A Breed Apart and A Breed Below: Creative Music Performance and The Expert Drummer

Popular Music (2020) Volume 39/2. © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press, pp.
312–331
10.1017/S0261143019000266
A breed apart and a breed below:

creative music performance and
the expert drummer
BILL BRUFORD
High Broom, Moon Hall Road, Ewhurst, Surrey, GU6 7NP, UK
E-mail: bill@billbruford.com
Abstract
This article argues that contemporary systems theory explanations are insufficient when accounting
for ‘in the moment’ creative musical performance. The system model’s focus on a domain-changing
contribution from an individual fails to offer a satisfactory account of the construction and assess-
ment of the more everyday distributed and collaborative creativity undertaken by many popular
music instrumentalists. A cultural psychology perspective, in contrast, situates distributed creativity
inbetween people and objects rather than within them. Glăveanu’s ‘Five As framework’ has particu-
lar utility in capturing the ordinary creativity that does not seek to change the domain but neverthe-
less contributes to it. The model is applied here to four case studies of expert instrumentalists that
draw upon a combination of primary evidence, lived experience and original research.
Introduction
Creativity is an important topic culturally, psychologically and developmentally. At
the cultural level, scientists, authors, government agencies and others maintain1 that
creativity lies at the heart of the modern economy. Popular music has been desig-
nated as part of the Creative Arts Industry by policy makers in government and aca-
demia, and the extent to which its instrumental practitioners are actually creative is
gaining increasing attention (Frith 2012; Burnard 2012; McIntyre et al. 2016; Cook
2018). On the psychological level there is proven linkage between control, creativity
and wellness. It is a commonplace within performance psychology that the greatest
performer happiness lies in those domains that accommodate and welcome the per-
sonal expressive input of the performer and that afford her a sense of control over her
own performance. Within developmental studies, enhancing problem solving and
critical thinking skills in children gives rise to an enhanced understanding of later-life
creativity that may be valuable in this so-called creative economy.
Creativity has, undoubtedly, a slippery nature and many meanings. What I
mean by the term is an elusive phenomenon that exists in the world, that makes a
1
Scientists, for example, like Parag Chordia, cited in Miles O’Brien and Marsha Walton (2011), authors
like John Howkins (2001) and Richard Florida (2002) and government agencies like the British
Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
312
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Middlesex University, on 01 Sep 2020 at 17:25:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143019000266
A breed apart and a breed below 313
concrete difference to some aspect of the world, and that contemporary cultures and
individuals recognise and value. While understanding remains clouded, it is too soon
to follow Frith’s call to abandon the notion altogether (Frith 2012, p. 71). On the con-
trary, its sheer ubiquity and substantial overuse argue for renewed engagement in
the hunt for greater clarity.
In this article, one creativity model is applied to four case studies of expert
Western kit drummers’ performance practices. One of my subjects fills rock stadia:
a second is in the central mainstream as a lauded studio player. The documentary
evidence from the two remaining drummers details and describes the exceptionally
high level of performance in the avant-garde of conceptual rock or modern jazz, the
smaller fields of operation inhabited by the iconoclasts, the disaffected or those who
simply do not fit in. Each performer’s actions and perceptions, and their commentary
thereon, are analysed through the lens of the Five As framework of distributive cre-
ativity (Glăveanu 2014).
Creativity and music performance

The history of the development of thinking on the topic has been elegantly described
by John Hope Mason, and several scholars have brought forward comprehensive
reviews of the main trends in the creativity literature (Hope Mason 2003;
Sternberg and Lubart 1999; Fillis and McAuley 2000; Starko 2001; McIntyre 2012;
Glăveanu 2012). To understand its relationship to popular music instrumental per-
formance it is necessary to briefly review how we got to where we are. Rather
than highlight and debate differences in the creativity discourse however, I confine
myself to trying to seek out and apply the key conceptions that usefully illuminate
the methodology of the expert drummer. Broadly, contemporary creativity theory
distinguishes between the Romantic person-centric approach found in earlier under-
standings of the phenomenon and more contemporary Rationalist systemic
approaches (Csikszentmihalyi 1988; Gruber 1989). In the latter view, creativity is
seen as a dynamic system working on a larger scale than that of the ‘lone-genius’
paradigm posited by the Romantic conception and concomitant understandings.
At the risk of oversimplification, such models posit an interlinked system comprising
an individual, a ‘domain’ of structured knowledge that the individual must access,
and a ‘field’ that comprises all those who can affect the structure of the domain. A
set of rules and practices is transmitted from the domain to the individual, who is
encultured into the domain and socialised into the field. For creativity to occur,
the individual must produce something unique and useful such that it is adopted
back into the domain, thus increasing the store of knowledge. The predominant
line of critique here points to the focus on a domain-changing contribution from
an individual, a focus that fails to offer a satisfactory account of the construction
and assessment of the more ‘everyday’, distributed, collaborative creativity under-
taken by many popular music instrumentalists.
No longer a divine or mysterious process in the gift of the Gods and bestowed
upon the lone genius, contemporary thinking sees creativity as something that can be
identified in us all. While not everyone will, anyone might become creative in mean-
ingful ways (Treffinger 1995, p. 302). Far from being in the province alone of the
highly gifted, we all share a cognitive apparatus capable of creativity (Weisberg
1993; Webster 2002). Only some, however, are given to employ that apparatus in a
314 Bill Bruford
manner likely to produce a creative act on a spectrum ranging from the everyday sort
of creativity employed by many, known as ‘little-c’ or ‘P’ (psychological) creativity,
to the novel, useful and surprising creativity accepted as such by a field of experts
and in the gift of very few, characterised as ‘Big-C’ or ‘H’ (historical) creativity.2
Little-c creativity includes everyday problem-solving and the ability to adapt to
change, and arguably, the ability to play a musical instrument to a rudimentary
standard. Big-C creativity is far rarer, and is held to occur when a person solves a
problem or creates an object that has a major impact on how we think, feel and
live our lives.3 In the domain of the drummer, for instance, it takes Big-C creativity
to change the way subsequent practitioners come to view the very role and function
of the instrument itself. Conceptions of creativity generally coalesce around notions
of novelty and usefulness (or value). McIntyre’s definition of the phenomenon encap-
sulates these key components. For him, creativity is:
a productive activity whereby objects, processes and ideas are generated from antecedent
conditions through the agency of someone, whose knowledge to do so comes from
somewhere and the resultant novel variation is seen as a valued addition to the store of
knowledge in at least one social setting. (Cited in Fulton and Paton 2016, p. 41)
Creativity in music performance now tends to be located within an interactive

