Introduction
Creativity is an important topic culturally, psychologically and developmentally. At the cultural level, scientists, authors, government agencies and others maintainFootnote 1 that creativity lies at the heart of the modern economy. Popular music has been designated as part of the Creative Arts Industry by policy makers in government and academia, and the extent to which its instrumental practitioners are actually creative is gaining increasing attention (Frith Reference Frith, Hargreaves, Miell and MacDonald2012; Burnard Reference Burnard2012; McIntyre et al. Reference McIntyre, Fulton and Paton2016; Cook Reference Cook2018). On the psychological level there is proven linkage between control, creativity and wellness. It is a commonplace within performance psychology that the greatest performer happiness lies in those domains that accommodate and welcome the personal expressive input of the performer and that afford her a sense of control over her own performance. Within developmental studies, enhancing problem solving and critical thinking skills in children gives rise to an enhanced understanding of later-life creativity that may be valuable in this so-called creative economy.
Creativity has, undoubtedly, a slippery nature and many meanings. What I mean by the term is an elusive phenomenon that exists in the world, that makes a concrete difference to some aspect of the world, and that contemporary cultures and individuals recognise and value. While understanding remains clouded, it is too soon to follow Frith's call to abandon the notion altogether (Frith Reference Frith, Hargreaves, Miell and MacDonald2012, p. 71). On the contrary, its sheer ubiquity and substantial overuse argue for renewed engagement in the hunt for greater clarity.
In this article, one creativity model is applied to four case studies of expert Western kit drummers’ performance practices. One of my subjects fills rock stadia: a second is in the central mainstream as a lauded studio player. The documentary evidence from the two remaining drummers details and describes the exceptionally high level of performance in the avant-garde of conceptual rock or modern jazz, the smaller fields of operation inhabited by the iconoclasts, the disaffected or those who simply do not fit in. Each performer's actions and perceptions, and their commentary thereon, are analysed through the lens of the Five As framework of distributive creativity (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014).
Creativity and music performance
The history of the development of thinking on the topic has been elegantly described by John Hope Mason, and several scholars have brought forward comprehensive reviews of the main trends in the creativity literature (Hope Mason Reference Hope Mason2003; Sternberg and Lubart Reference Sternberg, Lubart and Sternberg1999; Fillis and McAuley Reference Fillis and McAuley2000; Starko Reference Starko2001; McIntyre Reference McIntyre2012; Glăveanu 2012). To understand its relationship to popular music instrumental performance it is necessary to briefly review how we got to where we are. Rather than highlight and debate differences in the creativity discourse however, I confine myself to trying to seek out and apply the key conceptions that usefully illuminate the methodology of the expert drummer. Broadly, contemporary creativity theory distinguishes between the Romantic person-centric approach found in earlier understandings of the phenomenon and more contemporary Rationalist systemic approaches (Csikszentmihalyi Reference Csikszentmihalyi and Sternberg1988; Gruber Reference Gruber, Wallace and Gruber1989). In the latter view, creativity is seen as a dynamic system working on a larger scale than that of the ‘lone-genius’ paradigm posited by the Romantic conception and concomitant understandings. At the risk of oversimplification, such models posit an interlinked system comprising an individual, a ‘domain’ of structured knowledge that the individual must access, and a ‘field’ that comprises all those who can affect the structure of the domain. A set of rules and practices is transmitted from the domain to the individual, who is encultured into the domain and socialised into the field. For creativity to occur, the individual must produce something unique and useful such that it is adopted back into the domain, thus increasing the store of knowledge. The predominant line of critique here points to the focus on a domain-changing contribution from an individual, a focus that fails to offer a satisfactory account of the construction and assessment of the more ‘everyday’, distributed, collaborative creativity undertaken by many popular music instrumentalists.
No longer a divine or mysterious process in the gift of the Gods and bestowed upon the lone genius, contemporary thinking sees creativity as something that can be identified in us all. While not everyone will, anyone might become creative in meaningful ways (Treffinger Reference Treffinger1995, p. 302). Far from being in the province alone of the highly gifted, we all share a cognitive apparatus capable of creativity (Weisberg Reference Weisberg1993; Webster Reference Webster2002). Only some, however, are given to employ that apparatus in a manner likely to produce a creative act on a spectrum ranging from the everyday sort of creativity employed by many, known as ‘little-c’ or ‘P’ (psychological) creativity, to the novel, useful and surprising creativity accepted as such by a field of experts and in the gift of very few, characterised as ‘Big-C’ or ‘H’ (historical) creativity.Footnote 2 Little-c creativity includes everyday problem-solving and the ability to adapt to change, and arguably, the ability to play a musical instrument to a rudimentary standard. Big-C creativity is far rarer, and is held to occur when a person solves a problem or creates an object that has a major impact on how we think, feel and live our lives.Footnote 3 In the domain of the drummer, for instance, it takes Big-C creativity to change the way subsequent practitioners come to view the very role and function of the instrument itself. Conceptions of creativity generally coalesce around notions of novelty and usefulness (or value). McIntyre's definition of the phenomenon encapsulates these key components. For him, creativity is:
a productive activity whereby objects, processes and ideas are generated from antecedent conditions through the agency of someone, whose knowledge to do so comes from somewhere and the resultant novel variation is seen as a valued addition to the store of knowledge in at least one social setting. (Cited in Fulton and Paton Reference Fulton, Paton, McIntyre, Fulton and Paton2016, p. 41)
Creativity in music performance now tends to be located within an interactive ‘network of people co-operating’ (Burnard Reference Burnard2012, p. 14). Current findings document creativity as a culturally situated human behaviour characterised as recombinational, exploratory and/or transformational, with a component of problem finding or problem solving, less a discrete expression of individual will and more an activity constrained by, and mediated between, multiple actors and agencies. Music creativity, many suggest, is seldom the result of individual action alone (Cook Reference Cook2018; McIntyre et al. Reference McIntyre, Fulton and Paton2016; Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014).
