6.2. Datos obtenidos de la observación
6.2.1. Datos recogidos
6.2.1.7. Séptimo hábito: Afilar la sierra
The models of creativity I focus my attention on in this chapter were selected from amongst a number of available models. My selection was informed by the subject of study, namely, music as a mode of cultural production. The nature of my sample (sound recordings and secondary sources relaying the testimony of participants in jazz) and the substance of the scholarship that provides a lens through which I view it (cultural and theoretical discussions of jazz and its cultural, social and musical contexts) meant that cognitive science models of creativity were not appropriate, focusing as they do on brain function, the relationships between intelligence and behaviour, and their roles in creativity. While cognitive science enquiry is no doubt instructive, it seems less
immediately relevant to the essentially social and cultural practice of jazz performance as examined in this thesis.94
93 The capacity for self-‐reflective work may be related to self-‐efficacy (or self-‐belief: ‘I think I can,
I think I can’) and studies suggest higher self-‐efficacy is associated with higher creativity. (See Kaufmann, Creativity 101, 94, for a summary of this research.) The claim that there is a relationship between self-‐reflective work and self-‐efficacy tallies with the claims many jazz musicians have made about the importance of confidence and self-‐belief.
94 For a survey of cognitive science and creativity, see Ronald Finke, Thomas Ward, and Steven
There are other scholars whose work I did not find particularly useful. Joy Paul Guilford and E. Paul Torrance, for instance, scholars well known for their work on creativity, were of limited application to this project for similar reasons: they are primarily concerned with the structure of the intellect and consequent relationship to creativity and the relationship between creativity and
intelligence respectively.95 There is also an extensive literature that links
madness and other pathologies to creativity. While there are probably interesting parallels that could be drawn between such pathologies and the practice of some jazz musicians, the exclusive focus that literature places on individuals is at odds with my emphasis on ensemble jazz.
Among other models considered and discarded are those of: Graham Wallas (predicated on an idea disavowed by David Perkins96), which to some
extent is a common sense application of planning with a dose of metacognition (if the model were to be applied to jazz performance); Joseph Rossman, who builds upon Wallas’s ideas usefully, but whose model is more applicable to scientific enquiry than to cultural practice, I think; Alex Osborn (who developed brainstorming), whose model I like and might have been used here, although applying his seven-‐step process to the creative practices of jazz musicians probably wouldn’t have revealed very much more about those practices than was obvious from the act of parsing them into those steps in the first place. There are numerous other models too, which have been helpfully summarised by Silvano Arieti in his book Creativity: The Magic Synthesis.97 For the most part,
these models seemed unable to accommodate the variety of practice I have found amongst the jazz musicians considered. The five models I have adopted each tells a part of the story, and as such can be combined in useful ways that make sense of the music and the musicians I am considering.
95 Guilford, The nature of human intelligence; Torrance, E. Paul. Torrance test of Creative Thinking: Directions manual and scoring guide (Bensenville, IL: Scholastic testing Service, 1966). A useful summary of Guilford and Torrance’s work is found in Kaufmann, Creativity 101, 15-‐16.
96 Perkins, The Mind’s Best Work, 49-‐73.
97 Silvano Arieti, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis (New York: Basic Books, 1976). A more recent
survey has been complied by Paul Plsek, ‘Models for the Creative Process’ (1996) <http://www.directedcreativity.com/pages/WPModels.html> (24 March 2014).
As a general principle, I accept Thomas Kuhn, Jason Toynbee, Howard Becker and Keith Sawyer’s claims that creativity is primarily socially achieved: that creativity is the product of groups rather than individuals. While I do not discount the possibility that individuals can achieve creative outcomes working alone, for the purposes of this study – which focuses on ensemble jazz
performance – a social paradigm makes the most sense to me. In light of this, some well-‐known writers who might normally be expected to be included in a study of creativity – such as Edward DeBono – have been omitted because their work focuses on areas that are marginal to my central, social focus.98 While such
omissions narrow the focus of my work, I believe such a narrowing deepens the work rather than impoverishes it.