‘network of people co-operating’ (Burnard 2012, p. 14). Current findings document
creativity as a culturally situated human behaviour characterised as recombinational,
exploratory and/or transformational, with a component of problem finding or prob-
lem solving, less a discrete expression of individual will and more an activity con-
strained by, and mediated between, multiple actors and agencies. Music creativity,
many suggest, is seldom the result of individual action alone (Cook 2018;
McIntyre et al. 2016; Glăveanu 2014).
The contemporary belief that music performance should embody some degree
of creativity as a matter of course is widely held but quite new. Attempts to assess its
extent and the degree to which it may be encouraged or constrained within different
types of performance have hitherto originated from within the classical music trad-
ition, with questionable transference to popular music. Within the former, and as
recently as the mid-20th century, the performer was typically seen as the mouthpiece
of the composer, whose explicit will was to be carried out to the letter. As Nicholas
Cook reminds us, creative collaboration of the kind with which we are familiar in the
21st century was also evident in 17th century musicking, in which the composition
was ‘a “gist” capable of any number of sonic instantiations’ (Cook 2018, p. 83).
The contemporary expectation that a competent jazz musician can extemporise
from lead sheets was already there in the practice of ‘Private Music’, a pool of elite
musicians who provided music for the courts of James I and Charles I. The 17th cen-
tury music culture was, Cook suggests, one of radically distributed creativity.
Many contemporary performers associate creativity with putting something of
one’s self into the music (Cottrell 2004, p. 113), an idea that sits uncomfortably with
those composers from any tradition who required, or require, that the performer put
nothing of herself into the performance. Arnold Schoenberg, for example, deemed
2
The first construct in each pairing is usually attributed to Howard Gardner (1993), the second to
Margaret Boden (2004).
3
See Silvano Arieti (1976), Vlad Petre Glăveanu (2010) and Csikszentmihalyi (1988) for further in this
regard.
the performer to be ‘totally unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music
understandable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print’
(Cook 2003, p. 204). In Pierre Boulez’ view, ‘instrumentalists do not possess invention
– otherwise they would be composers’ (Frith 2012, p. 67). For many composers the
performer was at best as a ‘necessary evil’ whose ‘function was to serve the com-
poser’ (Benson 2003, pp. 12–14). Creative assessment was thus addressed to the mer-
its of the composition and its effective transmission in performance rather than any
individual’s interpretation of the work.
Contemporary reconceptions, however, tend to characterise creative perform-
ance as socio-cultural, intersubjective and interactive – an action in between actors
and their environment. Recent findings drawn from the perceptions of expert drum-
mers indicate that for them creative performance is embedded within a meaningful
shared experience around collaboration and community (Bruford 2016, 2018). In
Cook’s view, the social dimension is fundamental to the creative practice of music
(Cook 2018). It is facilitated in a co-operative network and implies the reorganisation
of ‘the connection or relationship an individual has with the immediate music situ-
ation, rather than reorganising that which occurs within the person’s mind’
(Greeno cited in Folkestad 2012, p. 196).
Analytic tools
Early models of the mysterious process of creativity emerged from science and math-
ematics, proposing a four-stage creative process of preparation, incubation, illumin-
ation and verification (see for example Wallas 1926). However, dancers’, actors’ and
musicians’ perceptions of creativity are tempered by the immediacy of the (usually)
collaborative moment in which they must communicate significant difference, liter-
ally perform. This immediacy tends to lengthen the preparation period (learning
and acquiring sufficient skills), to shorten the incubation (or rehearsal) period and
to reduce illumination to an almost instantaneous moment of performance.
Contemporary attributions of creativity range across a wide spectrum, from those
who characterise almost any music performance as creative to those who reserve
the term for the high-level domain-changing creativity of the great masters.
However, on the one hand, conceptions of ‘little-c’ everyday creativity tend to
be too inclusive: if everyone who can play a musical instrument to a rudimentary
standard is to be deemed creative, the term is rendered effectively meaningless. On
the other hand, ‘Big-C’ creativity is too exclusive (and stage models too static) to
shed much light on the ephemeral, elusive and fluid nature of performance
creativity. The impasse might be circumnavigated in part by the adoption of
two alternative analytic formulations, but first we begin by establishing those
components without which the notion of creativity in performance might be
said not to exist (Figure 1).
1. The components of creative performance

First, something needs to be selected. Drummers typically select, at whatever level of
consciousness, from a palette of temporal, metrical, timbral and dynamical options
available in the moment of performance. The term ‘in the moment’ is simply used
to identify performance actions that permit no revision before any connection with
316 Bill Bruford
Figure 1. The components of creative music performance.
or communication to an audience. These options are selected within multiple con-

straints: agentive, aesthetical, technical, environmental, motivational and constraints
of style and genre (the projection or sublimation of stylistic preferences: if I do this it
is grunge; if I do that it is gospel). Second, something needs to be differentiated. For
any type of creative artefact to be original, there needs to be qualitative difference in
some respect from any previously known instance of that type. For Glăveanu, ‘the
creative quality of action, at all times, resides in how differences are negotiated,
manipulated, widened or bridged by the person in concrete cultural settings’
(Glăveanu 2014, p. 76). What counts in drum performance is not where you got it
from, but where you take it to, in other words, how it is differentiated.
A third requirement is that the first two need to be communicated. Creative
practice requires consistency with a line of thinking that asserts the centrality of con-
nection and communication; they are ‘part and parcel of what it means to create’
(Glăveanu 2014, p. 37). Music performance becomes connected to and interactive
within a network of co-creatives in several ways: audibly (through groove or feel);
visually (through body language); culturally (through the sharing of meaning or
ideology); or psychologically (through the engendering of feelings and emotions).
Without communication, the potentially creative work is, at this point in its embry-
onic existence, on life support. Without communication there can be no assessment of
significance; at least, by no one other than the creator. Any fresh ideas or
divergent-thinking the creative agent may possess remain merely as desirable traits
if uncommunicated.
Finally, something needs to be assessed. Yet who is assessing what for
whom? In a Csikszentmihalyian view, the assessors are held to be the gatekeepers
in the field – all of those who can affect the structure of the domain, or permit it to
be affected. In the Five As framework, in contrast, the concept of the (individual or
group) ‘audience’ substantially broadens the group to include novices, potential
customers of a product, parents evaluating a child’s work, persons from another
domain who may use the product in unforeseen ways (for example, the use of
recorded music as source material for sampling), and even the dialogical self–
other (Hermans 2001). Borrowing from Hope Mason, it seems to me that the qual-
ity in the performance that is under evaluation is the degree of significance; not is it
new – but does it matter? (Hope Mason 2003, p. 233). A performance may well be
novel, useful and appropriate, but its difference should qualify as significant to an
audience. As yet, we have no single metric for knowing where or when variation
becomes newness. In the sphere of music performance all variation is in some way
new, but not all is significant: it is creativity that transforms the trivially new or
marginally different into the significantly new or different. These observations
gives us the key to unlock an operational definition of creative music performance
as a set of choices and decisions, selected from possible options, communicated to and
assessed by others for significant difference in an interaction between at minimum an
addresser and an addressee.
2. The Five As framework