The contemporary belief that music performance should embody some degree of creativity as a matter of course is widely held but quite new. Attempts to assess its extent and the degree to which it may be encouraged or constrained within different types of performance have hitherto originated from within the classical music tradition, with questionable transference to popular music. Within the former, and as recently as the mid-20th century, the performer was typically seen as the mouthpiece of the composer, whose explicit will was to be carried out to the letter. As Nicholas Cook reminds us, creative collaboration of the kind with which we are familiar in the 21st century was also evident in 17th century musicking, in which the composition was ‘a “gist” capable of any number of sonic instantiations’ (Cook Reference Cook2018, p. 83). The contemporary expectation that a competent jazz musician can extemporise from lead sheets was already there in the practice of ‘Private Music’, a pool of elite musicians who provided music for the courts of James I and Charles I. The 17th century music culture was, Cook suggests, one of radically distributed creativity.
Many contemporary performers associate creativity with putting something of one's self into the music (Cottrell Reference Cottrell2004, p. 113), an idea that sits uncomfortably with those composers from any tradition who required, or require, that the performer put nothing of herself into the performance. Arnold Schoenberg, for example, deemed the performer to be ‘totally unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print’ (Cook Reference Cook, Clayton, Herbert and Middleton2003, p. 204). In Pierre Boulez’ view, ‘instrumentalists do not possess invention – otherwise they would be composers’ (Frith Reference Frith, Hargreaves, Miell and MacDonald2012, p. 67). For many composers the performer was at best as a ‘necessary evil’ whose ‘function was to serve the composer’ (Benson Reference Benson2003, pp. 12–14). Creative assessment was thus addressed to the merits of the composition and its effective transmission in performance rather than any individual's interpretation of the work.
Contemporary reconceptions, however, tend to characterise creative performance as socio-cultural, intersubjective and interactive – an action in between actors and their environment. Recent findings drawn from the perceptions of expert drummers indicate that for them creative performance is embedded within a meaningful shared experience around collaboration and community (Bruford Reference Bruford2016, Reference Bruford2018). In Cook's view, the social dimension is fundamental to the creative practice of music (Cook Reference Cook2018). It is facilitated in a co-operative network and implies the reorganisation of ‘the connection or relationship an individual has with the immediate music situation, rather than reorganising that which occurs within the person's mind’ (Greeno cited in Folkestad Reference Folkestad, Hargreaves, Miell and MacDonald2012, p. 196).
Analytic tools
Early models of the mysterious process of creativity emerged from science and mathematics, proposing a four-stage creative process of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification (see for example Wallas Reference Wallas1926). However, dancers’, actors’ and musicians’ perceptions of creativity are tempered by the immediacy of the (usually) collaborative moment in which they must communicate significant difference, literally perform. This immediacy tends to lengthen the preparation period (learning and acquiring sufficient skills), to shorten the incubation (or rehearsal) period and to reduce illumination to an almost instantaneous moment of performance. Contemporary attributions of creativity range across a wide spectrum, from those who characterise almost any music performance as creative to those who reserve the term for the high-level domain-changing creativity of the great masters. However, on the one hand, conceptions of ‘little-c’ everyday creativity tend to be too inclusive: if everyone who can play a musical instrument to a rudimentary standard is to be deemed creative, the term is rendered effectively meaningless. On the other hand, ‘Big-C’ creativity is too exclusive (and stage models too static) to shed much light on the ephemeral, elusive and fluid nature of performance creativity. The impasse might be circumnavigated in part by the adoption of two alternative analytic formulations, but first we begin by establishing those components without which the notion of creativity in performance might be said not to exist (Figure 1).
The components of creative music performance.
1. The components of creative performance
First, something needs to be selected. Drummers typically select, at whatever level of consciousness, from a palette of temporal, metrical, timbral and dynamical options available in the moment of performance. The term ‘in the moment’ is simply used to identify performance actions that permit no revision before any connection with or communication to an audience. These options are selected within multiple constraints: agentive, aesthetical, technical, environmental, motivational and constraints of style and genre (the projection or sublimation of stylistic preferences: if I do this it is grunge; if I do that it is gospel). Second, something needs to be differentiated. For any type of creative artefact to be original, there needs to be qualitative difference in some respect from any previously known instance of that type. For Glăveanu, ‘the creative quality of action, at all times, resides in how differences are negotiated, manipulated, widened or bridged by the person in concrete cultural settings’ (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 76). What counts in drum performance is not where you got it from, but where you take it to, in other words, how it is differentiated.
