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Re: [microsound] Derivative Music



I think another way of looking at what we are discussing here is that
we're trying to outline a concept of creativity. Or anyways, if you
could articulate a concept of creativity you could then negatively
define what is derivative. Maybe this clears up some of the discussion
about whether music like hip-hop, which appropriates other people's
work through sampling, is derivative; certainly it's derivative in the
sense that it samples other people's music, but most people would
agree that at least some of hip-hop represents a creative development
in music. So hip-hop is not "derivative" in the sense of uncreative.

I did a few papers in my undergrad in research being done on
creativity in psychology. It seems that many psychologists are content
to define creativity purely on an individual basis. In other words, in
order to assess whether some product is creative, you would only have
to examine the creator's mind to see whether in the act of production
they had some form of mental "break-out" whereby they transcended some
previous "mental set" or way of thinking. But at the same time this is
clearly not all there is to creativity. I think more generally a
society will recognize something as creative when it constitutes some
kind of useful novelty (not to suggest that "usefulness" or "novelty"
are any easier to pin down than creativity). A person could produce a
piece of music that is a breakthrough relative to that person's
skills, but which has already been done to death in the creative /
artistic community at large. I think our everyday concept of
creativity is ambivalent in this way: it definitely seems like a
psychological phenomenon sometimes, but at other times it is clearly
tied to social evaluations that have little to do with an individual's
thought processes.

Looking at a piece of work's creativity in terms of its lineage of
influence, I think there is another sense in which our concept of
creativity is ambivalent. Some people might be inclined to argue that
a product is creative insofar as it breaks or deviates established
stylistic parameters. But if you look at, for example, Bach's music,
he didn't really create any radically new musical forms. A lot of what
we regard as his best music is valued because of the mastery with
which he executed certain existing musical forms. So while there
definitely is something to the idea that stylistic fusion / deviation
is involved in creativity, mastery of existing musical styles is often
considered creative as well. Of course, maybe this all trades on the
ambiguity of what exactly constitutes a musical style or form.

Miller Peterson

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