Several scholars have sought to amend or extend the ‘stage’, systemic and little-c
Big-C approaches whose shortcomings in respect of music performance have been
sketched above. For our purposes, the most useful expansion draws upon theories
of the extended mind and distributed cognition to focus on ‘the dynamic relation
between the self and others’ and conceptualises creativity as symbolic meaningful
action (Glăveanu 2014, p. 8). It may be recognised as inhering in a number of qual-
ities, tendencies or capacities attributable to the performance that are explicable, sug-
gests Glăveanu, as a system of relationships. His ‘cultural psychology of creativity’
sees creativity less as a thing, more as action in and on the world; his particular
account of distributed creativity locates the phenomenon ‘not within people or
objects but in between people and objects’ (Glăveanu 2014, p. 9; emphasis added;
see Figure 2).
Creativity is seen here as distributed between (rather than residing within) the
Action (the drumming) of an Actor (the drummer) and the Artefact (the perform-
ance). Exploiting the existing socio-cultural Affordances (for example, a previously
unimagined use or conception of the drum kit) this distribution exists in relation
Figure 2. The Five As framework of distributed creativity (Glăveanu 2014, p. 27; used by permission).
318 Bill Bruford
to an Audience (listeners, non-performing colleagues, co-performers, promoters et al.)

and results in music artefacts that are considered to be new, useful and significant by
the audience. From the relational interaction of these five elements emerge three
dimensions of distributed creativity that sharpen the focus on the more enigmatic,
clouded creativity of everyday music performance. They are respectively the tem-
poral, the material and the social.
Temporality
Studies of artistic creativity whose usefulness, functionality and validation are con-
strued as being ‘in the moment’ are difficult to undertake. Some of the exceptionality
of the creativity associated with music performance resides in a temporal spectrum
ranging from the immediacy of the performative moment to the fluid assessment
of the performing life over the decades following the performer’s death. The life of
that moment may be captured and artificially extended through recordings, such
as may contribute to assessment by an audience not present in the moment. For
example, attitudes to Paul Bonney’s recreation of Pink Floyd drummer Nick
Mason’s work (see below) are inevitably shaped by the quarter-century of cultural
progress elapsing between the original and the recreated performance. Favourable
assessment of Max Roach’s creativity (see below) has stabilised and deepened over
the seven decades since its enactment. The overarching idea of significant difference
may or may not be recognised at the moment of creation. Glăveanu introduces the
idea of the quality of the relationship between the Five As, the good functioning
of which is seen to allow and promote creativity. Good functioning may comprise
creative friction.
As noted above, many conceptions of creativity assert that the process or
product should be useful and novel. The utility of creative action resonates within
the temporal dimension of distributed creativity. A drum performance may be
characterised as ‘useful’ in any one or all of several ways: (a) in the microgenetic
(Glăveanu 2014, p. 76) sense of furthering the measure or phrase of music at hand;
(b) on a median level of gluing the performance together with, perhaps, a good
groove; and (c) in the ontogenetic sense of redefining possible futures for the
instrument and its practice across a lifespan. In this way the drummers following
Roach’s useful (and creative) performances were simultaneously relieved of
onerous performance demands and offered a new framework within which to
perform appropriately. In brief, ‘while individual creators and their outcomes
are rarely consequential . . . their small changes and additions of motifs or work
techniques need to be considered within networks or patterns of transmission
across people’ and, as Glăveanu always implies, across time (Glăveanu 2014,
p. 68).
The idea of novelty, however, is more elusive. It is frequently part of the musi-
cian’s self-conception that she feels obliged to contribute to the performance in a way
she perceives of as ‘new’. Tafuri’s proposition that novelty may be one of the most
important indicators of difference in a creative product is doubtless true but not with-
out contention in music circles, and it is not much use here (Tafuri 2006, p. 13). If the
drumming has not been derived, copied, imitated or translated from any previous
type of drumming (i.e. it is truly new), it will not be recognisable as drumming.
The better question is one to which we will return shortly: does it (the drumming)
matter, and, if so, to whom and in what way might it matter?
Materiality
The paradigm of distributed creativity would see materiality in, for example, the rela-
tional space between the actor and the cultural artefact, which in this case could be
the drum kit, or prior recordings of cultural elders. The creative musical imagination
is materialised and made meaningful in performance, one that embodies and is
inhabited by the influence of material artefacts of others, encountered in the moment
with colleagues, or in earlier times. Any music artefact, be it a performance, a record-
ing or an instrument, ‘bear(s) the marks of intentionality of the maker . . . and yet . . .
each object has the potential to transcend its designed use, to escape the intentionality
of the maker’ (Glăveanu 2014, p. 60). The design brief for the embryonic electronic
drum in the late 20th century was that it should sound like a drum. Alarmed but
intrigued by how far the end result failed to even approximate the brief, the question
rapidly became ontological: how unlike the sound of a drum could a drum be while
remaining a drum? What alternative creative opportunities might this unfortunate
artefact afford? In this way the material object had agency in its guidance of creative
outcomes.
3. A functional/compositional continuum of control