A third requirement is that the first two need to be communicated. Creative practice requires consistency with a line of thinking that asserts the centrality of connection and communication; they are ‘part and parcel of what it means to create’ (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 37). Music performance becomes connected to and interactive within a network of co-creatives in several ways: audibly (through groove or feel); visually (through body language); culturally (through the sharing of meaning or ideology); or psychologically (through the engendering of feelings and emotions). Without communication, the potentially creative work is, at this point in its embryonic existence, on life support. Without communication there can be no assessment of significance; at least, by no one other than the creator. Any fresh ideas or divergent-thinking the creative agent may possess remain merely as desirable traits if uncommunicated.
Finally, something needs to be assessed. Yet who is assessing what for whom? In a Csikszentmihalyian view, the assessors are held to be the gatekeepers in the field – all of those who can affect the structure of the domain, or permit it to be affected. In the Five As framework, in contrast, the concept of the (individual or group) ‘audience’ substantially broadens the group to include novices, potential customers of a product, parents evaluating a child's work, persons from another domain who may use the product in unforeseen ways (for example, the use of recorded music as source material for sampling), and even the dialogical self–other (Hermans Reference Hermans2001). Borrowing from Hope Mason, it seems to me that the quality in the performance that is under evaluation is the degree of significance; not is it new – but does it matter? (Hope Mason Reference Hope Mason2003, p. 233). A performance may well be novel, useful and appropriate, but its difference should qualify as significant to an audience. As yet, we have no single metric for knowing where or when variation becomes newness. In the sphere of music performance all variation is in some way new, but not all is significant: it is creativity that transforms the trivially new or marginally different into the significantly new or different. These observations gives us the key to unlock an operational definition of creative music performance as a set of choices and decisions, selected from possible options, communicated to and assessed by others for significant difference in an interaction between at minimum an addresser and an addressee.
2. The Five As framework
Several scholars have sought to amend or extend the ‘stage’, systemic and little-c Big-C approaches whose shortcomings in respect of music performance have been sketched above. For our purposes, the most useful expansion draws upon theories of the extended mind and distributed cognition to focus on ‘the dynamic relation between the self and others’ and conceptualises creativity as symbolic meaningful action (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 8). It may be recognised as inhering in a number of qualities, tendencies or capacities attributable to the performance that are explicable, suggests Glăveanu, as a system of relationships. His ‘cultural psychology of creativity’ sees creativity less as a thing, more as action in and on the world; his particular account of distributed creativity locates the phenomenon ‘not within people or objects but in between people and objects’ (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 9; emphasis added; see Figure 2).
The Five As framework of distributed creativity (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 27; used by permission).
Creativity is seen here as distributed between (rather than residing within) the Action (the drumming) of an Actor (the drummer) and the Artefact (the performance). Exploiting the existing socio-cultural Affordances (for example, a previously unimagined use or conception of the drum kit) this distribution exists in relation to an Audience (listeners, non-performing colleagues, co-performers, promoters et al.) and results in music artefacts that are considered to be new, useful and significant by the audience. From the relational interaction of these five elements emerge three dimensions of distributed creativity that sharpen the focus on the more enigmatic, clouded creativity of everyday music performance. They are respectively the temporal, the material and the social.
Temporality
Studies of artistic creativity whose usefulness, functionality and validation are construed as being ‘in the moment’ are difficult to undertake. Some of the exceptionality of the creativity associated with music performance resides in a temporal spectrum ranging from the immediacy of the performative moment to the fluid assessment of the performing life over the decades following the performer's death. The life of that moment may be captured and artificially extended through recordings, such as may contribute to assessment by an audience not present in the moment. For example, attitudes to Paul Bonney's recreation of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason's work (see below) are inevitably shaped by the quarter-century of cultural progress elapsing between the original and the recreated performance. Favourable assessment of Max Roach's creativity (see below) has stabilised and deepened over the seven decades since its enactment. The overarching idea of significant difference may or may not be recognised at the moment of creation. Glăveanu introduces the idea of the quality of the relationship between the Five As, the good functioning of which is seen to allow and promote creativity. Good functioning may comprise creative friction.
As noted above, many conceptions of creativity assert that the process or product should be useful and novel. The utility of creative action resonates within the temporal dimension of distributed creativity. A drum performance may be characterised as ‘useful’ in any one or all of several ways: (a) in the microgenetic (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 76) sense of furthering the measure or phrase of music at hand; (b) on a median level of gluing the performance together with, perhaps, a good groove; and (c) in the ontogenetic sense of redefining possible futures for the instrument and its practice across a lifespan. In this way the drummers following Roach's useful (and creative) performances were simultaneously relieved of onerous performance demands and offered a new framework within which to perform appropriately. In brief, ‘while individual creators and their outcomes are rarely consequential … their small changes and additions of motifs or work techniques need to be considered within networks or patterns of transmission across people’ and, as Glăveanu always implies, across time (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 68).
The idea of novelty, however, is more elusive. It is frequently part of the musician's self-conception that she feels obliged to contribute to the performance in a way she perceives of as ‘new’. Tafuri's proposition that novelty may be one of the most important indicators of difference in a creative product is doubtless true but not without contention in music circles, and it is not much use here (Tafuri Reference Tafuri, Deliège and Wiggins2006, p. 13). If the drumming has not been derived, copied, imitated or translated from any previous type of drumming (i.e. it is truly new), it will not be recognisable as drumming. The better question is one to which we will return shortly: does it (the drumming) matter, and, if so, to whom and in what way might it matter?
Materiality
The paradigm of distributed creativity would see materiality in, for example, the relational space between the actor and the cultural artefact, which in this case could be the drum kit, or prior recordings of cultural elders. The creative musical imagination is materialised and made meaningful in performance, one that embodies and is inhabited by the influence of material artefacts of others, encountered in the moment with colleagues, or in earlier times. Any music artefact, be it a performance, a recording or an instrument, ‘bear(s) the marks of intentionality of the maker … and yet … each object has the potential to transcend its designed use, to escape the intentionality of the maker’ (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 60). The design brief for the embryonic electronic drum in the late 20th century was that it should sound like a drum. Alarmed but intrigued by how far the end result failed to even approximate the brief, the question rapidly became ontological: how unlike the sound of a drum could a drum be while remaining a drum? What alternative creative opportunities might this unfortunate artefact afford? In this way the material object had agency in its guidance of creative outcomes.
3. A functional/compositional continuum of control
A final thinking tool addresses the sociality of instrumental performance, so prevalent when we view music creation as music co-creation, enacted for, with, as or without a leader. While not finely delineated, these four performance contexts may be situated along a functional/compositional continuum of control (FCC) ranging from the ‘hard functional’ extremity through ‘soft functional’ and ‘soft compositional’ to the opposite ‘hard compositional’ polarity, all with implications for creative inscription (see Figure 3).
The functional/compositional Continuum (FCC) depicts two modes and four contexts of drummer performance. Functional performance is theorised as being at the left polarity [F] with compositional performance at the right polarity [C].
Hard functional performance is typically enacted when performance choices are under direction, performing for a leader. Soft functional performance is typically enacted in collaborative decision-making with a leader. Soft compositional performance as a leader is engendered when no overt external direction is present; choice selection in what and how to play is constrained only by the considerations of the particular situation, that composite of musical experience, competence, cultural practice, people, instruments and instructions that together constitute the ‘concrete cultural setting’ in which the practitioner performs. Hard compositional performance is typically manifest in solo or duo performance without a leader where constraints of any nature are at their loosest. The principal attributes of functional and compositional performance are set out in Table 1.
Principal attributes of functional and compositional performance
The FCC is thus a construct that describes qualities of action according to the extent of agentive control perceived to be available. Successful musicianship requires that those perceptions accord with those of the other music actors in the performance space. Some occupations, such as print journalism, are deemed to be not ‘artistic’ because there is little room to exercise agency (McIntyre et al. Reference McIntyre, Fulton and Paton2016, p. 5). In popular music, the morning tribute band rehearsal, the afternoon ‘originals’ band rehearsal and the improvised set of ‘free’ jazz in the evening require not only differing suites of music skills but also clear understanding of available music choices governed by the position on the FCC in each situation. In the highly unstable domain of popular music, instrumentalists are continually evaluating and negotiating the agentive space.
Four case studies
Creativity in popular music performance has thus far been characterised as a set of choices and decisions, selected from possible options, communicated to and assessed by others for significant difference in an interaction between addresser and addressee. The freedom to make those selections may be constrained by the performer's perceived position on a continuum of control. Creative difference is embodied in the options selected, the constraints negotiated and the surprise occasioned at the effect of those selections. These observations point to the temporal and social–material dimensions of creative distribution hitherto overlooked in the discourse but emphasised in the Five As framework. With these analytic tools to hand we may proceed to an examination of four ‘real-life’ case studies to establish the extent to which, if any, their analyses shed a brighter light on performance creativity.
Hard functional performance: Paul Bonney
In seeking to avoid or decline the creative impulse, some music performance deliberately eschews one or more of its foundational components. Among drummers, for example, such action is found in the recreative, hard functional performance practice of Mancunian Paul Bonney of the tribute band The Australian Pink Floyd (APF).Footnote 4 The band's mission is to deliver a complete aural facsimile of the original Pink Floyd's work, inscribed some 25 years previously. Bonney discusses his immersion in the domain:
I studied Nick Mason intently and watched all the videos, how he finished when going around the kit and all that. His technical side was a lot different to mine, to say the least. I mastered the way he did it and I changed my technical side. Before the audition I used a room at the M.E.N arena with a huge PA and my kit. […] Before I went in to practise I was studying, watching videos and listening intently to the albums and bootlegs as well. (Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain2011, p. 44.)
The drummer's attention to detail here extends to securing not only the appropriate instruments (‘a carbon-copy really’) but also the services of Mason's technician who can advise on stylistic idiosyncrasies:
I've done everything imaginable to try to replicate Nick's sound. I always went for a Dark Side of the Moon sound for the toms and snare. Over the years I've been working on my cymbals. I can't get any closer to Nick because I'm with Paiste [cymbal manufacturer] now. Having Clive Brooks [Mason's drum technician] as my drum tech helps as well. He's set up Nick's kit for decades, so you can't get any better. He used to help me out with the playing side as well. (Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain2011, p. 45)
Having honed his personal contribution, the work continues collectively through an exhaustive preparation schedule with the other group members. Bonney states: ‘We do everything more or less to a tee; beat for beat from the albums’. Presumably the ‘more or less’ leaves a small window in which the less is considered unacceptable and distinguishes a good gig from a poor one.
