Creativity beyond innovation: Musical performance and craft

While creativity has been defined in a multiplicity of ways across disciplines, scholars generally agree that it involves the generation of ideas or products that are novel, of value, and appropriate to the field. Yet by too readily connecting creativity in musical performance to innovation, does this model neglect the more inconspicuous and unrecognised, but no less valuable, dimensions of creativity in score-based performance? This article offers a characterisation of musical performance situated within a framework of craft, by tracing rehearsal strategies employed in two new performance projects: the rehearsals for, and first performance of Four Duets for clarinet and piano (2012) by Edmund Finnis, written for Mark Simpson and Víkingur Ólafsson; and a recording made by Antony Pay of Alexander Goehr’s Paraphrase for solo clarinet Op. 28 (1969). My argument draws attention to “everyday” aspects of music-making, in which musicians make decisions in engaging with their work which are less explicit than the conventional “moments of revelation” that are prevalent in the literature, but which are nonetheless significant. Acknowledging these attributes of musicians’ performance practices can serve to develop a more nuanced understanding of creativity based on processes rather than outcomes, in order to move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to improvised transience

Reply to Thomas Singer

In reply to Dr. Singer, I question whether clinicians have a monopoly on understanding the unconscious. I reiterate the contention that if clinicians are to engage in cultural analysis, they need to be aware of the epistemology and methodology of disciplines whose sole purpose is to understand culture. Singer unwittingly acknowledges that the discipline of history is an unrecognised, albeit central, component of the theory of cultural complexes. To emphasise the importance of historical research, I challenge the widely held belief that the notion of a cultural unconscious should be attributed to Joseph Henderson. I clarify that my initial aim was to show that there are competing ways in which the term cultural complex has been used within depth psychology and accordingly, it is not a purely Jungian contribution. The current Jungian understanding of cultural complexes is in danger of becoming an uncritical meta-narrative promoting a laissez-faire approach, to which I take exception

The alchemy of austerity

In this article, we examine the return of austerity as a global and national economic and political strategy. We consider debates about the economic viability of fiscal austerity and about its implications for the politics of welfare. We widen the focus of politics to explore the relationship between austerity and unrest, before turning to the social imaginaries through which austerity is being mobilised in the UK (the Big Economy, the Big Society and the Broken Society). We conclude with some reflections on rethinking the relationships the economy, politics and society through the idea of moral economie