A final thinking tool addresses the sociality of instrumental performance, so preva-
lent when we view music creation as music co-creation, enacted for, with, as or with-
out a leader. While not finely delineated, these four performance contexts may be
situated along a functional/compositional continuum of control (FCC) ranging
from the ‘hard functional’ extremity through ‘soft functional’ and ‘soft compos-
itional’ to the opposite ‘hard compositional’ polarity, all with implications for cre-
ative inscription (see Figure 3).
Hard functional performance is typically enacted when performance choices
are under direction, performing for a leader. Soft functional performance is typically
enacted in collaborative decision-making with a leader. Soft compositional perform-
ance as a leader is engendered when no overt external direction is present; choice
selection in what and how to play is constrained only by the considerations of the
particular situation, that composite of musical experience, competence, cultural prac-
tice, people, instruments and instructions that together constitute the ‘concrete cul-
tural setting’ in which the practitioner performs. Hard compositional performance
is typically manifest in solo or duo performance without a leader where constraints
of any nature are at their loosest. The principal attributes of functional and compos-
itional performance are set out in Table 1.
The FCC is thus a construct that describes qualities of action according to the
extent of agentive control perceived to be available. Successful musicianship requires
that those perceptions accord with those of the other music actors in the performance
space. Some occupations, such as print journalism, are deemed to be not ‘artistic’
because there is little room to exercise agency (McIntyre et al. 2016, p. 5). In popular
music, the morning tribute band rehearsal, the afternoon ‘originals’ band rehearsal
and the improvised set of ‘free’ jazz in the evening require not only differing suites
of music skills but also clear understanding of available music choices governed by
the position on the FCC in each situation. In the highly unstable domain of popular
music, instrumentalists are continually evaluating and negotiating the agentive space.
320 Bill Bruford
Figure 3. The functional/compositional Continuum (FCC) depicts two modes and four contexts of drummer
performance. Functional performance is theorised as being at the left polarity [F] with compositional per-
formance at the right polarity [C].
Four case studies

Creativity in popular music performance has thus far been characterised as a set of
choices and decisions, selected from possible options, communicated to and assessed
by others for significant difference in an interaction between addresser and
addressee. The freedom to make those selections may be constrained by the perfor-
mer’s perceived position on a continuum of control. Creative difference is embodied
in the options selected, the constraints negotiated and the surprise occasioned at
the effect of those selections. These observations point to the temporal and social–
material dimensions of creative distribution hitherto overlooked in the discourse
but emphasised in the Five As framework. With these analytic tools to hand we
may proceed to an examination of four ‘real-life’ case studies to establish the extent
to which, if any, their analyses shed a brighter light on performance creativity.
Table 1. Principal attributes of functional and compositional performance
Hard functional performance: Paul Bonney

In seeking to avoid or decline the creative impulse, some music performance delib-
erately eschews one or more of its foundational components. Among drummers,
for example, such action is found in the recreative, hard functional performance prac-
tice of Mancunian Paul Bonney of the tribute band The Australian Pink Floyd (APF).4
4
Bonney’s comments in this section are sourced from Chamberlain (2011).
322 Bill Bruford
The band’s mission is to deliver a complete aural facsimile of the original Pink
Floyd’s work, inscribed some 25 years previously. Bonney discusses his immersion
in the domain:
I studied Nick Mason intently and watched all the videos, how he finished when going around
the kit and all that. His technical side was a lot different to mine, to say the least. I mastered the
way he did it and I changed my technical side. Before the audition I used a room at the M.E.N
arena with a huge PA and my kit. [. . .] Before I went in to practise I was studying, watching
videos and listening intently to the albums and bootlegs as well. (Chamberlain 2011, p. 44.)
The drummer’s attention to detail here extends to securing not only the appro-
priate instruments (‘a carbon-copy really’) but also the services of Mason’s technician
who can advise on stylistic idiosyncrasies:
I’ve done everything imaginable to try to replicate Nick’s sound. I always went for a Dark Side
of the Moon sound for the toms and snare. Over the years I’ve been working on my cymbals. I
can’t get any closer to Nick because I’m with Paiste [cymbal manufacturer] now. Having Clive
Brooks [Mason’s drum technician] as my drum tech helps as well. He’s set up Nick’s kit for
decades, so you can’t get any better. He used to help me out with the playing side as well.
(Chamberlain 2011, p. 45)
Having honed his personal contribution, the work continues collectively

through an exhaustive preparation schedule with the other group members.
Bonney states: ‘We do everything more or less to a tee; beat for beat from the albums’.
Presumably the ‘more or less’ leaves a small window in which the less is considered
unacceptable and distinguishes a good gig from a poor one.
On this account, the dimensions most generally associated with the creative
process – novelty, utility and significant difference – are conspicuous by their
absence:
The fans, when they come to watch the gig, they expect to hear it as it is on the album. If we
make a mistake we’re distraught with ourselves, because we’ve been doing it for so long.
We’re very picky and anal about it. People [by which is meant other tribute bands] want to
put their own feel on things but we say to stick to the script, because that’s what the
audience want to hear. (Chamberlain 2011, p. 46)
Externally motivated, drummer and band ‘stick to the script’ in their goal of sat-
isfaction of listener expectations. This policy seeks to avoid the injection of any creativ-
ity. In Bonney’s view, it is this that distinguishes APF’s approach from other tribute
bands that ‘move off the beaten track and put their own little bit to it. We don’t’. His
interlocutor does not raise the topic of creativity, but clearly the drummer seeks to
recreate a script previously created by others.
Bonney’s performance practice represents an extreme case and can be situated
at the hard functional polarity of the FCC. In its studious avoidance of differentiation,
a key component of creative action is missing. Few conceptualisations of creativity
would attribute creative agency on the basis of this description of practice. In a
Csikszentmihalyian systems reading, information has been transmitted from the
domain and absorbed by the individual in, for example, the learning of the Pink
Floyd repertoire. However, while widely acknowledged by the field, no variation
has been offered for consideration: selection back into the domain is thus impossible.
In Glăveanu’s interpretation, the interaction of some or all of the five components is
required at a minimum, irrespective of any domain-changing outcome. The most
obvious variables here are the room and the audience, but in view of the highly con-
straining nature of the exactness required of the ‘live’ recreation, these environmental
and societal considerations have to be ignored. From either perspective, creativity
appears to be absent.
Soft functional performance: Blair Sinta

