MUSIC AS A CREATIVE PROCESS - BMEGT43X001

The main goal of the course is to contextualize each student's creative process. To understand how you work, how you create, how you deal with ideas, and to contextualize this in the different historical, regional and stylistic landscapes of global music. Because the course is open to creative musicians of all types and styles, students with very different musical backgrounds and musical interests will likely – and hopefully – come together in the classroom, so the course will help them explore and understand musical worlds that may be foreign to them.

1. Solid knowledge of the cultural embeddedness of the communication institutional system.

1. Skills of making independent analysis, knowledge claims, explanations and drawing valid conclusions.

1. Awareness of the historical and social embeddedness of cultural processes and institutions

1. Professional self confident, committed to work and problem solving on professional basis.

Lectures, field trips, independent creative work

• John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961)
• Nicholas Cook–Eric Clarke–Daniel Leech-Wilkinson–John Rink (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• William Kinderman, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
• Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being (London: Penguin, 2023)
• Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics – Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (New York: Rowman & Littlefiled, 1992)
• Christian Thorau–Hansjakob Ziemer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
• Catherine Williams–Justin A. Williams (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Participation is mandatory, no more than 3 missed classes.

Assessment of class activity and creative work

• classwork: 50
• creative work: 50
• sum: 100

Participation

Retake and make-up test options are defined by the valid regulations of the University’s Code on Education and Examination

Consulted with the Faculty Student Representative Committee, approved by the Vice Dean for Education, valid from: 02.06.2024.

Music is an extremely broad and colorful field. Traditional African percussion music played on wooden sticks is just as rightly called music as a two-and-a-half-minute American pop song with three basic chords and a simple melody, or an eighty-minute, elaborately orchestrated European symphony full of lush harmonies and complex polyphony written for an orchestra of 120 musicians. Of course, different types of music require different skills, knowledge and craftsmanship and are defined by different cultural concepts and social and historical contexts. The goal of the course is to understand and consciously experience the process of making music of any kind and to create a musical product during the course that will be premiered at the end of the semester. This may be a notated musical artwork, a series of pop songs, a score or soundtrack for a film, concert or musical theater performance based on the students' own musical ideas. Or anything else that can be described as music.