Embodied Monologues
In March 2017, I visited Maynooth University in Ireland, where I presented a paper at Embodied Monologues research series and symposium. The symposium “seeks to generate responses and challenges to the idea of solo or ‘mono’ performance,” while asking important questions on “the role of the intertextual, the multimedial, the intercorporeal in this mode of performance.”
Abstract
Contemporary study and practice of composition often equates the act of composing music with reflexive creative processes, implying a mind-body duality between the conceptualization and contextualization of compositional creativity. The paper challenges this notion by defining creativity in musical composition as a multidisciplinary investigation into the structure of musical experience: a creative endeavor defined by a fusion of cognitive and perceptual mechanisms.
In order to further explore how composers engage with creativity, the paper investigates the psychological attributes of creative cognition whose associations become the foundation for an understanding of embodied creativity in musical composition. Here the embodiment of musical creativity is defined as a cognitive and performative causality: a relationship between the cause and effect of our creative experience when composing music. On this ground, the paper surveys the psychological foundations of creativity as it redefines musical composition using the framework of embodiment as its main unifying concept. Using examples from empirical and theoretical research in creativity studies, music psychology, embodied music cognition, philosophy, and the author’s own creative practice, the paper makes an argument for the reciprocity of creative cognition and conation in the act of musical composition. Given the cognitive approach to musical creativity, and employing a practice-based research methodology, the paper thus develops an integrative theoretical model to account for the causality of the cognitive and performative psychological referents responsible for the formation of the embodied creativity in music.
