The Creative Process in Musical Composition: An Introspective Account

TL;DR

This chapter provides an introspective account of the long-term creative process behind composing a musical piece, emphasizing personal experience and evolving understanding of creativity over nearly two decades.

Contribution

It offers a personal, experiential perspective on the creative process in music composition, integrating scholarly insights with individual practice.

Findings

Creative process unfolds over years, influenced by personal experience.

Intuitive understanding of creativity is shaped through practice and scholarly reading.

Personal bias influences interpretation of the creative process.

Abstract

This chapter charts the creative process in the composition of a piece of music titled 'Stream not gone dry' that unfolded, while I was primarily occupied with other matters, over the course of nearly two decades. It avoids discussion of the technical aspects of musical composition, and it can be read by someone with no formal knowledge of music. The focus here is on what the process of composing this particular piece of music says about how the creative process works. My interpretation of the music-making process may be biased by my academic view of creativity, but I believe that the influence works primarily in the other direction, my understanding of how the creative process works is derived from experiences creating. This intuitive understanding is shaped over time by the process of reading scholarly papers on creativity and working them into my own evolving theory of creativity, but the papers that I resonate with and incorporate are those that are in line with my experience. This chapter just makes the influence of personal experience more explicit than in other more scholarly writings on creativity.