Zvony Nagy

Zvony Nagy

composer | performer | scholar

ENCAM Keynote Address

1 minute read

I am pleased to be invited to give a keynote address at the Meeting of Cognition and Musical Arts — a joint venture promoted by the Brazilian Association of Cognition and Musical Arts and organized by PPGMUS/Federal University of Bahia, the virtual conference talks will be held online on November 18-20.

I will give a keynote talk on compositional creativity, the topic I explored in my book, The Embodiment of Musical Creativity: The Cognitive and Performative Causality of Musical Composition (Routledge).

The Embodied Creativity of Musical Composition

Contemporary musical composition practice equates composing music with intuitive, creative processes, implying a mind-body duality between the conceptualization and contextualization of musical creativity. In my talk, I challenge this notion by defining creativity in musical composition as a multidisciplinary investigation into the structure of musical experience: a creative endeavor defined by a fusion of cognition and perception.

To further explore how composers engage with creativity, I investigate the psychological attributes of creative cognition whose associations become the foundation for understanding embodied creativity in musical composition. I define the embodiment of musical creativity as a cognitive and performative causality: a relationship between the cause and effect of our creative experience when composing music. I survey the psychological foundations of creativity as they redefine musical composition using the framework of embodiment as its central unifying concept. Using examples from empirical and theoretical research in creativity studies, music psychology, embodied music cognition, philosophy, and my creative practice, I argue for the reciprocity of creative cognition and perception in the act of musical composition. Finally, I develop an integrative theoretical model to account for the causality of the cognitive and performative psychological referents responsible for the emergence of embodied creativity in musical arts.

Watch live on Friday, November 20, starting at 4:00 pm (CST) on Facebook Live and YouTube.

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