On this account, the dimensions most generally associated with the creative process – novelty, utility and significant difference – are conspicuous by their absence:
The fans, when they come to watch the gig, they expect to hear it as it is on the album. If we make a mistake we're distraught with ourselves, because we've been doing it for so long. We're very picky and anal about it. People [by which is meant other tribute bands] want to put their own feel on things but we say to stick to the script, because that's what the audience want to hear. (Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain2011, p. 46)
Externally motivated, drummer and band ‘stick to the script’ in their goal of satisfaction of listener expectations. This policy seeks to avoid the injection of any creativity. In Bonney's view, it is this that distinguishes APF's approach from other tribute bands that ‘move off the beaten track and put their own little bit to it. We don't’. His interlocutor does not raise the topic of creativity, but clearly the drummer seeks to recreate a script previously created by others.
Bonney's performance practice represents an extreme case and can be situated at the hard functional polarity of the FCC. In its studious avoidance of differentiation, a key component of creative action is missing. Few conceptualisations of creativity would attribute creative agency on the basis of this description of practice. In a Csikszentmihalyian systems reading, information has been transmitted from the domain and absorbed by the individual in, for example, the learning of the Pink Floyd repertoire. However, while widely acknowledged by the field, no variation has been offered for consideration: selection back into the domain is thus impossible. In Glăveanu's interpretation, the interaction of some or all of the five components is required at a minimum, irrespective of any domain-changing outcome. The most obvious variables here are the room and the audience, but in view of the highly constraining nature of the exactness required of the ‘live’ recreation, these environmental and societal considerations have to be ignored. From either perspective, creativity appears to be absent.
Soft functional performance: Blair Sinta
The second case study highlights the problem-finding and problem-solving skills of Blair Sinta, a Los Angeles studio drummer. In this vignette, Sinta finds one problem and is given another, along with a set of more or less favourable circumstances and a short time-frame in which to solve them. Here, the drummer describes the process of recording the track ‘4th Street Feeling’ for singer Melissa Etheridge to a knowledgeable readership of drum community members in an industry magazine:
Capturing the vibe on this tune was all about restraint and holding back as long as possible without having it lack dynamics or energy. It's definitely reminiscent of early 70s Motown, so we wanted to pay homage to that but modernize it at the same time. I used an 18” bass drum with a goatskin head and a soft beater. In the rack tom position I put a DW 10” × 2” snare with a Keplinger tambourine taped on the head. On my left I placed a tambourine that I played with my left hand. In the first verse and chorus it is played on 2 and 4, but in the second verse the tambourine moves to quarter notes and the 10” snare stays on the backbeat. At the second chorus I move to the main snare, which is a DW 10” × 4” snare tuned very low with the head loaded up with tape [i.e. heavily dampened]. This snare size tuned like this gives a bit of an 808 feel and sound.Footnote 5 The 14” floor tom with a towel on it becomes the driving rhythmic force here and picks up the energy. A ride cymbal enters at the bridge to give a more delicate feeling. The sound we created collectively on this tune was something that grew out of the three weeks we recorded together and something quite different for Melissa on any of her previous recordings’.Footnote 6 (Sinta Reference Sinta2012, p.72)
Sinta's description is a sophisticated micro-analysis that goes to the heart of the drummer's art, namely, how to ‘restrain’ and ‘hold back’ while still supplying forward momentum or ‘energy’. An additional problem references the temporal component of distributed creativity: time is money in a recording studio. His ability to cross-refer widely to artists (Phil Collins) in other genres and styles (Motown) of music and to be fully conversant with their histories and current practice affords the possibility of both ‘paying homage to’ and ‘modernizing’ the Motown aesthetic simultaneously. His combined solution, ‘riding’Footnote 7 on the muted 14” floor tom, solves his restraint-with-energy issue while also referencing Marvin Gaye's Motown hit ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’ which uses just such a ploy to good effect. The use of the tambourines, both free-standing and taped to the smaller snare drum, further highlights the Motown connection, while pointing to both the fluid nature and improvised approach to the instrument itself. The music dictates the components of the drum kit, rather than the other way around, the instrument itself being under permanent reconstruction in service of the music.
From a wide variety of percussive possibilities, Sinta is trying to produce exactly what Etheridge would have requested if (a) she knew it existed and (b) she knew how to get it. Evoking Glăveanu's concept of the ‘sociality’ in creative distribution, Sinta is acting here as the ‘invisible composer’, offering creative input and problem-solving skills while remaining anonymous in terms of authorship. The disembodied nature of the description of the ride-cymbal ‘entering at the bridge to give a more delicate feeling’ distances him from emotional connection to his performance (which in a very real sense is no longer his). Others may later decide, for example, that they want something entirely different, and remove, replace or alter parts of the drum kit composition. Sinta's reference to ‘the sound we created collectively on this tune’ indicates that the sound is understood as being dedicated to this track only, and that the drum kit will be reconfigured for the next track. The drummer is able to function well in an ambiguous, abstract and pressured situation. Etheridge is conducting the sessions in a way that creativity theorists would understand,Footnote 8 providing what Pamela Burnard has identified as ‘opportunities to experiment, negotiate, and make judgments within the social system in which specific works are created’ (Burnard Reference Burnard2012, p. 135).Footnote 9 The substantial measure of agentive control available positions this as soft functional performance on the (porous) border close to the compositional side of the FCC (see Figure 3). Having successfully identified, constructed and solved problems, Sinta evaluates his work as ‘something quite different for Melissa’.
