Monograph

Music as Creative Practice

(Nicholas Cook – Cambridge)

Nicholas Cook’s main contribution to CMPCP will be a monograph provisionally entitled Music as Creative Practice, which will draw upon and synthesise the outputs of the Centre’s projects. Existing musicological and psychological approaches to the creative process in music have tended to focus on composers’ sketches. This research will take such work as its starting point, but will develop it through an investigation of creativity in musical performance, understood as the generation of meaning that emerges through the act of performance. While this creative dimension is present in solo performance, Cook will equally focus on creative interactions in ensemble performance, which illustrate a basic human phenomenon: the group creativity exemplified by brainstorming, and more generally by the collaborative real-time interaction of productive working environments. The aims are thus to use music as a vehicle for investigating a vital dimension of social interaction, while rethinking traditional musicological approaches in terms of a fundamentally social conception of creation. Whereas traditional musicology has focused almost exclusively on the creative role of composers, it is more productive to understand creativity as distributed across the participants in musical practice, while composition itself – often seen as the paradigm of individual creation – is better understood in implicitly social terms.

Designed to relate productively to CMPCP’s other projects, this research will draw on Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s research into the role of shape and embodiment in performance decision-making and its representation; on John Rink’s study of the transformation of knowledge into practice through performance teaching and learning; and on Tina K. Ramnarine’s ethnographic work with musicians across the globe and Eric Clarke’s similar engagement with composers and contemporary music performers. Also important to Cook’s study will be the research of two of the Centre’s funded doctoral students, who will focus on the creative dimension of record production in the respective contexts of classical and popular music. Through regular collaboration with CMPCP’s researchers, Cook will enhance communication and interaction between them, thereby helping to ensure that their activities represent more than the sum of their parts. External links will be fostered through visits to research institutes (e.g. IRCAM) and collections (e.g. British Library Sound Archive, Borthwick Institute for Archives). Research will begin in month 19 (though preparatory work will occur during months 7–18); outputs will include contributions to the Centre’s project workshops and Performance Studies Network conferences in addition to the monograph.