Tracking the Creative Process in Music

TCPM, 3rd Edition — PARIS, 8-10 OCTOBER 2015

The TCPM conference brings together researchers interested in artistic creativity and the study of processes of musical and sound creation of the past and present. Researchers working on this cluster of problems from a wide variety of disciplines (history, music analysis, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, etc.) are invited to assess the different methodologies developed in the last thirty years in their respective areas from an interdisciplinary perspective. Each approach contributes in its own way to the advancement of our understanding of the procedures, techniques, knowledge and skills employed by musicians involved in creative projects.

Following the epistemological paradigm shifts that musicology underwent at the end of the last century, the very notion of ‘creative process’ has been transformed. Sketch studies have extended their scope beyond notated works of art music. Today this field includes all contemporary musical repertories as well as the oral, technological and collaborative dimensions of the creative process in music. There is growing interest, for example, in the function of improvisation and gesture in the creative process, in the collective and collaborative dimensions of artistic work, in the redefinition of the roles of the composer and the performer, in the art of studio production, and the strategies of documentation, transmission and future performance of works involving technology. The complexity and the multidimensionality of this field of study require new analytical tools and new research methods at the crossroads of analytical musicology, the social science and humanities and other academic disciplines.

This broadening of the field also provides a new context for the study of works and composers from the Western musical canon. Whether based on historical archives or on the collection of empirical data, studies of the creative process in music share many of the same methodological requirements, descriptive vocabulary and models of creative action. This conference therefore aims to be a forum in which the most recent results produced by the well-established tradition of sketch studies can meet the complementary or alternative paradigms emerging from other repertories or approaches.

The first edition of TCPM was held in Lille, 2011 : http://tcpm2011.meshs.fr/?lang=en

The second edition of TCPM was held in Montreal, 2013 : http://tcpm2013.oicrm.org/?lang=en

The documentary films below (selected from a series of four) offer views and interviews shot during TCPM’2011: