Rituals of Creativity: Tradition, Modernity, and the “Acoustic Unconscious” in a U.S. Collegiate Jazz Music Program

Abstract

In this article, I seek to complicate the distinction between imitation and creativity, which has played a dominant role in the modern imaginary and anthropological theory. I focus on a U.S. collegiate jazz music program, in which jazz educators use advanced sound technologies to reestablish immersive interaction with the sounds of past jazz masters against the backdrop of the disappearance of performance venues for jazz. I analyze a key pedagogical practice in the course of which students produce precise replications of the recorded improvisations of past jazz masters and then play them in synchrony with the recordings. Through such synchronous iconization, students inhabit and reenact the creativity epitomized by these recordings. I argue that such a practice, which I call a "ritual of creativity," suggests a coconstitutive relationship between imitation and creativity, which has intensified under modernity because of the availability of new technologies of digital reproduction.

“I Am Not an Artist, I Make Art”: Amateurish Artists in Israel and the Sense of Creativity

“…If we were to point to a single idea associated mostly with the notion of art, one which distinguishes art from other human endeavors, creativity would be the one (Edmonds & Candy, 2002). Whether it derives from romantic ideals of spontaneous creation, liberated from institutional restrictions, or rooted in capitalist ideas of innovation and acceleration, artistic expression has always been perceived as based on creativity as its sole raison d' etre (Wilf, 2012). Yet, as central as it may seem for artistic practice, as well as for the on-going discourse about art, the appeal related to creativity stands in stark opposition to its sense of clarity.…”

La creatividad que se experiencia

“…Existe un paralelismo significativo entre este proceso de aprendizaje caligráfico y el descrito en un estudio reciente por el antropólogo Eitan Wilf (2012), sobre el aprendizaje con la trompeta de jazz. A pesar de que el contexto institucional (una facultad moderna de Norte América) no podría estar más alejada de un seminario en China, existe el mismo interés por emular las obras maestras del pasado con el objetivo de adquirir un nivel de destreza tal que los practicantes puedan, por así decirlo, desprenderse de las ataduras de su formación previa y lanzarse a por su propio espacio creativo.…”

Sociable robots, jazz music, and divination: Contingency as a cultural resource for negotiating problems of intentionality

“…Specifically, the dwindling demand for jazz since the 1950s has resulted in the gradual disappearance of performance venues in which neophyte musicians can inform their competence with listening and can apprentice with experienced practitioners in real‐time performance situations. Such apprenticeship has gradually given way to abstract, formalized, and rationalized education in the hundreds of academic programs that have come to function as the pillars of the jazz world over the last few decades, in lieu of the commercial jazz scenes of the past (Wilf :572, :35–36, in press a; see also Chevigny :51–52; Rosenthal :170–173). The educators I worked with argued time and again that as a result of these institutional transformations—the shift of jazz training from the clubs to the classroom, where standardized, printed pedagogical aids have become a key mode of acquiring knowledge—students fail to cultivate the embodied indexicality between auditory representations and how it feels to execute them with their instruments.…”