David Byrne on How Music and Creativity Work
Maria Popova,
Brain Pickings,
Sept 13, 2012
This is really interesting, because I've had long conversations with Donald Belliveau on this exact topic. Don is a musician and composer, as we explored in some depth the creativity process in music. What we found was essentially the same thing David Byrne has found (and, presumably, known about a long longer than we did): "context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed... the tailoring process — form being tailored to fit a given context — is largely unconscious, instinctive. We usually don't even notice it. Opportunity and availability are often the mother of invention."
It's like I wrote on the subject of copyright a few years ago, "there is far less that's original than the supposed originators would like to claim." It's that whole idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, except they're not giants, they're leviathans, compositions of society as a whole. Don illustrated the point with a simple example: popular music today, he said, conforms to the hip hop beat (dum dum DUM, sum dum DUM). This can be contrasted with rock beats, say or disco (thump thump thump thump). Popular musicians (Taylor Swift, Arcade Fire) write into this format. Yes, it will evolve (I'll have to listen to K-Pop more carefully). But this won't be the result of some creative genius - it will be the consequence of an entire culture. And it won't be better - it will just be different.
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