My new piece - Symphonic Suite [WIP]

[Richard Barrett]

I'm also saying that the word "instinct" is often used for things that aren't instinctual. There is no "instinct" for example to write tonal music (or to write atonal music); it's something that's learned, maybe to the point of being "second nature" (but not first, which I assume is what's supposed to be meant by instinct).

[Pabmusic]

I think you may have misconstrued what I was trying to say. What is the "rational, conscious" reason for being creative in the first place? The desire to create/express is quintessentially an instinctual thing, if anything is.

Oh - yes, I see. Typical me.

[ahinton]

I think you may have misconstrued what I was trying to say. What is the "rational, conscious" reason for being creative in the first place? The desire to create/express is quintessentially an instinctual thing, if anything is.

Then why "If one were to be entirely "rational, conscious, reflective" there'd be no perceived need or desire for creative work! ..."? I must be getting denser than ever as the years advance, because all that I can seem to perceive here is a sense of tying up in knots - but maybe that's just me...

[ahinton]

I'm also saying that the word "instinct" is often used for things that aren't instinctual. There is no "instinct" for example to write tonal music (or to write atonal music); it's something that's learned, maybe to the point of being "second nature" (but not first, which I assume is what's supposed to be meant by instinct).

So do you perceive there to be no practical way in which instinct can function and work with what is learned, as though the two are somehow inherently incompatible? Composers cannot expect to do much without "what is learned", surely?...

[Ian]

Instinct might might affect how and what you learn, absorb or choose.

What tells us whether an idea is ‘good’ or not. Why do some things leap out and actually become an ‘idea’?

[Ian]

Believe me, instinct is important. We have evolved to behave instinctively (instincts were no doubt important on the African savannah). However, instincts rarely triumph over logic - the brain is easily tricked - but that doesn't make the two incompatible at all. Don't blindly follow your instincts, but don't ignore them either.

Instinctively, I believe you.

[Richard Barrett]

What tells us whether an idea is ‘good’ or not. Why do some things leap out and actually become an ‘idea’?

Possibly because one of the most important abilities a composer might learn is to be able to assess the implications and potential of some particular starting point. Bach would have been able to look at a fugue subject and immediately know where it could lead, what its combinatorial possibilities were, what kind of sequential passages could be extracted from it, and so on. Pierre Henry no doubt had the same kind of insight into the sound of a creaking door. Seeing the possibilities "inherent" in a given point of departure might seem "intuitive", but in my experience it's something that grows with experience (and with the impulsion to use that experience as a springboard for new discoveries), which would seem to imply that again it's second nature rather than first.

[ahinton]

Possibly because one of the most important abilities a composer might learn is to be able to assess the implications and potential of some particular starting point. Bach would have been able to look at a fugue subject and immediately know where it could lead, what its combinatorial possibilities were, what kind of sequential passages could be extracted from it, and so on. Pierre Henry no doubt had the same kind of insight into the sound of a creaking door. Seeing the possibilities "inherent" in a given point of departure might seem "intuitive", but in my experience it's something that grows with experience (and with the impulsion to use that experience as a springboard for new discoveries), which would seem to imply that again it's second nature rather than first.

Isn't it both? - i.e. both "intuitive" and something that "grows with experience", a crucial part of which is a never-ending learning curve? It occurs to me that one's own learning and experiences can influence - or rather impact upon - instincts at least as powerfully if not more so than the kinds of external influence that you mention earlier.

[Serial_Apologist]

If the instinctual is defined as lying in the amygdala, then what issues therefrom in terms of primal survival motivations will as I understand it be mediated in the creative process by learning, any type of society's way of permitting its members' access to what they and it can mutually offer; and this learning is encoded in different ways according to the properties invested in each medium of communication, one such being music. By the time all these hurdles are taken on board as contributants to the whole process of being human, what they have to do has as much to do with ego, the individual's received idea from significant others and memory of him/herself (the ego) as the efficacy of encoded means of transmission and permissibility embodying that self and, by extension, collective self allows.

While most processes involving encodement - from mathematics to DNA - are evidence-dependent, those upon which humanity elects to pin so much dependency for everday protocols and practices are as provisional as the self; yet this concept of "the self", in which issues of instinctuality are confusingly intermixed, is by conventions in many cultures (not just "the Western") so split between instinctuality, logic, and notions of underlying permanence that trying to use the clumsy means of language and concepts thereby implicated to deconstruct then effectively is often seen as threatening to the motivations built thereon, making the task very unpopular, to say the least! At least music is not so bedevilled by divisions into subject and object, self and other, black and white - though there are ways of encoding it as such, and these may be the received unwisdoms of which Richard speaks, now that I understand his distinction. One place to start might be by questioning the Judaeo-Christian idea of inbuilt conflict between the instinctual or intuitive and the logical - whose instalment by means of various forms of self-imagery (advertising) into the minds of the young for social enculturation purposes might, like love deprivation, account for hard-wiring confirmatory of prejudices involved - and replacement of these discongruent notions with others visualising "human nature" as a process of enharmonisation between non-conflicting elements taking place in propitious circumstances, or "Mens sana in corpore sano" as some Roman presumably once said. It might be a better starting point at which to arrive, to misinterpret what somebody said earlier in this thread.

[Ian]

Possibly because one of the most important abilities a composer might learn is to be able to assess the implications and potential of some particular starting point. Bach would have been able to look at a fugue subject and immediately know where it could lead, what its combinatorial possibilities were, what kind of sequential passages could be extracted from it, and so on. Pierre Henry no doubt had the same kind of insight into the sound of a creaking door. Seeing the possibilities "inherent" in a given point of departure might seem "intuitive", but in my experience it's something that grows with experience (and with the impulsion to use that experience as a springboard for new discoveries), which would seem to imply that again it's second nature rather than first.

I agree with that, but I wonder if you have missed out a stage? Bach no doubt could have in an instant understood the contrapuntal possibilities in a fugue subject, but he didn’t do that by looking through a directory of possible fugue subjects choosing the suitable ones - he actually had to come up with them, and the crucial thing (for me) is that his subjects are often really good ideas as well as being suitable fugue subjects. A ‘good’ fugue subject isn’t merely an idea that technically lends itself to that treatment - it has to have some other additional, ‘non-essential’ ingredient.

Also, ‘good‘ ideas aren’t merely the concern of composers - listeners also have an interest. My earliest memories of really loving music go back to when I was about 6 - In the Hall of the Mountain King and Colonel Bogey were big favorites. They both struck me at the time (and still now) has having great ideas, but I don’t think it would have been second nature fueling that response at the age of six.

[Serial_Apologist]

Also, ‘good‘ ideas aren’t merely the concern of composers - listeners also have an interest. My earliest memories of really loving music go back to when I was about 6 - In the Hall of the Mountain King and Colonel Bogey were big favorites. They both struck me at the time (and still now) has having great ideas, but I don’t think it would have been second nature fueling that response at the age of six.

But to argue that is to claim inherent corresponding properties between e.g. those two pieces and your brain receptors. Although theoreticians have argued for instinctual/emotional responses inhering in certain sonorous resonances which confirm validity in tonally resolving harmonic procedures for all time, I'm probably no surer than Richard that this is in fact the case, and that we've reached the optimum if not final point in the evolution of musical idiom in terms of harmony.

[Ian]

But to argue that is to claim inherent corresponding properties between e.g. those two pieces and your brain receptors.

I had put it down to the two composers coming up with, or crafting, ideas that also excited them. So it becomes a bit like sharing an enthusiasm, and my case the enthusiasm was shared without, I think, any additional learnt prompting on anyone else's part.

[Richard Barrett]

I agree with that, but I wonder if you have missed out a stage

I was actually thinking about the situation in which he would be given a subject, which of course we know happened at least once (and not a very suitable one either in fact).

Regarding your early enthusiasms, I really don't think a six-year-old is a musical blank slate. If there was some intrinsic, supra-cultural sense in which these examples were "good ideas", presumably all the musical cultures in the world would produce much more similar manifestations than in fact they do. I recall Colin McPhee writing somewhere that when he first brought a piano to Bali and played various pieces of Western music from several centuries to the local musicians, they thought it all sounded pretty much the same, whereas the differences between the intonational characters of the gamelan orchestras in neighbouring villages were very clear to them.

[Ian]

I was actually thinking about the situation in which he would be given a subject, which of course we know happened at least once (and not a very suitable one either in fact).

If there was some intrinsic, supra-cultural sense in which these examples were "good ideas", presumably all the musical cultures in the world would produce much more similar manifestations than in fact they do. I recall Colin McPhee writing somewhere that when he first brought a piano to Bali and played various pieces of Western music from several centuries to the local musicians, they thought it all sounded pretty much the same, whereas the differences between the intonational characters of the gamelan orchestras in neighbouring villages were very clear to them.

I’m not saying those pieces are intrinsically good- in which the case point about the piano in Bali would be relevant. I was rather wondering why I had personal favorites among the fare that was available to me. As far as I was concerned those pieces had ‘better’ ideas than other, in most respects, similar pieces. What is it that made think that? I don’t think I was aware that those particular pieces were also generally considered hits.

[Richard Barrett]

What is it that made think that? I don’t think I was aware that those particular pieces were also generally considered hits.

The fact that they were considered hits makes it more likely that you'd have been exposed to them in the first place, and perhaps repeatedly, and/or maybe with some other associations... there is certainly something memorable (partly as a result of being simple, symmetrical and repetitive) about those pieces, which as a six-year-old you'd be able to latch on to in a way that you might not with say Brahms.