Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2007. Dept. of Art. / CD-Rom includes images of art work. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 8).

This thesis examines creativity in performance through the study of the performance practices of professional clarinettists. Creativity research has tended to emphasise the innovative, revelatory qualities of the creative process, rather than the more pragmatic activities related to notated performance. This corresponds to a tension between the perceived creative opportunities of improvisation and notated music, and has resulted in a discourse that associates improvisation with spontaneity and novelty, and notated performance with repetition and reproduction. How might this discourse be challenged? Through a series of case studies documenting clarinettists working in a variety of collaborative settings, I examine how performers' constructions of creativity might complement or challenge the perceived creative affordances of notated music, and how the presence of, and/or collaboration with a living composer affects the creative process. A broadly ethnographic methodology is employed, drawing on thematic analysis of qualitative data obtained through semi-structured interviews with musicians, and audio-visual footage of workshops, rehearsals and performances. Conceptually, the thesis adopts an ecological perspective (Ingold 2011; Clarke, Doffman, and Lim 2013), proposing that creativity is a distributed phenomenon, entangled within a complex interweaving of social, material, and historical influences. It draws on work by Richard Sennett (2008) and Tim Ingold (2013) on craft and material engagement, suggesting that the interaction between a practitioner and a tradition entails a synthesis of action, perception and prior experience. I argue that this orientation is useful for developing an analytical framework that accounts for the dimensions of performance that might otherwise be taken for granted. The research offers insights into the performance practices of contemporary concert musics - a line of inquiry that remains largely unaddressed. More broadly, it makes room for a more forward-looking model of creativity based on processes rather than outcomes, and one that better appreciates the fluid pathways between performers and scores.

The aim of the thesis was to explore two focus questions using the phenomenological approach. Firstly, what it meant to be an artist for three particular artists; a painter, a writer and a playwright. Secondly, what a general explicitation (after Van Kaam, 1958) of the three subjects' artistic creative experience and working processes revealed in essence. The taped data of the three artists were reduced and explored through a number of phenomenological strategies. This led to the formulation of four essential descriptions for each artist, which were based structurally on Van den Berg's experiential categories in A Different Existence. Thus, the essential descriptions reflect each artist's relationship with his/her world, body, fellow people and time. The final step was the achievement of a general extended description. The major conclusion arising from the phenomenological explication is that art affords a way through which artists are able to live an authentic existence. That is, the body and world of the artist are in harmony and the artist's art roots him in the past, is manifest in the present and indicates the future direction of his work. Another conclusion is that the artist is Janus-faced and this enables him/her to balance subjectivity and objectivity in the Lebenswelt and to communicate what he/she sees to others in a healthy way through art. The artist's relationship with world, body, fellow people and with time, is postulated as being qualitatively richer than that of the nonartist. The two focus questions were successfully answered through the research explication and were validated by two independent judges. The viability of the phenomenological approach in the field of artistic creativity was therefore demonstrated. Suggestions for future research were made, one of which was that more phenomenological research aimed at eliciting specific information on the creation of art works might render more information on the artistic creative process.

This dissertation examines Éliane Radigue’s collaborative compositional practice as an alternative model of creation. Using normative Western classical music mythologies as a backdrop, this dissertation interrogates the ways in which Radigue’s creative practice calls into question traditional understandings of creative agency, authorship, reproduction, performance, and the work concept. Based on extensive interviews with the principal performer-collaborators of Radigue’s early instrumental works, this dissertation retraces the networks and processes of creation—from the first stages of the initiation process to the transmission of the fully formed composition to other instrumentalists. In doing so, I aim to investigate the ways in which Radigue’s unique working method resists capitalist models of commodification and reconfigures the traditional hierarchical relationship between composer, score, and performer. Chapter 1 traces Radigue’s early experiences with collaboration and collective creativity in the male-dominated early electronic music studios of France in the 1950s and 60s. Chapter 2 focuses on the initiation process behind new compositions. Divided into two parts, the first part describes the normative classical music-commissioning model (NCMCM) using contemporary guides for composers and commissioners and my own experiences as an American composer of concert music. The second part examines Radigue’s performer-based commissioning model and illuminates how this initiation process resists power structures of the NCMCM. Chapter 3, which is centered on the role of the composer, score, and performer, is divided into three parts. The first details the relationship between composer, score, and performer in the mythologies of nineteenth-century Western classical music. I again draw from both primary sources and my own personal experiences as a composer to explore these normative frameworks. The second details the procedures of Éliane Radigue’s creative process in her earliest collaborative instrumental compositions (Elemental II, Naldjorlak I, and OCCAM I for solo harp) and the Occam Ocean series as a whole. Using these as a point of departure, the third part explores the role of the composer, score, and performer in Radigue’s collaborative process, examining the ways in which these roles are reconfigured to create new, more equitable relationships between creative actors.

