Distributed Creativity and Ecological Dynamics: A Case Study of Liza Lim's 'Tongue of the Invisible'

Musical choices during group free improvisation: A qualitative psychological investigation

“…The findings challenge the conception of improvisation as an unbroken creative stream emanating from an individual soloist (Clarke, Doffman, & Lim, 2013;. Participants' perceptions of their improvisation as an external entity in the course of playing suggests a process in which individuals relinquish some agency at times, contributing a nuanced understanding of an essentially interpersonal creativity (Hallam & Ingold, 2007;Sawyer, 2006).…”

Repurposing the Past? The Historical Basset Clarinet in Creative Collaboration

“…Employing a similar methodological approach to other recent studies of 'real-world' contexts of Western 'concert' musics (see, among others, Bayley, 2010Bayley, , 2011Bayley & Clarke, 2009Clarke, Cook, Harrison, & Thomas, 2005;Clarke et al, 2013;Clarke, Doffman, & Timmers, 2016;Donin & Féron, 2012;Donin & Theureau, 2007), the material on which this paper is based was collected over a 30-month period (November 2013-February 2016 and includes interviews with Johnson and Rosman conducted at various stages during the process; audiovisual footage of workshop meetings, 3 rehearsals, and the premiere; in addition to email correspondence of c. 14,000 words, including audio recordings of techniques and passages, sketch materials, and score fragments (see Table 1 for a summary of the audio-visual material collected during fieldwork). …”

“…Over the past decade investigations of composer-performer interactions have flourished, whether addressing the face-to-face encounters between performers and composers during the genesis of a work (Clarke et al, 2016;Donin & Féron, 2012;Donin & Theureau, 2007;Fitch & Heyde, 2007;Hayden & Windsor, 2007;Kanga, 2014;Östersjö, 2008); and/or composer-performer(s) interplay and negotiation during rehearsal (Archbold, 2011;Barrett et al, 2014;Bayley, 2010Bayley, , 2011Bayley & Clarke, 2009Clarke et al, 2013;Seddon, 2004;Seddon & Biasutti, 2009). A small corpus of work has evaluated the composer-performer relationship from the perspective of the clarinettist, addressing a variety of questions including the socio-psychological effects of engaging with composers on the performer's creative practice (Roe, 2007); the expediency and contingency of the collaborative process, and the influence of external factors and other creative agents such as conductors, recording engineers, and producers (Merrick, 2009); and the role of dialogue in collaboration (Roche, 2011).…”

“…In their auto-ethnographic account of working together on a new commission for speaking cellist, Fabrice Fitch and Neil Heyde (2007) draw on Helmut Lachenmann's (1996) metaphor of composition as 'building an instrument' (Fitch & Heyde, 2007, p. 92) (Hooper, 2012, p. 36). Rather than a 'network', Clarke et al (2016) have suggested that this more complex and fluid relationship might best be understood as an 'ecological mesh' (p. 121; see also Clarke et al, 2013;Ingold, 2011 De Souza's interests ultimately lie elsewhere, in the relationship between the performer's body and instrument rather than the distribution of knowledge during co-present collaboration, yet in drawing attention to instruments' physical, technical, and historical affordances, he offers a fruitful framework for approaching the basset clarinet in this project, which, like Sheppard Skaerved's violin, has powerful historical and cultural resonances. Thus, attending to the social life of musical instruments (see Appadurai, 1988;and Bates, 2012) in collaborative work may offer an opportunity to delve more deeply into the processes of music-making that might otherwise be overlooked.…”

WilliamKinderman, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012). xi + 233 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978‐0‐252‐03716‐0 (hb.)

“…To take a simple example of such a convention, the 'unfulfilled implication' (p. 122) discussed earlier in connection with the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth Symphony can be considered to be a descendant of the 'elliptical retransition' often found in the developments of Haydn's string quartets. 25 Attempting to understand which attributes of this pattern, whose population peak was probably reached more than a century before Mahler used it, motivated him to replicate it (whether consciously or not) is arguably a more fertile strategy for the exploration of creativity -as a 'distributed' phenomenon 26 -than often abstract speculation founded on what might be an imperfectly understood biography.…”