Different Trails: On the Multiple Genetic Roots Determining a Distributed Compositional Project

Abstract

Although it is a mistake to believe that the material traces left by a composer's practice can help us to properly reconstruct the creative process, compositional sketches may throw light on it. Nevertheless many such accounts take their respective case studies as isolated objects that are, unfortunately, sometimes decontextualised from the whole record of their authors. Ethnography potentially offers a better methodology and auto-ethnographic accounts, third party observations, and mixtures of these approaches have already been applied to contemporary music. This article aims to combine both these approaches in a discussion of a recent compositional project at IRCAM, carried out by a team of three people. I consider how the previous artistic experiences and achievements of these people, jointly and separately, have had a substantial impact on their shared project. In addition, as the case study had a scientific underpinning, I comment on the cognitive bridge that the composer had to build between scientific and musical conceptions.

Timelines in Spectral Composition: A cognitive approach to musical creativity

“…We seek to explain those exceptional cases of creativity through what we are coming to know about the general functioning of imagination and reasoning, moving forward in the direction of research already published in this journal (Kendall 2010). In addition, we follow the footsteps of recent studies about cognitive anchoring within musical practices (Besada 2019a(Besada , 2019bZbikowski 2019).…”