The second case study highlights the problem-finding and problem-solving skills of
Blair Sinta, a Los Angeles studio drummer. In this vignette, Sinta finds one problem
and is given another, along with a set of more or less favourable circumstances and a
short time-frame in which to solve them. Here, the drummer describes the process of
recording the track ‘4th Street Feeling’ for singer Melissa Etheridge to a knowledge-
able readership of drum community members in an industry magazine:
Capturing the vibe on this tune was all about restraint and holding back as long as possible
without having it lack dynamics or energy. It’s definitely reminiscent of early 70s Motown,
so we wanted to pay homage to that but modernize it at the same time. I used an 18” bass
drum with a goatskin head and a soft beater. In the rack tom position I put a DW 10” × 2”
snare with a Keplinger tambourine taped on the head. On my left I placed a tambourine
that I played with my left hand. In the first verse and chorus it is played on 2 and 4, but in
the second verse the tambourine moves to quarter notes and the 10” snare stays on the
backbeat. At the second chorus I move to the main snare, which is a DW 10” × 4” snare
tuned very low with the head loaded up with tape [i.e. heavily dampened]. This snare size
tuned like this gives a bit of an 808 feel and sound.5 The 14” floor tom with a towel on it
becomes the driving rhythmic force here and picks up the energy. A ride cymbal enters at
the bridge to give a more delicate feeling. The sound we created collectively on this tune
was something that grew out of the three weeks we recorded together and something quite
different for Melissa on any of her previous recordings’.6 (Sinta 2012, p.72)
Sinta’s description is a sophisticated micro-analysis that goes to the heart of the

drummer’s art, namely, how to ‘restrain’ and ‘hold back’ while still supplying for-
ward momentum or ‘energy’. An additional problem references the temporal compo-
nent of distributed creativity: time is money in a recording studio. His ability to
cross-refer widely to artists (Phil Collins) in other genres and styles (Motown) of
music and to be fully conversant with their histories and current practice affords
the possibility of both ‘paying homage to’ and ‘modernizing’ the Motown aesthetic
simultaneously. His combined solution, ‘riding’7 on the muted 14” floor tom, solves
his restraint-with-energy issue while also referencing Marvin Gaye’s Motown hit ‘I
Heard it Through the Grapevine’ which uses just such a ploy to good effect. The
use of the tambourines, both free-standing and taped to the smaller snare drum, fur-
ther highlights the Motown connection, while pointing to both the fluid nature and
improvised approach to the instrument itself. The music dictates the components of
5
This comment refers to an electronic drum sound from the Roland Corporation’s TR-808 Drum
Machine, a device made globally popular by Phil Collins in his solo work between the mid-1980s
and early 1990s. Many of his ballads, including hits like ‘One More Night’, ‘Do You Remember?’ and
‘Can’t Turn Back the Years’ used the 808 sound. http://www.vintagesynth.com/roland/808.php
(accessed 9 November 2013).
6
Blair Sinta, Capturing the 4th Street feeling, p. 72. The album was recorded at the House of Blues studio in
Los Angeles, USA. The track may be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8dAYNjb-_Q.
7
‘Riding’ is the drummer’s term for the playing of a repeated pattern, usually one-handed, on the hi-hat
or cymbal, which carries the forward momentum of the rhythm.
324 Bill Bruford
the drum kit, rather than the other way around, the instrument itself being under
permanent reconstruction in service of the music.
From a wide variety of percussive possibilities, Sinta is trying to produce
exactly what Etheridge would have requested if (a) she knew it existed and (b) she
knew how to get it. Evoking Glăveanu’s concept of the ‘sociality’ in creative distribu-
tion, Sinta is acting here as the ‘invisible composer’, offering creative input and
problem-solving skills while remaining anonymous in terms of authorship. The dis-
embodied nature of the description of the ride-cymbal ‘entering at the bridge to give
a more delicate feeling’ distances him from emotional connection to his performance
(which in a very real sense is no longer his). Others may later decide, for example,
that they want something entirely different, and remove, replace or alter parts of
the drum kit composition. Sinta’s reference to ‘the sound we created collectively
on this tune’ indicates that the sound is understood as being dedicated to this
track only, and that the drum kit will be reconfigured for the next track. The drum-
mer is able to function well in an ambiguous, abstract and pressured situation.
Etheridge is conducting the sessions in a way that creativity theorists would under-
stand,8 providing what Pamela Burnard has identified as ‘opportunities to experi-
ment, negotiate, and make judgments within the social system in which specific
works are created’ (Burnard 2012, p. 135).9 The substantial measure of agentive con-
trol available positions this as soft functional performance on the (porous) border
close to the compositional side of the FCC (see Figure 3). Having successfully iden-
tified, constructed and solved problems, Sinta evaluates his work as ‘something quite
different for Melissa’.
This excellent description of contemporary practice shows something of the
subtlety with which drummers can articulate and inflect the rhythmic feel of a
piece to project aesthetic feeling across genre boundaries whilst under the pressure
associated with the recording studio. There are finely granulated interactions at dif-
fering levels of functional creativity here, particularly in the finding and solving of
problems. All three of Glăveanu’s distributive strands are in play. The temporal
aspect is evident in both the ‘restraint-with-energy’ issue and the sense of crisis, of
having to do something in a hurry. Interestingly, studio and live performance in
which rapidly changing audience and employer satisfaction is critical to job-retention
may counter-intuitively promote creativity. The materiality of Sinta’s performance
inheres in particular in the subtle choice of components and the forensic care taken
in their positioning. Finally, the interaction between the actor (Sinta) and audience
(Etheridge), evocative of the social dimension of creative distribution, surfaces in
the adopted role of the ‘invisible composer’ and the joint attribution of ‘the sound
we created collectively’.
As metrical and dynamic options recede in the face of homogeneity in practice
(Bruford 2016), anecdotal evidence suggests that Sinta’s approach reflects a growing
8
For example, Treffinger has brought forward a creative problem solving framework that understands
problems as ‘opportunities and challenges for successful change and constructive action’ in which a
problem might be defined as ‘any important, open-ended, and ambiguous situation for which one
wants and need new options and a plan for carrying a solution successfully’. Donald Treffinger
(1995), pp. 303–4.
9
Burnard’s understanding accords with the recent thinking of other music educationalists who find indi-
vidual creativity situated ‘within social communities where members practice problem finding, problem
solving, and productive evaluation’. See also Margaret Barrett and Joyce Gromko (2007), p. 227.
interest in manipulating the mediational means – the drum kit – to engender timbral
difference not only from genre to genre, but from artist to artist within each genre
and conceivably from track to track within each artist’s album. These incremental
step-changes in drumset practice over time reflect the meaningful relationship
between actor, action and outcome at the heart of the Five As conception. The
high level of interaction between actor, action, artefact, audience and affordances per-
mits the attribution of creativity, irrespective of domain change. These same dimen-
sions of performance in aggregate, however, do not constitute creativity in the
individual sense posited by the systems model. The creativity surrounding and res-
onating within Sinta’s performance practice hides in the shadows, and is better
teased out within a distributive model.
Soft compositional performance: Asaf Sirkis

