Capitalising on intuition and reflection: Making sense of a composer’s creative process

Author:

Pohjannoro Ulla1

Affiliation:

1. Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki

Abstract

This case study investigated the transformation of intuitive and reflective thinking during a composer’s compositional process. The qualitative data comprised stimulated recall interviews conducted in the composer’s studio during the compositional process and the entire manuscript corpus that the composer created during that process. The results showed the qualitative change in the composer’s intuitive and reflective thinking in the course of the process; within intuitive compositional acts, imagination changed into experimentation and incubation into restructuring, whereas within reflective compositional acts, rule-based reasoning changed into contemplating alternatives. Further, intuitive metacognition decreased while reflective metacognition increased. These changes were explained by concurrent procedures of grounding and rationalisation. In the grounding procedure, the composer substantiated the fuzzy construction of his original ideas (called the Identity Idea by the composer) into aesthetically coherent musical structures that gradually limited the compositional problem space. The rationalisation procedure involved the composer becoming increasingly proficient in the way in which he operated on his musical ideas and materials. After a critical moment, the composer adopted a situation-specific cognitive device called ‘rational intuition’. This ‘rational intuition’ was the composer’s way of creating aesthetic coherence when working fluently, albeit retaining rationality, in an insecure and complex working situation of a creative process. The prerequisites of ‘rational intuition’ were (1) the guidance of a goal-driven cue (i.e. the Identity Idea) as a key determinant and motivational energy for the process; (2) the selection of intuitive and reflective compositional acts to match compositional situations; (3) an expert ability to learn implicitly; and (4) resilience to abeyance.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Music,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Cited by 10 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. Fostering Composer Voice in Tertiary Teaching of Contemporary Music Composition;Journal of Research in Music Education;2024-06-12

2. Towards a Reflection in Creative Experience Questionnaire;Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems;2023-04-19

3. Anagram Technique: The Investigation of Tonal Music into New Frequencies for Composition;2023 Joint International Conference on Digital Arts, Media and Technology with ECTI Northern Section Conference on Electrical, Electronics, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering (ECTI DAMT & NCON);2023-03-22

4. Mind the body: Materiality and physicality in a composer’s thinking process;Psychology of Music;2021-11-20

5. Embodiment in Composition: 4E Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Evidence from a Case Study;Musicae Scientiae;2020-10-10

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