Local and Global Understandings of Creativities


Book Description

In music making “in company”, the protagonists have to follow the rules of interaction and create the cohesion of “being together”. At the same time, they try to promote personal goals that depend on specific personal treasure troves of experience. These are continuously being modified also as a result of the exchange between individuals. The perspective of the “individuals in company” leads the emphasis of the investigations to the ways in which the acts of performance, interpretation and local discourse give shape to creative processes in multipart music making and to the definition of the individual, collective and collaborative dimensions in this context. Focusing on the “creators” rather than on the “produced object”, the studies included in this volume explore the diversity of the roles, powers, symbolism, meanings and values given to the “polyphony of voices” in secular and religious traditions based on extensive fieldwork experience. The contributors to this volume also consider the UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List in this context, as well as the role of local, national and international awards. By understanding “culture as a drug”, whose absorption is realised within interacting cells, culture appears as a cellular network and music as quite an efficient device for its functioning.




Understanding the Relationship Between Networks and Technology, Creativity and Innovation


Book Description

This volume features excellent new research devoted to advancing our understanding of how networks foster creativity, innovation and the development of cutting-edge technologies. This is crucial reading for any researchers exploring strategic management tools and techniques, and specifically the intricacies of "network theory" within businesses.




Seeding the Tradition


Book Description

For artists, creativity plays a powerful role in understanding, confronting, and negotiating the crises of the present. Seeding the Tradition explores conflicting creativities in traditional music in Hõ Chí Minh City, the Mekong Delta, and the Vietnamese diaspora, and how they influence contemporary southern Vietnamese culture. The book centers on the ways in which musicians of đón ca tài tù, a "music for diversion," practice creativity or sáng tạo in early 21st-century southern Vietnam. These musicians draw from long-standing theories of primarily Daoist creation while adopting strategically from and also reacting to a western neo-liberal model of creativity focused primarily—although not exclusively—on the individual genius. They play with metaphors of growth, development, and ruin to not only maintain their tradition but keep it vibrant in the rapidly-shifting context of modern Vietnam. With ethnographic descriptions of zither lessons in Hõ Chi Minh City, outdoor music cafes in Cãn Thơ, and television programs in Đõng Tháp, Seeding the Tradition offers a rich description of southern Vietnamese sáng tạo and suggests revised approaches to studying creativity in contemporary ethnomusicology.




Understanding and Recognizing Creativity


Book Description

This volume addresses key issues and assumptions about creativity as a potential discipline, making the progress of creativity studies more explicit and communicable to those within and outside of the field.




Performing Nostalgia: Migration Culture and Creativity in South Albania


Book Description

Migration studies is an area of increasing significance in musicology as in other disciplines. How do migrants express and imagine themselves through musical practice? How does music help them to construct social imaginaries and to cope with longings and belongings? In this study of migration music in postsocialist Albania, Eckehard Pistrick identifies links between sound, space, emotionality and mobility in performance, provides new insights into the controversial relationship between sound and migration, and sheds light on the cultural effects of migration processes. Central to Pistrick?s approach is the essential role of emotionality for musical creativity which is highlighted throughout the volume: pain and longing are discussed not as a traumatising end point, but as a driving force for human action and as a source for cultural creativity. In addition, the study provides a fascinating overview about the current state of a rarely documented vocal tradition in Europe that is a part of the mosaic of Mediterranean singing traditions. It refers to the challenges imposed onto this practice by heritage politics, the dynamics of retraditionalisation and musical globalisation. In this sense the book constitutes an important study to the dynamics of postsocialism as seen from a musicological perspective.




Precarious Creativity


Book Description

Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges workers face. The authors take on crucial issues and provide insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, they investigate working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in places such as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad, across a range of job categories that includes visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, Tejaswini Ganti, and others, this collection offers timely critiques of media globalization and broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity.




Understanding Art Education


Book Description

What is distinctive about art and design as a subject in secondary schools? What contribution does it make to the wider curriculum? How can art and design develop the agency of young people? Understanding Art Education examines the theory and practice of helping young people learn in and beyond the secondary classroom. It provides guidance and stimulation for ways of thinking about art and design when preparing to teach and provides a framework within which teachers can locate their own experiences and beliefs. Designed to complement the core textbook Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School, which offers pragmatic approaches for trainee and newly-qualified teachers, this book suggests ways in which art and design teachers can engage reflexively with their continuing practice. Experts in the field explore: The histories of art and design education and their relationship to wider social and cultural developments Creativity as a foundation for learning Engaging with contemporary practice in partnership with external agencies The role of assessment in evaluating creative and collaborative practices Interdisciplinary approaches to art and design Developing dialogue as a means to address citizenship and global issues in art and design education. Understanding Art Education will be of interest to all students and practising teachers, particularly those studying at M Level, as well as teacher educators, and researchers who wish to reflect on their identity as an artist and teacher, and the ways in which the subject can inform and contribute to education and society more widely.




Music Theory in Ethnomusicology


Book Description

During the 1960s and 70s some ethnomusicologists formed relationships with music-makers and ritual specialists in an attempt to interpret how they understood their musical actions. Subsequently ethnomusicologists have studied the respects in which explicit and implicit theory is involved in communication of musical knowledge. They have observed the production of music theory in institutions of modern nation-states and have sought out groups and individuals whose theorizing is not constrained by existing institutions. They are assessing the extent to which musical terminologies of diverse languages can be interpreted in relation to general concepts without imposing the assumptions and biases of one body of existing theory. That exercise is increasingly recognized as a necessary effort of decolonization. A thorough yet concise introduction to this field, Music Theory in Ethnomusicology outlines a conception of music theory suited to cross-cultural research on musical practices.




Writing Migration through the Body


Book Description

Writing Migration through the Body builds a study of the body as a mutable site for negotiating and articulating the transnational experience of mobility. At its core stands a selection of recent migration stories in Italian, which are brought into dialogue with related material from cultural studies and the visual arts. Occupying no single disciplinary space, and drawing upon an elaborate theoretical framework ranging from phenomenology to anthropology, human geography and memory studies, this volume explores the ways in which the skin itself operates as a border, and brings to the surface the processes by which a sense of place and self are described and communicated through the migrant body. Through investigating key concepts and practices of transnational embodied experience, the book develops the interpretative principle that the individual bodies which move in contemporary migration flows are the primary agents through which the transcultural passages of images, emotions, ideas, memories – and also histories and possible futures – are enacted.




Creativity


Book Description

Drawing on a number of cutting-edge discoveries from brain research as well as on his own insights as a neuroscientist and neuropsychologist, Goldberg presents a wide-ranging discussion of history, culture, and evolution to arrive at an original understanding of the nature of human creativity. He discusses the origins of language, the nature of several neurological disorders, animal cognition, virtual reality, and even artificial intelligence. Included are his bold predictions about the future directions of creativity and innovation in society, and how they will change the ways the human brain develops and ages.