Rock Music and Creativity :: Creative Creativity Essays

Rock Music and Creativity As the reader may verify by looking at my name, I originate from Cyprus, a Greek island in the Mediterranean Sea. As I grew up in a Greek environment, Greek music predominated in my listenings with a glimpse of classical music added when my studies in the piano encouraged it. My short stay in the States has, apart from many other things, introduced me to rock music. According to Google.com, "rock 'n' roll can be defined as a genre of popular music originating in the 1950s; a blend of Black rhythm-and-blues with White country-and-western; rock is a generic term that evolved out of rock 'n' roll." The purpose of this essay is not, however, to provide an analysis on rock music. I know I have much to learn, many hours of listening to be able to be considered a `rock fan'. Nevertheless, rock provides a perfect example where Margaret Boden's three domains of creativity appear explicitly. Margaret Boden, Dean of School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences and professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Sussex, has written many essays on creativity. In The Creative Priority she divides creativity into three main branches. The first involves `making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas', new ways to join already existing ideas in order to generate a completely novel creation, be it a poem, a painting or a scientific invention. The `exploration of conceptual spaces', searching for possibilities in an area that no one has thought about before and realizing the potential those may have, entails the second branch. Finally, the third includes `transforming conceptual spaces in people's minds', pushing and altering the limits previously imposed to result in the triumph of creation. This classification provides a summary of what various authors have illustrated in their works on the creative process. As the definition of rock music states, rock emerged from the combination of black rhythm-and-blues and white country-and-western. Those two kinds of music prevailed on the music scene since the beginning of the 20th century. Both were familiar to the audiences of the time. What Elvis did that shook the waves and initiated a revolution in music, was to combine those two familiar ideas in an unfamiliar way. The result was a new – for the time – music genre, which as such had a lot to offer and a lot to explore within.