Abstract
This article places the compositional work of Johann Sebastian Bach in the context of present day practice of creating music. It uses images and places from the art of memory to the act of making music in order to closely examine the relationship between musical creativity and embodiment. While focusing on the central hypothesis that exposure to specific musical practices leads to the formation of multimodal creative agency, an argument is made for the emergence of an embodied creative space. The embodiment of musical creativity is defined as a cognitive and performative causality: a relationship between the cause and effect when composing, performing, or listening to music. Expanding on this model, music making is further considered to be an embodied activity that stems from the causality of these interde-pendent attributes of creativity: the cognitive actions controlled and sustained by our mind, and the performative interactions mediated by our body and the environment. By exploring the actions and interactions commonly associated with composing and performing music, this article defines the embodied creative musical space as an interactive agency that lives at the threshold of cognition and performativity. As a result, the nature of musical creativity as an embodied, lived experience extends the social and collaborative concepts of creativity, as it becomes an interactive creative contingency. Delivered from the perspective of a composer, performer, and music scholar, the paper contributes to the growing interdisciplinary discourse on musical creativity.
Keywords: musical creativity, embodiment, memory, creative space, musical composition and
performance.