Le 29 juin 2017
de 16h00 à 16h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance précomposée - Analyzing Models and Creativity in the Long Eighteenth Century
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Vasili Byros
Though never explicitly presented as studies in musical creativity, schema and partimento research have tacitly advanced a theory of the creative process in the long eighteenth century, one centered on the close imitation of models or schemata. Because every composer of the period presumably worked with the same models, a lacuna remains in our understanding of musical creativity—namely, how composers as aesthetically and stylistically diverse as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were cut from the same schematic cloth as a Leo, Locatelli, and Galuppi.
This paper closely examines the problem by theorizing the relationship of models to creativity, following research in creative cognition. Bach’s Weimar organ fugues in D, G, and A minor (BWV 538, 542–543) serve as case studies, whereby music analysis becomes a means of (re)enacting the creative compositional act.
The investigation pivots on two key themes in creativity studies: 1) models/schemata are not internalized in the same way by all members of a culture (Vygotsky 1978), but rather are already learned in a creative manner, which subsequently leads to their original use and appropriation; 2) original contributions in a given domain rely not on the mere imitation of models, but rather on deep-level analogies among them, which allows for conceptual combination/blending.
I combine creative cognition research with historically contextualized analysis of musical scores and pedagogical documents.
