Book
Routledge An Ashgate Book: SEMPRE Series in the Psychology of Music (2017)
Embodiment of Musical Creativity
Embodiment of Musical Creativity offers an innovative look at the interdisciplinary nature of creativity in musical composition. Using examples from empirical and theoretical research in creativity studies, music theory and cognition, psychology and philosophy, performance and education studies, and the author’s own creative practice, the book examines how the reciprocity of cognition and performativity contributes to our understanding of musical creativity in composition. From the composer’s perspective the book investigates the psychological attributes of creative cognition whose associations become the foundation for an understanding of embodied creativity in musical composition. The book defines the embodiment of musical creativity as a cognitive and performative causality: a relationship between the cause and effect of our experience when composing music. Considering the theoretical, practical, contextual, and pedagogical implications of embodied creative experience, the book redefines aspects of musical composition to reflect the changing ways that musical creativity is understood and evaluated. Embodiment of Musical Creativity provides a comparative study of musical composition, in turn articulating a new perspective on musical creativity.
Reviews
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This pioneering work on musical creativity breaks new ground on definitions and applications of the term and is presented in both readable and a logical fashion. Nagy is adept at drawing together many disciplines and presenting a rich and complex contribution to our understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of creativity. This highly recommended text is a valuable resources and provocative inspiration not only for composers, but also for performers and listeners too. - Andrew Shenton, Boston University
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The book contents offer an innovative focus on composition that draws on an evidence-based and reflective understanding of both cognition and performativity. As the same time, the text provides deeper insights into the multimodal nature of creativity itself. Nagy’s choice of topics and focus on embodiment is in line with a new wave of music studies that seek to understand how our bodymind design is reciprocally interwoven in the ways that we make sense of, and generate, musical experience. Nagy’s personal reflections on his experiences as a composer and academic provide a strong basis for this rich narrative that concludes with an elaboration of the pedagogical implications for the teaching of compositional creativity. - Graham Welch, Series Editor, University College London
Articles
Journal of Genius and Eminence (2019)
Music and Embodied Creative Space
Informed by theoretical and empirical research in the cognitive sciences this article seeks to identify a relationship between musical creativity and embodiment. While focusing on the central hypothesis that exposure to specific musical practices leads to the formation of multimodal creative agency, an argument is made for the emergence of an embodied creative space. The embodiment of musical creativity is defined as a cognitive and performative causality: a relationship between the cause and effect when composing, performing, or listening to music. Expanding on this model, music-making is further considered to be an embodied activity that stems from the causality of these interdependent attributes of creativity: the cognitive actions controlled and sustained by our mind, and the performative interactions mediated by our body and the environment. By exploring the actions and interactions commonly associated with composing and performing music, the author defines the embodied creative musical space as an interactive agency that lives at the threshold of cognition and performativity. In order to support this argument, the author relates images and places from the art of memory to the act of making music, while placing the compositional work of Johann Sebastian Bach in the context of present-day practice of creating music. As a result, the nature of musical creativity as an embodied, lived experience extends the social and collaborative concepts of creativity, as it becomes an interactive creative contingency. Delivered from the perspective of a composer, performer, and music scholar, this article contributes to the growing interdisciplinary discourse on musical creativity.
Creativity Research Journal (2015)
The Apperception of Musical Creativity
Musical invention is defined in this article as a form of inward creativity. The creative acts of musical performance are understood in terms of ritual-like symbolic and stylized actions, and those of musical composition as the mind's enactment of meditation and reflection. This article draws on the relationship between two psychological attributes of musical creativity: the cognitive ones controlled and sustained by the central nervous system, and the emotional attributes that may be understood as a sense of inward reflection. The complex nature of musical creativity suggests further emotional and musical representations accumulated and constructed by the composer or performer. When this occurs, music's distinct character is apperceived as a musical ritual in terms of self-realization, rather than a mere execution of idiomatically constructed musical sequences. Along with present-day research in psychology and perspectives on cognitive neuroscience of creativity, this article brings forth a direct link between musical creativity, ritual, and self-awareness. It develops a theory of the apperception of musical creativity in performance and composition using the notions of ritual and self-realization as mutually inclusive idiosyncrasies of musical experience.