Asaf Sirkis is a fiercely committed Israeli-British jazz drummer of international
repute and active in the profession for more than 25 years. Alongside multiple credits
as a sideman on jazz dates for others, he has written, directed and produced eight
CDs of original material over some 15 years. The dimensions most generally asso-
ciated with creativity – novelty, utility and the production of significant difference
– that were conspicuous by their absence in Bonney’s work are equally conspicuous
by their presence in Sirkis’s compulsion to take the road less travelled: ‘When I see a
lot of people going in one direction I have to go the other way’, he says.10
Sirkis has an inclusive, holistic view of creativity. He sees the phenomenon as
‘something that everyone has’. It ‘has no address – it is not dependent on time or
place . . . You can invite it, you can allow it, but I don’t think you can actually culti-
vate it, and accumulate it. It’s not a commodity’. It is ‘an expression of human
worthiness’ and, ‘like oxygen’, vital to human survival, conceptions that underscore
the idea that humans are driven to create in order to make sense of the world and
adjust to it. It is thus non-optional; Sirkis surrenders to it entirely. For him, the phe-
nomenon is unavoidable because there are always challenges that make him think in
another way so he is impelled to be creative. Creativity is ‘just one of these things we
always have. We always drink water, we always breathe and we always have to be
creative, otherwise we cannot survive’. He insists that he has ‘no other choice’ but to
play differently, because everyone is different. Stay true to yourself, he advises, and
your singularity will eventually shine through in your music. Having no need of sin-
gularity, Bonney, in contrast, chooses rather to withhold the creative impulse as a
matter of professional judgment.
Sirkis makes multiple references to the circumstances of allowing, or being
allowed, which afford creative action. This idea materialises in terms of allowing mis-
takes to be made and things to go wrong; of allowing a creative process to come to
fulfilment; and of allowing identity projection (a characteristic of compositional prac-
tice) rather than sublimation (a characteristic of functional practice; see Table 1). As
an occupant of terrain close to the pole of high compositional performance, Sirkis is
not at his best in functional performance:
10
The comments of all the case study participants so far have been drawn from their public utterances.
Sirkis’s comments, however, were taken from a research interview conducted with him by the author,
and thus afford the most direct access to the drummer’s lived experience (Bruford 2016).
326 Bill Bruford
Whenever people insist on really giving me . . . like, very very strict directions about where the
bass drum should be, how the hi-hat should be, you know, how I should tune my snare and so
on and, and, all that kind of thing, I, I don’t really feel comfortable and usually I would not
stay in that situation for very long, you know, I would always respect my commitments if
it’s a gig, if it’s a recording, but I would maybe discontinue that situation. (Bruford 2018, p. 59)
Evoking the sociality of Glăveanu’s formulation, Sirkis’s conception of ‘func-

tional’ summons images of servitude, compliance and loss of power that induce dis-
comfort and are at odds with his existing self-identity. Melissa Etheridge was
perhaps wise to engage with Sinta’s creative sensibilities rather than those of Sirkis.
In the following extract, Sirkis grapples with the nature of creative music performance:
When you play you don’t play what you practised anymore, when you are creative. You are
putting it . . . you are taking your skill, taking it to the next level, basically. Where it’s not the
actual thing what you do is important, but the music; you know, what you want to express is
more important than the actual means of doing that, OK? It’s simply that for me. It’s when
everything connects together. All what you have, all what you learn is coming together and
. . . and you’re using in that particular moment when you’re creative only the things that
you really need for your creative process. (Bruford 2018, p. 183)
His assertion that ‘you don’t play what you practised anymore’ neatly describes
the typical approach of the expert jazz musician. In Sirkis’s depiction, the creative per-
formance requires the music to be reduced, focused and taken to ‘the next level’ (i.e.
differentiated). Anything superfluous to the expression is jettisoned; technical con-
cerns evaporate as individual performance is seamlessly connected to the whole in
the interpretive moment.
Such action choices demonstrate a high convergence with the attributes of the
compositional performer. These attributes include a desire to be close to or express
the phenomenon of creativity and to seek it out. Sirkis places creativity squarely at
the centre of his music consciousness. He prioritises connection and communication
with co-performers and non-performers. He sees the communicative moment as
‘the moment where everything that’s about you comes out’, i.e. is literally expressed.
Expression is tied up with ‘developing your own sound, your own style of playing,
your own way of expressing yourself’. In convergence with Glăveanu, connection
with an audience is, for Sirkis, an essential component of creative expression.
Sirkis communicates in order ‘to be seen’, in sharp contrast to the musical chameleon
in functional performance, for whom a crucial aim is to avoid ‘being seen’. The
expressive intention is recognition and acknowledgement. Visible and audible
authorship in live performance is crucial to Sirkis as a source of additional energy:
‘There’s more energy when you are creative and being seen as creative’. In keeping
with his assumption that creativity is unavoidable, he is thus ‘forced to be creative, so
you can either accept it or allow it, or you can be very bitter about it or you can be
very angry about it or very frustrated about it’. Like Sinta, Sirkis’s ‘soft’ creativity is
viewed as a means to an end rather than something to be pursued or avoided for its
own intrinsic value.
In his articulation of the materiality of creative distribution, Glăveanu addresses
the use of cultural resources and affordances in the generation of new artefacts (in
this case, performances). The creative drum performance engages with multiple
material and cultural resources; for example, the mediational means (the drum kit,
technical abilities), cultural expectations (that drummers, for example, should keep
time) and highly embodied quality of performance (Glăveanu 2014, p. 51). Rare
among drummers, Sirkis’s highly developed finger technique is a key determinant in

the way he plays, affording him the ability to play softly with great articulation. It
has ‘conditioned’ the way that he plays so that ‘I can play softer maybe better
than I can play louder’. Assessing his control at the high dynamic levels of saxopho-
nist Gilad Atzmon’s group to be insufficient, Sirkis’s two mediational means – his
instruments and his technique – both needed adaptation to sustain creative action
in that particular situation.
Hard compositional performance: Max Roach