This excellent description of contemporary practice shows something of the subtlety with which drummers can articulate and inflect the rhythmic feel of a piece to project aesthetic feeling across genre boundaries whilst under the pressure associated with the recording studio. There are finely granulated interactions at differing levels of functional creativity here, particularly in the finding and solving of problems. All three of Glăveanu's distributive strands are in play. The temporal aspect is evident in both the ‘restraint-with-energy’ issue and the sense of crisis, of having to do something in a hurry. Interestingly, studio and live performance in which rapidly changing audience and employer satisfaction is critical to job-retention may counter-intuitively promote creativity. The materiality of Sinta's performance inheres in particular in the subtle choice of components and the forensic care taken in their positioning. Finally, the interaction between the actor (Sinta) and audience (Etheridge), evocative of the social dimension of creative distribution, surfaces in the adopted role of the ‘invisible composer’ and the joint attribution of ‘the sound we created collectively’.
As metrical and dynamic options recede in the face of homogeneity in practice (Bruford Reference Bruford2016), anecdotal evidence suggests that Sinta's approach reflects a growing interest in manipulating the mediational means – the drum kit – to engender timbral difference not only from genre to genre, but from artist to artist within each genre and conceivably from track to track within each artist's album. These incremental step-changes in drumset practice over time reflect the meaningful relationship between actor, action and outcome at the heart of the Five As conception. The high level of interaction between actor, action, artefact, audience and affordances permits the attribution of creativity, irrespective of domain change. These same dimensions of performance in aggregate, however, do not constitute creativity in the individual sense posited by the systems model. The creativity surrounding and resonating within Sinta's performance practice hides in the shadows, and is better teased out within a distributive model.
Soft compositional performance: Asaf Sirkis
Asaf Sirkis is a fiercely committed Israeli-British jazz drummer of international repute and active in the profession for more than 25 years. Alongside multiple credits as a sideman on jazz dates for others, he has written, directed and produced eight CDs of original material over some 15 years. The dimensions most generally associated with creativity – novelty, utility and the production of significant difference – that were conspicuous by their absence in Bonney's work are equally conspicuous by their presence in Sirkis's compulsion to take the road less travelled: ‘When I see a lot of people going in one direction I have to go the other way’, he says.Footnote 10
Sirkis has an inclusive, holistic view of creativity. He sees the phenomenon as ‘something that everyone has’. It ‘has no address – it is not dependent on time or place … You can invite it, you can allow it, but I don't think you can actually cultivate it, and accumulate it. It's not a commodity’. It is ‘an expression of human worthiness’ and, ‘like oxygen’, vital to human survival, conceptions that underscore the idea that humans are driven to create in order to make sense of the world and adjust to it. It is thus non-optional; Sirkis surrenders to it entirely. For him, the phenomenon is unavoidable because there are always challenges that make him think in another way so he is impelled to be creative. Creativity is ‘just one of these things we always have. We always drink water, we always breathe and we always have to be creative, otherwise we cannot survive’. He insists that he has ‘no other choice’ but to play differently, because everyone is different. Stay true to yourself, he advises, and your singularity will eventually shine through in your music. Having no need of singularity, Bonney, in contrast, chooses rather to withhold the creative impulse as a matter of professional judgment.
Sirkis makes multiple references to the circumstances of allowing, or being allowed, which afford creative action. This idea materialises in terms of allowing mistakes to be made and things to go wrong; of allowing a creative process to come to fulfilment; and of allowing identity projection (a characteristic of compositional practice) rather than sublimation (a characteristic of functional practice; see Table 1). As an occupant of terrain close to the pole of high compositional performance, Sirkis is not at his best in functional performance:
Whenever people insist on really giving me … like, very very strict directions about where the bass drum should be, how the hi-hat should be, you know, how I should tune my snare and so on and, and, all that kind of thing, I, I don't really feel comfortable and usually I would not stay in that situation for very long, you know, I would always respect my commitments if it's a gig, if it's a recording, but I would maybe discontinue that situation. (Bruford Reference Bruford2018, p. 59)
Evoking the sociality of Glăveanu's formulation, Sirkis's conception of ‘functional’ summons images of servitude, compliance and loss of power that induce discomfort and are at odds with his existing self-identity. Melissa Etheridge was perhaps wise to engage with Sinta's creative sensibilities rather than those of Sirkis. In the following extract, Sirkis grapples with the nature of creative music performance:
When you play you don't play what you practised anymore, when you are creative. You are putting it … you are taking your skill, taking it to the next level, basically. Where it's not the actual thing what you do is important, but the music; you know, what you want to express is more important than the actual means of doing that, OK? It's simply that for me. It's when everything connects together. All what you have, all what you learn is coming together and … and you're using in that particular moment when you're creative only the things that you really need for your creative process. (Bruford Reference Bruford2018, p. 183)
His assertion that ‘you don't play what you practised anymore’ neatly describes the typical approach of the expert jazz musician. In Sirkis's depiction, the creative performance requires the music to be reduced, focused and taken to ‘the next level’ (i.e. differentiated). Anything superfluous to the expression is jettisoned; technical concerns evaporate as individual performance is seamlessly connected to the whole in the interpretive moment.
