Processes and experiences of creative cognition in seven Western classical composers

In a qualitative study, we explored the range of reflections and experiences involved in the composition of score-based music by administering a 15-item, open-ended, questionnaire to seven professional composers from Europe and North America. Adopting a grounded theory approach, we organized six different codes emerging from our data into two higher-order categories ( the act of composing and establishing relationships). Our content analysis, inspired by the theoretical resources of 4E cognitive science, points to three overlapping characteristics of creative cognition in music composition: it is largely exploratory, it is grounded in bodily experience, and it emerges from the recursive dialogue of agents and their environment. More generally, such preliminary findings suggest that musical creativity may be advantageously understood as a process of constant adaptation – one in which composers enact their musical styles and identities by exploring novel interactivities hidden in their contingent and historical milieux

The first-person perspective and beyond: Comment on Almaas

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Imprint Academic.The target papers of this special issue make a variety of interesting claims about the nature of consciousness and self. A persistent theme in many of these contributions is the description of various “selfless” states: modes of experience in which one’s sense of selfhood erodes or disappears entirely, and one is left with bare consciousness and a unifying sense that “all is one”. While phenomenologically intriguing, these descriptions can be somewhat difficult to parse for those of us who’ve not personally realized these experiences. Nevertheless, they are important to consider for a number of reasons—including the different ways they appear to challenge some taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of consciousness and self. In this commentary, we engage primarily with Almaas’ contribution. We attempt to clarify what we take his claims about selfless experience to amount to, exactly, and then—working from within the phenomenological tradition—we attempt to show how his descriptions of selfless experience and “pure consciousness” might be reconciled with phenomenological approaches to consciousness and self. We conclude by briefly indicating some of the ways a comparative analysis of this sort is mutually beneficial