Max Roach (1924–2007) has come to embody everything reasonably considered to be
creative on the drum kit. In the short period from approximately 1944 to 1953 he
redefined the role of the drummer in several areas, opening up new vistas for
those who came after him. Jazz drumming underwent a particularly fertile period
in New York City in the post-World War II period. Venues that offered singing
and dancing were taxed, so instrumentalists were preferred to singers when it
came to hiring (Sippel 1944). In front of a seated audience (and intrinsically moti-
vated), the musicians were able to fashion a tougher, less inclusive music. Roach is
acknowledged as the founder of a modern style of jazz drumming that became stand-
ard procedure for players in the mid-20th century. His unaccompanied drum pieces
are conventionally regarded as a gold-standard of creative practice.
The origins of his first variation in the domain lay in a problem and its solution.
The problem was unsustainable tempi. Until Roach’s arrival, the bass drum was con-
ventionally played four beats to the bar in 4/4 time, generally without accent, its pri-
mary function being to provide a steady pulse for dancing. But marking out the
steady four beats to the bar at tempi around 300 beats per minute for long periods
rapidly became unmusical, unfeasible and, in the absence of dancing, unnecessary.
The solution was to assign the time-keeping to the right hand on a ‘ride’ cymbal,
allowing a wholesale re-interpretation of the bass drum function in a process
which became known as ‘dropping bombs’.
Roach’s choice of rhythmic placement echoed, underlined or displaced melodic
motifs that lay implicit within the composition or any given solo. With the rhythmic
continuum now taken care of, his left hand on the snare drum and right foot on the
bass drum were free to prod, cajole, comment and support in an endless conversation
with and between each other and the top line melodic information. In discussion of
Roach’s work, the word ‘conversation’ is in frequent use, specifically to describe the
interaction between his limbs, and more generally to describe jazz musicians’ inter-
actions within the ensemble.
This first variation – removing the rhythmic continuum from bass drum to ride
cymbal – appears to have prepared the ground quickly for a second, more conceptual
innovation. Almost simultaneously, Roach underwent a subtle shift in perspective
which went on to inform the essence of his playing, most notably in his ability as
a drum soloist. Crucially, he now came to see the drum kit as one instrument rather
than a set of several. The blocks, bells and whistles of the ‘traps’ set of the vaudeville
and music hall era were performed upon by players with the approach of the sym-
phonic percussionist, with a technique appropriate to each individual instrument,
albeit handled by one performer. Even as the traps set was giving way to the trimmer
standard drum set, Roach came to see the instrument as one whole. Like notes on a
328 Bill Bruford
piano, his four limbs on any combination of the seven (standard) instruments could
produce chords, colours, and semi-definitely pitched melodies. Roach saw it
architecturally:
My first solo piece was called ‘Drum Conversation’, and people would ask me, ‘Where are the
chords? Where’s the melody?’ And I would say, ‘It’s about design. It isn’t about melody and
harmony. It’s about periods and question marks. Think of it as constructing a building with
sound. It’s architecture’. (Mattingly 2007, p. 1)
These two key variations of (a) changing the locus of the rhythmic continuum from
right foot to right hand and (b) reframing the drum solo in terms of structural design,
together repositioned the drummer as equal with others in the co-creation of a new
popular music style known as bebop. Roach’s methods have become accepted tech-
niques of the day; almost any drummer who sits down at the kit plays something of
Roach. He came to be credited with raising the level of the drummer from the lowly
functionary who kept time for the band to equal conversationalist within the whole
band, when, for example, ‘trading fours’ with saxophonist Sonny Rollins. While his
work has been widely acknowledged within and outside the domain, with numerous
honorary citations from the French and American Academic communities in particu-
lar,11 creative attribution is seldom plain and simple in a tightly connected cultural
milieu such as post-World War II US jazz, fertile ground for a more distributed cre-
ativity. Several significant scholarly works attribute Roach’s first key innovation to
drummer Kenny Clarke, or at least split credit between Clarke and Roach
(DeVeaux 1997; Korall 2002).
A Csikszentmihalyian reading would argue that Roach nevertheless satisfies all
of the criteria of high-level domain-changing creativity. A set of rules and practices
has been transmitted from the domain to the individual, two novel variations have
been effected in some aspect of the content of the domain, and those variations
have subsequently been selected by the field for inclusion in the domain. The systems
model, however, has little to say by way of explanation of the more clouded, multi-
ascriptive collaborative creativity associated with in-the-moment performance.
Roach’s work highlights, for instance, an unresolved tension around the originality
of the variation that the systems model requires. If notions of originality also
imply ‘being the first’ to bring something about, there is evidence to suggest that
Roach was neither the first nor the only drummer to make these changes. Others
may have been doing something very similar around the same time. As noted
above, ‘originality’ is generally applicable to something that is not derived, copied,
imitated or translated from anything else: music that could be so described would
be effectively unlistenable and probably go unrecognised as music. The great drum-
ming so-called ‘originals’ have clearly delineated antecedents in the work of their
rhythmic forebears, and it is precisely these connections that ensure their cultural
value, relevance and potency, if not their creativity.
Analysis deploying the Five As framework similarly supports the position that
Roach’s work did indeed embody everything reasonably considered creative in
instrumental performance. The fluidity of his constant interaction with the ever-
changing socio-cultural, technical, temporal, conceptual and material components
11
The drummer was The MacArthur Foundation Award Winner of 1988 in the US, and named
Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.
of his performance practice resulted in hard compositional performance which chan-