While existing criticism of Emma Tennant's work emphasizes its feminist agenda, less attention has been paid to her rewriting of different narratives and discourses. Tennant's career has centered on challenging literary values as well as generic categories, realist conventions, and gender stereotypes. Contrary to implications that rewriting is "re-vision," an "act of survival" that corrects or subverts earlier texts, this thesis argues that Tennant's characteristic resistance to categories also extends to the work of rewriting and revision. Her texts suggest that the act of "writing back" is not as straightforward as it may seem, but deeply ambiguous and ambivalent. Developing theories of the "signature" that return the writer-as-agent to the otherwise anonymous field of intertextuality, this thesis traces Tennant's figurations of writing, metafictional devices, and intertextual allusions to show how these relate to themes in the fiction. Examining groupings of the texts from different critical perspectives, each chapter shows how Tennant's rewritings destabilize notions of originality, identity, and agency, and represent political discourses and social progress in an ambivalent way. While this thesis offers very specific insights into Tennant's work, the close readings also encompass broader themes, such as feminism and postmodernism, the gothic, myths of home and exile, and the ventriloquistic techniques of pastiche and biofiction. The arguments centered on her work contribute to the larger discourse on rewriting in two ways. First, in problematizing assumptions that rewriting inherently strives toward progress or correction, this thesis argues that rewriting can dramatize the ambiguity and ambivalence that haunt acts of resistance. Second, in advancing challenges to the idea that intertextuality functions anonymously, it argues that rewriting can return agency to the text by offering representations of authorship that engage with literary and cultural history.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / Please refer to full text for abstract.

The problem of this study was to determine whether there was any relationship between selected personality variables and art production with structured and non-structured stimuli.

Hawthorne is one among the few American writers who have dwelt on the subject of the creative process throughout his works. Through introspection and then skillfully enumerating the necessary elements of artistry, Hawthorne educated his audience in the progression of creating a piece of work. Many changes have taken place in literature since Hawthorne's time, but the basic principles set forth in his theories still hold true. Hawthorne's theories of art and his analysis of the creative process are surely among his most important contributions to literature. In the absence of a long national literary history, he mingled the Actual with the Imaginary and adapted his work to a form of the novel called Romance. With materials he could find concerning the short history of his country, he showed how past events influence the present. He examined the creative process that took place in his own work and shared with posterity the conditions under which he created.

This study utilized a phenomenological research methodology based on Husserl's work to explore the content of subjective internal experiencing during the art process. The study was designed to examine what transpired during the art experience in therapy to provide a better understanding of the therapeutic dimensions of the subject's interaction with the art medium, in this case drawing with pastels. This phenomenological study involved four subjects who participated in eight therapy sessions each, in which art was the principal medium, for a total of 40 hours of therapy over a period of 10 weeks. On the basis of the findings and conclusions of this study, recommendations were made for a series of studies to be conducted to gain broader insight into the therapeutic modalities of the art process. Some considerations for training programs of therapists in the use of art in therapy and recommendations for therapists trained in the use of art in therapy were also included.

As an undergraduate journalism student, I was taught the “little person, big picture” reportage technique – in essence, using an individual’s story to illuminate a larger issue. In this collection, in which I aim for honesty and relatability, I position myself as the “little person” in essays meant to convey one individual’s experiences and thoughts in hopes of touching another individual who’s gone through similar experiences or had similar thoughts. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection