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Creativity, Collaboration and Development in Jeremy Thurlow's Ouija for Peter Sheppard Skærved

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Eric Clarke ,
Mark Doffman  and
Renee Timmers
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Abstract

This article documents and analyses a creative collaboration between the composer Jeremy Thurlow and the violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved in the production of Ouija, a work for solo violin and laptop computer. The article situates the account of this creative process within recent literature on distributed and collaborative creativity, and focuses on three aspects of the project: verbal interaction between the two musicians, analysed in terms of ‘creative-talk’ and ‘face-talk’, and the relationship between immediate and more contextual concerns (‘inside/outside the room’); a quantitative analysis of changes in the musical material, focusing on timing; and a qualitative analysis of the role of the violinist's embodied and instrumental engagement with the music. The article discusses the findings in relation to forwards-orientated (process) and backwards-orientated (product) conceptions of creativity, the operation of different social components in creative collaboration and the relationship between craft, history and embodiment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 141 , Issue 1 , 2016 , pp. 113 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Jeremy Thurlow and Peter Sheppard Skærved for their generosity in allowing us to follow them in this collaborative project, and for stimulating and productive discussions in our work on this article. This research was supported by award no. AH/D502527/1 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, under its Research Centres scheme, which also provided the funds with which to commission the project. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the article.

Video clips 1–5 are available as supplemental material at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2016.1151240.

References

1 Some indicators of this interest are the edited volumes Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, ed. Irène Deliège and Geraint Wiggins (Hove and New York, 2006), and Musical Imaginations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance, and Perception, ed. David Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell and Ray MacDonald (Oxford, 2012); the three international conferences ‘Tracking the Creative Process in Music’ held in Lille, Montreal and Paris in 2011, 2013 and 2015 respectively (see <http://tcpm2011.meshs.fr/?lang=en>, <http://tcpm2013.oicrm.org/?lang=en> and <http://tcpm2015.ircam.fr/>); and the large-scale European Research Council funded project Music, Digitization and Mediation (see <http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk>).

2 Though not all: many musicians continue to find that clearly demarcated and established roles make for a highly productive way of working. See, for example, John Croft, ‘On Working Alone’, Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, ed. Eric Clarke and Mark Doffman (New York, forthcoming).

3 Creativity as problem-solving using domain-specific expert knowledge has become a dominant model within creativity research; see K. Anders Ericsson, ‘Creative Expertise as Superior Reproducible Performance: Innovative and Flexible Aspects of Expert Performance’, Psychological Inquiry, 10 (1999), 329–33, and Robert W. Weisberg, Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts (Hoboken, NJ, 2006). For an overview of the state of creativity research, see Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge, 1999), and more recently The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, ed. James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge, 2010).

4 See Collaborative Creativity: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Dorothy Miell and Karen Littleton (London, 2004).

5 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA, 1982), 13. The collaboration discussed in this article itself has a significantly sequential character, in addition to important moments/periods of simultaneous engagement.

6 See, for example, R. Keith Sawyer, Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration (Mahwah, NJ, 2003); idem, The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York, 2007); and idem, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2nd edn, New York, 2012).

7 R. Keith Sawyer, ‘Group Creativity: Musical Performance and Collaboration’, Psychology of Music, 34 (2006), 148–65 (p. 148).

8 Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Bryn Harrison and Philip Thomas, ‘Interpretation and Performance in Bryn Harrison's être-temps’, Musicae scientiae, 9 (2005), 31–74.

9 Ibid., 34.

10 Clarke, Cook, Harrison and Thomas, ‘Interpretation’, 45.

11 Harrison, quoted ibid., 43. Thomas, too, regards the notation as ‘a prescription for action rather than a description of sound’ (quoted ibid., 39).

12 Fabrice Fitch and Neil Heyde, ‘“Recercar”: The Collaborative Process as Invention’, Twentieth-Century Music, 4 (2007), 71–95.

13 See Helmut Lachenmann, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, ed. with an introduction by Joseph Häusler (Wiesbaden, 1996), for the notion of ‘building an instrument’ as encapsulating the compositional process; cited in Fitch and Heyde, ‘“Recercar”’, 92.