Such action choices demonstrate a high convergence with the attributes of the compositional performer. These attributes include a desire to be close to or express the phenomenon of creativity and to seek it out. Sirkis places creativity squarely at the centre of his music consciousness. He prioritises connection and communication with co-performers and non-performers. He sees the communicative moment as ‘the moment where everything that's about you comes out’, i.e. is literally expressed. Expression is tied up with ‘developing your own sound, your own style of playing, your own way of expressing yourself’. In convergence with Glăveanu, connection with an audience is, for Sirkis, an essential component of creative expression. Sirkis communicates in order ‘to be seen’, in sharp contrast to the musical chameleon in functional performance, for whom a crucial aim is to avoid ‘being seen’. The expressive intention is recognition and acknowledgement. Visible and audible authorship in live performance is crucial to Sirkis as a source of additional energy: ‘There's more energy when you are creative and being seen as creative’. In keeping with his assumption that creativity is unavoidable, he is thus ‘forced to be creative, so you can either accept it or allow it, or you can be very bitter about it or you can be very angry about it or very frustrated about it’. Like Sinta, Sirkis's ‘soft’ creativity is viewed as a means to an end rather than something to be pursued or avoided for its own intrinsic value.
In his articulation of the materiality of creative distribution, Glăveanu addresses the use of cultural resources and affordances in the generation of new artefacts (in this case, performances). The creative drum performance engages with multiple material and cultural resources; for example, the mediational means (the drum kit, technical abilities), cultural expectations (that drummers, for example, should keep time) and highly embodied quality of performance (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 51). Rare among drummers, Sirkis's highly developed finger technique is a key determinant in the way he plays, affording him the ability to play softly with great articulation. It has ‘conditioned’ the way that he plays so that ‘I can play softer maybe better than I can play louder’. Assessing his control at the high dynamic levels of saxophonist Gilad Atzmon's group to be insufficient, Sirkis's two mediational means – his instruments and his technique – both needed adaptation to sustain creative action in that particular situation.
Hard compositional performance: Max Roach
Max Roach (1924–2007) has come to embody everything reasonably considered to be creative on the drum kit. In the short period from approximately 1944 to 1953 he redefined the role of the drummer in several areas, opening up new vistas for those who came after him. Jazz drumming underwent a particularly fertile period in New York City in the post-World War II period. Venues that offered singing and dancing were taxed, so instrumentalists were preferred to singers when it came to hiring (Sippel Reference Sippel and DeVeaux1944). In front of a seated audience (and intrinsically motivated), the musicians were able to fashion a tougher, less inclusive music. Roach is acknowledged as the founder of a modern style of jazz drumming that became standard procedure for players in the mid-20th century. His unaccompanied drum pieces are conventionally regarded as a gold-standard of creative practice.
The origins of his first variation in the domain lay in a problem and its solution. The problem was unsustainable tempi. Until Roach's arrival, the bass drum was conventionally played four beats to the bar in 4/4 time, generally without accent, its primary function being to provide a steady pulse for dancing. But marking out the steady four beats to the bar at tempi around 300 beats per minute for long periods rapidly became unmusical, unfeasible and, in the absence of dancing, unnecessary. The solution was to assign the time-keeping to the right hand on a ‘ride’ cymbal, allowing a wholesale re-interpretation of the bass drum function in a process which became known as ‘dropping bombs’.
Roach's choice of rhythmic placement echoed, underlined or displaced melodic motifs that lay implicit within the composition or any given solo. With the rhythmic continuum now taken care of, his left hand on the snare drum and right foot on the bass drum were free to prod, cajole, comment and support in an endless conversation with and between each other and the top line melodic information. In discussion of Roach's work, the word ‘conversation’ is in frequent use, specifically to describe the interaction between his limbs, and more generally to describe jazz musicians’ interactions within the ensemble.
This first variation – removing the rhythmic continuum from bass drum to ride cymbal – appears to have prepared the ground quickly for a second, more conceptual innovation. Almost simultaneously, Roach underwent a subtle shift in perspective which went on to inform the essence of his playing, most notably in his ability as a drum soloist. Crucially, he now came to see the drum kit as one instrument rather than a set of several. The blocks, bells and whistles of the ‘traps’ set of the vaudeville and music hall era were performed upon by players with the approach of the symphonic percussionist, with a technique appropriate to each individual instrument, albeit handled by one performer. Even as the traps set was giving way to the trimmer standard drum set, Roach came to see the instrument as one whole. Like notes on a piano, his four limbs on any combination of the seven (standard) instruments could produce chords, colours, and semi-definitely pitched melodies. Roach saw it architecturally:
My first solo piece was called ‘Drum Conversation’, and people would ask me, ‘Where are the chords? Where's the melody?’ And I would say, ‘It's about design. It isn't about melody and harmony. It's about periods and question marks. Think of it as constructing a building with sound. It's architecture’. (Mattingly Reference Mattingly2007, p. 1)
These two key variations of (a) changing the locus of the rhythmic continuum from right foot to right hand and (b) reframing the drum solo in terms of structural design, together repositioned the drummer as equal with others in the co-creation of a new popular music style known as bebop. Roach's methods have become accepted techniques of the day; almost any drummer who sits down at the kit plays something of Roach. He came to be credited with raising the level of the drummer from the lowly functionary who kept time for the band to equal conversationalist within the whole band, when, for example, ‘trading fours’ with saxophonist Sonny Rollins. While his work has been widely acknowledged within and outside the domain, with numerous honorary citations from the French and American Academic communities in particular,Footnote 11 creative attribution is seldom plain and simple in a tightly connected cultural milieu such as post-World War II US jazz, fertile ground for a more distributed creativity. Several significant scholarly works attribute Roach's first key innovation to drummer Kenny Clarke, or at least split credit between Clarke and Roach (DeVeaux Reference DeVeaux1997; Korall Reference Korall2002).
