Examining creativity in collaborative music performance: constraint and freedom

Music performance is a creative activity that frequently occurs in collaboration with other musicians. As stated by Robinson (2011, p. 152), “creativity is a process more often than it is an event,” where this process involves not only generating new ideas but also evaluating them. Many researchers have examined the creative processes that occur in the musical collaborations that take place in orchestras, bands, choirs and smaller ensembles such as duos, trios and quartets (Davidson, 2005, Juslin and Timmers, 2010, Juslin and Laukka, 2003, Good and Davidson, 2002) where musical ideas are both generated and evaluated in the act of performance itself. This paper examines the duality of both creative constraint and creative freedom in collaborative music performance, focusing on the musical interactions and communications between a piano accompanist and a solo performer. Drawing on the work of Katz (2009) and other researchers in this field (Kokotsaki, 2007, White, 2010) this paper uses the analysis of an autoethnographic narrative (Chang, 2008, Ellis and Bochner, 2000, Bartleet and Ellis, 2009) to explore the creative dimensions of music performance for a collaborative pianist with both singers and instrumentalists. The paper concludes that while all musical collaborations share similar creative constraints and freedoms, there are significant creative differences for a piano accompanist when performing with singers and instrumentalists. The findings of this case study (Flyvbjerg, 2011, Flyvbjerg, 2006) will add more understanding to the significance of creativity in collaborative music performance.