14 Fitch and Heyde, ‘“Recercar”’, 92–3.

15 Ibid., 93.

16 Amanda Bayley, ‘Multiple Takes: Using Recordings to Document Creative Process’, Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology, ed. Amanda Bayley (Cambridge, 2010), 206–24.

17 Amanda Bayley, ‘Ethnographic Research into Contemporary String Quartet Rehearsal’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 20 (2011), 385–411.

18 Jane W. Davidson and James M. Good, ‘Social and Musical Co-ordination between Members of a String Quartet: An Exploratory Study’, Psychology of Music, 30 (2002), 186–201.

19 Bayley draws heavily on Steven Feld's notion of ‘interpretive moves’, the active and multiple sense-making of which listeners make use when engaging with what he describes as the ‘dialectic musical object’. Feld's analysis attempts to move away from the overly psychological ‘billiard-ball’ approach to the generation of musical meaning and towards a dynamic understanding of the relationship between listeners and sound. Bayley transfers his model into the domain of musical practice – how ‘interpretive moves’ may take place within the frame of a rehearsal; see Feld, ‘Communication, Music and Speech about Music’, Music Grooves, ed. Charles Keil and Steven Feld (2nd edn, Tucson, AZ, 2005), 77–95.

20 Bayley, ‘Multiple Takes’, 213.

21 Amanda Bayley, ‘Ethnographic Research’, 399.

22 Brian Ferneyhough, Climbing a Mountain: Sixth String Quartet in Rehearsal and in Performance (Arditti Quartet; Optic Nerve, 2011; 2 DVDs, prod. Paul Archbold, dir. and photographed by Colin Still for the Institute of Musical Research, London).

23 Ibid., DVD 1, 13:11.

24 Eric Clarke, Mark Doffman and Liza Lim, ‘Distributed Creativity and Ecological Dynamics: A Case Study of Liza Lim's “Tongue of the Invisible”’, Music and Letters, 94 (2013), 628–63.

25 See, for example, Georgina Born, ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’, Twentieth-Century Music, 2 (2005), 7–36, and Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam, ‘Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction’, Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, ed. Hallam and Ingold (Oxford, 2007), 1–24.

26 The commission was made possible by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice.

27 Eric Clarke interview with Jeremy Thurlow, 6 August 2012.

28 Clarke, interview with Thurlow, 6 August 2012.

29 Ibid. A ouija board is a device used at séances to communicate with the spirits of dead people.

30 Email correspondence from Jeremy Thurlow to Peter Sheppard Skærved and Mark Doffman, 15 February 2012. ‘New repartee’ refers to a movement provisionally entitled ‘Repartee’ which Peter and Jeremy tried out at the first workshop, but subsequently abandoned.

31 From W1 (see Table 1 below, p. 129).

32 Jeremy consistently refers to the laptop music as the ‘tape part’.

33 These recordings were made by Peter Sheppard Skærved on violin and viola, and by his Kreutzer Quartet colleague Neil Heyde on cello.

34 The use of recorded string sounds at the start of each line, where the instrumental sound of the line is most exposed and noticeable, and of optimally controlled contrapuntal relationships between the lines allowed the most successful combination of control with sonic realism to be achieved.

35 In effect the entire collaborative creative process (i.e. all of the creative work that was not Jeremy's ‘private’ compositional activity) was recorded on video.

36 The retrospective verbal protocol method presents participants with previously recorded (audio or audiovisual) material and invites them to comment on anything that they see/hear going on that strikes them as worth mentioning. It has been used in general social science research (see, for example, K. Anders Ericsson and Herbert A. Simon, Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data (rev. edn, Cambridge, MA, 1993)) and in some previous music research (see, for example, Matthew Sansom, ‘Musical Meaning: A Qualitative Investigation of Free Improvisation’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sheffield, 1997), and Mirjam James, Karen Wise and John Rink, ‘Exploring Creativity in Musical Performance through Lesson Observation with Video-Recall Interviews’, Scientia paedagogica experimentalis, 47 (2010), 219–50).

