Postscript: Music composition, creativity and collaboration – an old story, only recently told (original) (raw)

I warmly thank Caroline Traube and Nicolas Donin for offering me the opportunity to add a note to collective reflection on a subject which has greatly occupied my attention: the process of musical creation. Indeed, from the first years in which I was in charge of research in the sciences de la musique at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM, Paris), I spearheaded or encouraged analysis not only of musics themselves, but also of the way in which they are conceived, carried out, and then listened to (see Delalande, 2013, for an overview of this research program). Examining the process of creation over a period of time and in a given place-the GRM where music is made with machines-also meant delving into the question of artistic cooperation among different "professions": the composer of course (it is toward her/him that everyone would turn whenever the question of creativity was involved), but also instrumentalists, scholars, technical and computer assistants, and furthermore, instrument makers, bound up in the creative process. These profiles come into play in this special issue of Musicae Scientiae, but also a question: how are we to give an account of their cooperation? Actually this concern is not all that new, and this is what I would like to set forth within the following historical perspective, grounded partly in my own experience as a researcher and member of the GRM. Over a long period, throughout the time when the technology of writing dominated the composition of Western erudite music-roughly since the 13th century-creation was an eminently solitary activity, which had not been the case within the oral tradition (since creation in the oral context comes about in the very course of transmission); nor is it any longer solitary now whenever it occurs in the research institutions where highly different profiles rub shoulders and cooperate with each other. What actually is musical research? The answer is teams, locations, institutions wherein composers of experimental music are in a relationship of compelled cooperation, whether direct or indirect, with the inventors of technical tools. The full span of these practices is exercised under the watchful eye of a third pillar of musical research; that is, a reflexive, analytical research element (Delalande, 1986). 1 Schaeffer was not wrong to boast of being the "creator of impossible but necessary institutions," as much as he was the inventor of musique concrète. 2