What's your music? Subjective theories of music-creating artists

Abstract

In an interview study with 17 music-creating artists (composers of contemporary “classical” music, electronic music, musicals, movie scores, and jazz musicians) from Southern Germany, three types of music-creating artists could be discerned: the avant-gardists, the neo-romantics, and the self-disclosing artists. These types represent social groups that are prone to typical intergroup conflicts. The different types of music-creating artists adhere to different aesthetic ideals: the avant-gardists emphasize the abstract beauty of musical structures and try to develop their music from within the music itself, the neo-romantics view music as the true language of the heart and try to express something through their music, and the self-disclosing artists feel the drive to express their feelings and sensations by means of music. As a consequence, different dimensions of musical communication are pivotal: formal aspects, the relationship between the musician and the listener, and self-disclosure. The three types of music-creating artists resemble the types of composers analyzed by Julius Bahle in the 1930s ( e.g. Bahle, 1930). Regarding their modus operandi, the musicians differ on a continuum between a purely rational creative work and the creation of music in an unconscious outburst of inspiration. Nevertheless, most musicians experience an alternation between phases of intuitive inspiration and phases of deliberate rational construction during the creative process. Therefore, a typology of musicians based on their modus operandi seems unhelpful.

Inspiration and decision-making: A case study of a composer’s intuitive and reflective thought

“…Holtz's (2009) study based on interviews with 17 composers elaborated Bahle's typology that recognizes inspirational type (using mainly intuition) and working type (using chiefly reflection) among composers (Bahle, 1938). Studies by Bailes (Bailes, 2009;Bailes & Bishop, 2012), Hargreaves (2012), and Mountain (2001) have focused on composers' imaginative processes, which comprise implicit and explicit reasoning.…”

“…These, and other germinal ideas, were both musical and extramusical in nature: audial, visual, auditive-structural, and philosophical-conceptual, incorporating all source types of inspiration identified by Mountain's (2001) study of composers' writings and interviews (cf. Holtz, 2009, andKatz &Gardner, 2012, where each composer usually had an exclusive type of germinal idea).…”

https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=ijts-transpersonalstudies

“…One genre of music that clearly values intuition over intellectual thinking is improvisational jazz, as due to its spontaneous nature, it "provides direct and instant access to the creative process" (Tafuri, 2006, p. 139). In his interview study with seventeen music creators, Holtz (2009) explored the creative process of classical, jazz, electronic, and film-score composers. In a preliminary study, Holtz (2009) reported:…”

“…In his interview study with seventeen music creators, Holtz (2009) explored the creative process of classical, jazz, electronic, and film-score composers. In a preliminary study, Holtz (2009) reported:…”

A spiral model of musical decision-making

“…Other data reporting alternating periods of intuitive or deliberate thinking by musicians includes Holtz’s (2009) interview study of 17 professional musicians in which almost all participants reported “the need for an alternation between phases of deliberate construction and of intuitive experimentation” (p. 214). Similarly, Nelson and Rawlings (2007) studied eleven artists (five musicians, two writers, two visual artists, one writer/visual artist, one playwright/theater director) and found that the artistic creative processes involved movement between intuition and more critical, analytical mental processes that “may occur frequently in the course of the overall process or only several times” (p. 239; also see Allen and Thomas, 2011; Sowden et al, 2014).…”