37 Video was captured in HD using a Sony HD HDR-XR200 AVCHD Handycam (4 megapixels).

38 Both Jeremy and Peter sent comments on the full draft, and also commented on the impact of the involvement and presence of the first two authors in the project. Both musicians expressed the view that this had been entirely positive. Peter (interview, 19 July 2012) observed that it had ‘enhanced it hugely, because we've been thinking about how we collaborate from the get-go. And that's been very, very nice. It also meant that it has helped with the intensity level from the beginning, which was brilliant’; and later stated: ‘The presence of Mark Doffman and Eric Clarke at the various stages of this project has been an enabling, benevolent one. At no stage did they interfere with the trajectory of the work, but provided a space for reflection’ (email to Eric Clarke, 8 February 2014). Likewise, Jeremy (interview, 3 November 2012) stated: ‘I quickly found that this was a very nice working relationship with Peter and indeed with you [Mark Doffman] because you were there the whole time as well …. So it was a very nice supportive relationship.’

39 PRAAT is a program developed for speech analysis by Paul Boersma and David Weenink, and is used widely in music performance research. See

40 Sonic Visualiser is an audio analysis program with a number of purpose-designed functions to assist with the detailed analysis of recorded music. See

41 R. Keith Sawyer and Stacy DeZutter, ‘Distributed Creativity: How Collective Creations Emerge from Collaboration’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, 3 (2009), 81–92.

42 See, however, Fred Seddon, ‘Empathetic Creativity: The Product of Empathetic Attunement’, Collaborative Creativity, ed. Miell and Littlejohn, 65–78; Bayley, ‘Multiple Takes’; and eadem, ‘Ethnographic Research’. For a content-analytical approach to rehearsal, see Jane Ginsborg, Roger Chaffin and George Nicholson, ‘Shared Performance Cues in Singing and Conducting: A Content Analysis of Talk During Practice’, Psychology of Music, 34 (2006), 167–94.

43 From W1.

44 From W1.

45 Mihailo Trandafilovski is the second violinist of the Kreutzer Quartet, of which Peter is the leader.

46 From W2.1.

47 In the second workshop, a few moments of purely social intercourse are indicated, which were primarily related to a visiting composer, well known to both Peter and Jeremy, who was present for some of the rehearsal.

48 From W1.

49 We use the term ‘directive’ here very broadly following Searle's typology of speech acts – assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declaratives. Directives are those types of speech in which the speaker expresses the desire for the addressee to do something. This sort of speech includes advice, questions and requests, as well as direct orders. See John R. Searle, ‘A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts’, Language, Mind and Knowledge, ed. Keith Gunderson, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 7 (Minneapolis, MN, 1975), 344–69.

50 From I3.

51 From W1.

52 Ibid.

53 From I2.

54 Ingold and Hallam, ‘Creativity and Cultural Improvisation’.

55 From I3.

56 For an introduction to the idea of face-work, see Erving Goffman, ‘On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction’, Psychiatry, 18 (1955), 213–31.

57 Hsien-Chin Hu, ‘The Chinese Concept of “Face”’, American Anthropologist, 46 (1944), 45–64; Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (Garden City, NY, 1967); Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge, 1987).

58 Kathy Domenici and Stephen W. Littlejohn, Facework: Bridging Theory and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA, and London, 2006), 10.

59 John G. Oetzel, Stella Ting-Toomey, Yumiko Yokochi, Tomoko Masumoto and Jiro Takai, ‘A Typology of Facework Behaviors in Conflicts with Best Friends and Relative Strangers’, Communication Quarterly, 48 (2000), 397–419 (p. 398).

60 From W1.

61 From W2.2.

63 From I2.

64 See Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London, 2008).

65 From I1.

66 From W1.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 From I3.

70 Byron Dueck, ‘Jazz Endings, Aesthetic Discourse and Musical Publics’, Black Music Research Journal, 33 (2013), 91–115.

71 Steven Feld and Aaron Fox, ‘Music and Language’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 23 (1994), 25–53 (p. 43).

72 From W1.

73 See Eric Clarke, ‘Empirical Methods in the Study of Performance’, Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, ed. Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook (Oxford, 2004), 77–102.

74 The limitations of regarding the score as specifying an ‘inexpressive performance’ and departures from the score as a measure of expressiveness have been widely pointed out.