I begin with Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Systems Model of Creativity,
because it offers a disciplinary view of creativity, describing the ways a range of participants in particular domains (or disciplines) act as gatekeepers for their domain.99 This model also makes distinctions between different kinds of
domains and the degree to which they accommodate variation. Both of these phenomena are significant to my discussion of jazz in Chapter Two because what is and is not considered jazz is contested by various factions of the field (that is, the gatekeepers), and because in some ways those disagreements come down to what it is considered acceptable to vary, or include, or omit, when playing jazz. These notions have obvious consequences for the sounding objects that
musicians produce.
The second model I discuss is sociologist Jason Toynbee’s Radius of Creativity Model.100 Toynbee’s model is particularly useful for this study because
it makes comprehensible the way artistic work ranges from being so much a crystallisation of the style features of a particular genre that it might be said that creativity has not occurred at all, through to artistic work that is so eccentric that it is in fact rejected by the field (and so from the domain) in which it occurs.
98 Edward DeBono’s work on a domain-‐general dimension of creativity (Lateral Thinking [New
York: Harper Colophon, 1973]) would be difficult (and perhaps capricious) to empirically demonstrate given the sample I am using.
99 Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity. 100 Toynbee, Making Popular Music.
This model dovetails elegantly with Csikszentmihaly’s Systems Model, and provides a useful lens for understanding different kinds (and degrees) of variation that may be accommodated within particular domains.
The third model examined is Negus and Pickering’s understanding of Creativity as the Communication of Experience.101 Two aspects in particular make
this model applicable to my thesis. First, the writers’ acceptance of an inclusive definition of creativity (as described above) provides a means to accommodate much of the ‘routine creativity’ that is part and parcel of the working lives of artists in all kinds of genres (including jazz musicians). Second, this model locates moments of creative breakthrough (or paradigm shifts) in the context of routine practice, an approach that makes sense of many of the moments of game-‐changing creativity in jazz, some of which are discussed in Part Two.
The fourth model I consider is perhaps more a taxonomy than a model as such, but Margaret Boden’s framework of Combine, Explore, Transform offers an excellent rubric for understanding various mechanisms of creative action.102
Boden’s model is useful in interpreting why certain creative work occupies particular spaces in Toynbee’s Radius of Creativity model, and also helpfully distinguishes between different kinds of creative work in the domain of jazz as examined in Chapter Two of this thesis.
Finally, I discuss Keith Sawyer’s model of Group Creativity.103 Sawyer’s
model is particularly significant because it underscores the role of the ensemble or group as being indispensible to the creative moment, and illustrates the importance of improvisation, group flow and emergence, all of which generally characterise jazz performance (as discussed in Chapter Two).
Of the five models I make use of, only Keith Sawyer’s model of group creativity has been applied to jazz in significant degree. To some extent my conclusions reflect his, but differ in two important ways. First, my analysis includes specific examples of exceptional creativity where the constraints of the
101 Negus and Pickering, Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value.
102 Margaret Boden, ‘Creativity: How does it work?’, in The Idea of Creativity, ed. Michael Krausz,
Dennis Dutton and Karen Bardsley (Boston: Brill, 2009), 237-‐250.
genre were exceeded as a result of group action (something Sawyer’s work implies may be possible, but does not elaborate in any detail). In some of the instances I examine the genre of jazz was advanced (or at least changed) as a result of this creativity, an eventuality Sawyer’s work does not really address. Second, I examine instances when group practices have been deliberately
unsettled by leaders in ways that result in enhanced creative practice on the part of their groups. This idea is suggested by Sawyer in very general terms (and detailed to a greater extent by Teresa Amabile, although without a particular context being specified104) but has not been explored by either writer in the kind
of detail I provide here. In these ways I believe my work carries forward the ideas that Sawyer promulgates.
Jason Toynbee makes reference to jazz (and in particular bassist and composer Charles Mingus) in his discussion of social authorship, but the particular aspects of his Radius of Creativity model that I make use of are not applied to jazz in any rigorous way in his work. Likewise, Keith Negus and Michael Pickering use jazz musician Miles Davis as an incidental example of a creative actor, but do not systematically apply their model to jazz musicians per se. As far as I am aware, no one has applied Margaret Boden’s Combine, Explore, Transform taxonomy to jazz, or made a systematic application of Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi’s Systems Model to jazz in the ways that I explore it in this thesis.