A Csikszentmihalyian reading would argue that Roach nevertheless satisfies all of the criteria of high-level domain-changing creativity. A set of rules and practices has been transmitted from the domain to the individual, two novel variations have been effected in some aspect of the content of the domain, and those variations have subsequently been selected by the field for inclusion in the domain. The systems model, however, has little to say by way of explanation of the more clouded, multi-ascriptive collaborative creativity associated with in-the-moment performance. Roach's work highlights, for instance, an unresolved tension around the originality of the variation that the systems model requires. If notions of originality also imply ‘being the first’ to bring something about, there is evidence to suggest that Roach was neither the first nor the only drummer to make these changes. Others may have been doing something very similar around the same time. As noted above, ‘originality’ is generally applicable to something that is not derived, copied, imitated or translated from anything else: music that could be so described would be effectively unlistenable and probably go unrecognised as music. The great drumming so-called ‘originals’ have clearly delineated antecedents in the work of their rhythmic forebears, and it is precisely these connections that ensure their cultural value, relevance and potency, if not their creativity.
Analysis deploying the Five As framework similarly supports the position that Roach's work did indeed embody everything reasonably considered creative in instrumental performance. The fluidity of his constant interaction with the ever-changing socio-cultural, technical, temporal, conceptual and material components of his performance practice resulted in hard compositional performance which changed forever the way drummers consider their instrument, themselves and their own individual practices. Both perspectives emphasise that the drummer's creativity resided in interaction, in something done with others, whether they were or were not present. The extent to which Roach's unaccompanied drum compositions, for example, were in fact created socially as a by-product of musical relationships with others, even if enacted individually and without accompaniment, is an interesting question better addressed from within the Five As formulation with its strands of sociality, materiality and temporality.
Discussion
All four instrumentalists whose work has been discussed above had immersed themselves in the music performance sub-domain of drumming over many years to various degrees of competence from mastery to expert. All had generated output within a complex matrix of socio-cultural, psychological and musical parameters and constraints, that cultural setting known generally in popular music performance as the ‘situation’. These situations occurred within specific performance contexts governed primarily by agentive control, and were mapped to an FCC.
Selection, differentiation, communication and assessment – four essential components of music creativity – were present to a significant degree in respect of Sinta, Sirkis and Roach. Bonney's music actions, however, offered no differentiation for assessment. An application of the systems model would indicate that: (a) Roach's performance practice alone fulfilled its astringent and exclusive criteria; (b) Bonney's practice alone failed to do so; and (c) it is unable to ascribe or deny creativity in the cases of Sinta and Sirkis. It is insufficiently granulated to identify the subtle quality of the relationship at the cultural psychological level, between the actor, action and artefact that is at the heart of Glăveanu's formulation. Blair Sinta's way of doing things in particular demonstrates an everyday level of performance that many consider creative but that does not set out to be domain changing.
Nor is the Big-C little-c dyad much use to us here. Practically any human activity can be designated as a problem that needs a little-c creative solution. It is not a problem to play my musical instrument, but it may be a problem to find a way to play in such a way as to make a concrete difference to some aspect of, for example, Melissa Etheridge's world. If creativity is a quality of the relationships in a situation, the prime relationship for the expert drummer is between his co-performers and collaborators, the people for whom the drumming matters: here, the other members of APF, and Etheridge, Roach's and Sirkis's colleagues.
The Five As framework has much to tell us about what has been called ‘the creativity of the ordinary’ (Glăveanu Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 1). This might include, for example, the incremental creativity of slow improvement over time. Changing the way people live and think and act, which is after all the ultimate goal of domain change, takes time. Ascriptions of creativity are also notoriously fluid and changeable over time; as in, for example, the case of the 15th century Italian painter Botticelli, or the Pre-Raphaelites, or anyone who has played in progressive rock. The meaning of creativity is tied to ever-changing historical processes, technologies and social conditions, and conceptions of individual and society. A systems model analysis can at best, it seems, ascribe creativity at only a frozen moment in time.
Conclusion
This article serves as a response to Glăveanu's (Reference Glăveanu2014, p. 23) call for case studies of creative expression that might further understanding of theories of distribution, and as an application of his model to real-world instances of distributed creative endeavour within music performance. Music performers can demonstrate creativity in what they do, and creativity is (or can be, arguably) a good thing. It is not only (or even primarily) about cognitive capacities and personality characteristics. An action-theoretical view identifies creativity as a quality of the relationship between the actor, the action and the artefact – the drummer, the drumming and its outcome. Rather than being seen as residing within one or a combination of those three loci, it is seen as residing in between them. In this way, creativity is a natural outcome of the distribution of mind through culture. I conclude that a distributive approach that construes creativity as a quality of the relationship connecting two or more people in a common search for meaning, for understanding, is more finely calibrated than the systems model, and thus better able to identify any creativity emerging from the relationship between the popular music instrumentalist and the situation, that ‘concrete cultural setting’ (2014, p. 76) in which she must live, breathe and perform.