75 See Renee Timmers and Henkjan Honing, ‘On Music Performance, Theories, Measurement and Diversity’, Cognitive Processing, ed. Marta Belardinelli, special issue of International Quarterly of Cognitive Sciences, 1–2 (2002), 1–19.

76 We use the word ‘playing’ to refer both to rehearsal run-throughs and true (public) performances.

77 From W1.

78 A correlation coefficient measures the linear relationship between two sets of numerical values, and ranges from +1 (perfectly positive covariance) to 0 (no relationship) to -1 (a perfect inverse covariance). The analyses discussed here are based on 46 data points, excluding the four data points for the pauses. The statistical significance value (p value) indicates the probability that this association is based on chance (in this case, very unlikely).

79 From W1.

80 The notes in the score read: ‘Bars should not be treated as separate phrases, but joined together in longer phrases comprising several bars (sometimes 3, sometimes 4, 5 …). These larger phrases can end with longer notes (dotted minims, semibreves, etc.) and may be followed by rests.’

81 From W1.

82 After the first play-through Jeremy reminded Peter of the recommendation to join together different numbers of units, which Peter immediately implemented.

83 There are two units (SNU + LNU) per bar.

84 W1.

85 From I2.

86 From I1.

87 From W1.

88 From I1.

89 Some important landmarks include Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962; original French version 1945); Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA, 1991); and Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA, 1997).

90 See, for example, Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, IL, 1958), and George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter and Karl H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behaviour (New York, 1960).

91 The standard example is knowing how to ride a bicycle.

92 From I1.

93 One of Peter's ongoing projects is investigating Paganini – his violin and bows, his repertoire and concert schedules, and the particular playing posture that he appears to have adopted. As Peter explained: ‘I'm very involved in using iconography of Paganini to look at his performance practice, and how much of his music and the new instrument technology he was using was relying on a certain form of posture.’ From I1.

94 From I1.

95 Video clips 1 and 2 may be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2016.1151240.

96 From I1.

97 From W2.2.

98 Video clips 3 and 4 may be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2016.1151240.

99 Video clip 5 may be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2016.1151240.

100 From W2.2 (with following response from Jeremy).

101 See Eric F. Clarke and Jane W. Davidson, ‘The Body in Performance’, Composition–Performance–Reception: Studies in the Creative Process in Music, ed. Wyndham Thomas (Aldershot, 1998), 74–92.

102 See Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (London, 1990), and, for a contrasting view, David Gelerntner, The Muse in the Machine: Computers and Creative Thought (London, 1994), both cited in Eva Vass, ‘Understanding Collaborative Creativity: Young Children's Classroom-Based Shared Creative Writing’, Collaborative Creativity, ed. Miell and Littlejohn, 79–95 (p. 80).

103 See Dueck, ‘Jazz Endings’.

104 See, for example, Sawyer and DeZutter, ‘Distributed Creativity’, and Sawyer, ‘Group Creativity’.

105 Sawyer does refer to scripts, formulaic speech and the dialogic Bakhtinian qualities of language, all of which are reliant on the capacity of language to connect past, present and future contexts. Our reading of his work, however, is that it establishes an undue emphasis on the present, and diminishes the importance of cultural cues and social identity within a collaborative framework. See Sawyer, ‘Group Creativity’, 154–6.

106 From W1.

107 Jeremy's own sense that this should be the case, and of his own creative responsibility, is expressed in the following passage from his interview after the first performance, where he states that despite the improvised element Ouija should be ‘a piece that I had imagined and dreamed and made happen, and that I thought was worth hearing. So it's a sort of contract as an artist: you have to do something that you think is worth people's time coming along to listen to, and they will actually get something good from. And so I wanted to fulfil that, and the more you say that the performer can do whatever they like, the less you feel you've kept your bargain there’ (from I1).

108 From I1.

109 Ibid.

110 ‘I try and avoid playing music by composers who are alive with whom I don't have a relationship. Simply because if there's an opportunity to have it, there's so much to be gained from that; and even if I don't have a relationship with them I try to work with somebody who does have a relationship with them.’ Ibid.

111 From I2.

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