge Lacasse, Jerrold Levinson, Eric Lewis, Felix Meyer, Ingrid Monson, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Christoph Neidhöfer, Emmanuelle Olivier, John Rink, Friedemann Sallis, Jacques Theureau, Vincent Tiffon, Elena Ungeheuer, and Philippe Vendrix.

The themes covered included a wide range of disciplines (history, music analysis, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, information science, music technology, sociology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology) as reflected in the titles of the session themes: computer-assisted analysis, journey to the end of the sketch, distributed creativity, composing (with/in the) tradition, revealing the compositional system, compositional strategies, cognitive processes, historicity and temporality, transformative technologies, and conservation of electroacoustic and mixed-media work.

Creativity in performance, composition, and more…

The present MS special issue includes seven papers presented at the TCPM 2013 conference, with one additional paper by Andreas C. Lehmann, suggested by the editor-in-chief. A striking feature of this collection is that creativity is no longer reserved exclusively for composers. Consistent with this new trend, the issue opens with five papers devoted to the study of creative processes in musical performance. Different aspects and dimensions of the phenomenon are studied along with different disciplinary approaches. Hyacinthe Ravet presents sociological models for cooperation between conductors and performers, pointing toward shared creativity. Isabelle Héroux and Emily Payne, in their respective papers, explore the way expert musicians shape their performances. Andreas C. Lehmann completes this first section, focused on instrumental performance, by looking at the case of jazz improvisation. Then we move to Guillaume Boutard’s qualitative enquiry into timbre and gesture from the performer’s perspective, revealing a process of co-construction of expertise and appropriation of live electronics.

Two papers investigate creative strategies in composition. However, the authors do not fully embrace the classical view of composition as a purely solitary activity that excludes direct observation or interactive data collection; rather, they raise issues of cooperation and performance, as well as of the close monitoring of cognitive activity over the creative process. The first paper, by Amanda Bayley and Nicole Lizée, examines the creative layers and continuities within the composition and rehearsal processes of Lizée’s Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop, written for the Kronos Quartet. The second paper, by Hans Roels, highlights the individuality of compositional strategies, through a field study involving eight composers with different aesthetic visions, research concepts, data collection, and analysis methods.

The last paper, by Laura Zattra and Nicolas Donin, sheds light on the professional profile and expertise of the Computer Music Designer (CMD), a sorely overlooked and misunderstood partner of the composer.

To close this issue, we invited François Delalande to reflect on the articles from his perspective as member and principal coordinator of scientific research of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM, Paris) for more than three decades. Delalande was a pioneer in empirical musicology well before the name was coined. His and his colleagues’ work inspired both of us in many ways, and we are proud he agreed in turn to offer some thoughts on the creative process. His piece completes the circle by highlighting the complexity of artistic cooperation as put forward by the first paper of this issue – this time among composers, instrumentalists, scientists, technical and computer assistants, as well as instrument makers.