ged forever the way drummers consider their instrument, themselves and their own
individual practices. Both perspectives emphasise that the drummer’s creativity
resided in interaction, in something done with others, whether they were or were
not present. The extent to which Roach’s unaccompanied drum compositions, for
example, were in fact created socially as a by-product of musical relationships
with others, even if enacted individually and without accompaniment, is an interest-
ing question better addressed from within the Five As formulation with its strands of
sociality, materiality and temporality.
Discussion
All four instrumentalists whose work has been discussed above had immersed them-
selves in the music performance sub-domain of drumming over many years to vari-
ous degrees of competence from mastery to expert. All had generated output within
a complex matrix of socio-cultural, psychological and musical parameters and con-
straints, that cultural setting known generally in popular music performance as the
‘situation’. These situations occurred within specific performance contexts governed
primarily by agentive control, and were mapped to an FCC.
Selection, differentiation, communication and assessment – four essential com-
ponents of music creativity – were present to a significant degree in respect of Sinta,
Sirkis and Roach. Bonney’s music actions, however, offered no differentiation for
assessment. An application of the systems model would indicate that: (a) Roach’s
performance practice alone fulfilled its astringent and exclusive criteria; (b)
Bonney’s practice alone failed to do so; and (c) it is unable to ascribe or deny creativ-
ity in the cases of Sinta and Sirkis. It is insufficiently granulated to identify the subtle
quality of the relationship at the cultural psychological level, between the actor,
action and artefact that is at the heart of Glăveanu’s formulation. Blair Sinta’s way
of doing things in particular demonstrates an everyday level of performance that
many consider creative but that does not set out to be domain changing.
Nor is the Big-C little-c dyad much use to us here. Practically any human activ-
ity can be designated as a problem that needs a little-c creative solution. It is not a
problem to play my musical instrument, but it may be a problem to find a way to
play in such a way as to make a concrete difference to some aspect of, for example,
Melissa Etheridge’s world. If creativity is a quality of the relationships in a situation,
the prime relationship for the expert drummer is between his co-performers and col-
laborators, the people for whom the drumming matters: here, the other members of
APF, and Etheridge, Roach’s and Sirkis’s colleagues.
The Five As framework has much to tell us about what has been called ‘the cre-
ativity of the ordinary’ (Glăveanu 2014, p. 1). This might include, for example, the
incremental creativity of slow improvement over time. Changing the way people
live and think and act, which is after all the ultimate goal of domain change, takes
time. Ascriptions of creativity are also notoriously fluid and changeable over time;
as in, for example, the case of the 15th century Italian painter Botticelli, or the
Pre-Raphaelites, or anyone who has played in progressive rock. The meaning of cre-
ativity is tied to ever-changing historical processes, technologies and social condi-
tions, and conceptions of individual and society. A systems model analysis can at
best, it seems, ascribe creativity at only a frozen moment in time.
330 Bill Bruford
Conclusion
This article serves as a response to Glăveanu’s (2014, p. 23) call for case studies of
creative expression that might further understanding of theories of distribution,
and as an application of his model to real-world instances of distributed creative
endeavour within music performance. Music performers can demonstrate creativity
in what they do, and creativity is (or can be, arguably) a good thing. It is not only
(or even primarily) about cognitive capacities and personality characteristics. An
action-theoretical view identifies creativity as a quality of the relationship between
the actor, the action and the artefact – the drummer, the drumming and its out-
come. Rather than being seen as residing within one or a combination of those
three loci, it is seen as residing in between them. In this way, creativity is a natural
outcome of the distribution of mind through culture. I conclude that a distributive
approach that construes creativity as a quality of the relationship connecting two or
more people in a common search for meaning, for understanding, is more finely
calibrated than the systems model, and thus better able to identify any creativity
emerging from the relationship between the popular music instrumentalist and
the situation, that ‘concrete cultural setting’ (2014, p. 76) in which she must live,
breathe and perform.
References
Arieti, S. 1976. Creativity: the Magic Synthesis (New York, Basic Books)
Barrett, M.S., and Gromko, J.E. 2007. ‘Provoking the muse: a case study of teaching and learning in music com-
position’, Psychology of Music. Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research, 35/2, pp. 213–30
Benson, B. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: a Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press)
Boden, M. 2004. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd edn (London, Routledge)
Bruford, B. 2016. ‘Making it work: creative music performance and the Western kit drummer’. PhD Thesis
(University of Surrey)
Bruford, B. 2018. Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press)
Burnard, P. 2012. Musical Creativities in Practice (Oxford, Oxford University Press)
Chamberlain, R. 2011. ‘Paul Bonney: Australian Pink Floyd’, Rhythm, 194, pp. 44–6
Cook, N. 2003. ‘Music as performance’, in The Cultural Study of Music: a Critical Introduction (chapter 17), ed.
M. Clayton, T. Herbert, and R. Middleton (New York, Routledge)
Cook, N. 2018. Music as Creative Practice (Oxford, Oxford University Press)
Cottrell, S. 2004. Professional Music-making in London (Aldershot, Ashgate)
Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1988. ‘Society, culture and person: a systems view of creativity’, in The Nature of Creativity:
Contemporary Psychological Perspectives, ed. R. Sternberg (New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 325–39
DeVeaux, S. 1997. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press)
Fillis, I., McAuley, A. 2000. ‘Modeling and measuring creativity at the interface’, Journal of Marketing Theory and
Practice, 8/2, pp. 8–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40469989?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents (accessed 20
July 2012)
Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class (New York, Basic Books)
Folkestad, G. 2012. ‘Digital tools and discourse in music: The ecology of composition’, in Musical Imaginations:
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance and Perception, ed. D. Hargreaves, D. Miell, and
R. MacDonald (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 193–205
Frith, S. 2012. ‘Creativity as a social fact’, in Musical Imaginations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity,
Performance and Perception, ed. D. Hargreaves, D. Miell, and R. MacDonald (Oxford, Oxford University
Press), pp. 62–72
Fulton, J., and Paton, E. 2016. ‘The systems model of creativity’, in The Creative System in Action, ed.
P. McIntyre, J. Fulton, and E. Paton (New York, Palgrave Macmillan)
Gardner, H. 1993. ‘Seven creators of the modern era’, in Creativity, ed. J. Brockham (New York, Simon and
Schuster), pp. 28–47
Glăveanu, V.-P. 2010. ‘Paradigms in the study of creativity: introducing the perspective of cultural psychology’,
New Ideas in Psychology, 28/1, pp. 79–93. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/29334/ (accessed 14 September 2012)
Glăveanu, V.-P. 2014. Distributed Creativity: Thinking Outside the Box of the Creative Individual (Heidelberg,
Springer)
Gruber, H. 1989. ‘The evolving systems approach to creative work’, in Creative People at Work: Twelve Cognitive
Case Studies, ed. D. Wallace and H. Gruber (Oxford, Oxford University Press)
Hermans, H. J. 2001. ‘The dialogical self: toward a theory of personal and cultural positioning’, Culture &
Psychology, 7(3), pp. 243–81
Hope Mason, J. 2003. The Value of Creativity: the Origins and Emergence of a Modern Belief (Aldershot, Ashgate)
Howkins, J. 2001. The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas (London, Allen Lane the Penguin
Press)
Korall, B. 2002. Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz; the Bebop Years (Vol. 2) (New York, Oxford University
Press)
Mattingly, R. 2007. Percussive Arts Society: Hall of Fame. Artist’s biography (Indianapolis, IN, PAS Publications).
http://www.pas.org/about/hall-of-fame/max-roach (accessed 4 April 2017)
McIntyre, P. 2012. Creativity and Cultural Production: Issues for Media Practice (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan)
McIntyre, P., Fulton, J., and Paton, E. (eds). 2016. The Creative System in Action: Understanding Cultural
Production and Practice (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan)
O’Brien, M., and Walton, M. 2011. ‘Music and creativity’, National Science Foundation Online. http://www.nsf.
gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/musiccreativity.jsp (accessed 26 May 2015)
Sinta, B. 2012. ‘Capturing the 4th Street feeling’, Drumhead Magazine, 34, pp. 72–7. http://www.brettsimons.
com/frames/press/Drumhead_Sinta_Simons_Etheridge.pdf (accessed 22 August 2016)
Sippel, J. 1944. ‘Music affected by new tax measure’, Down Beat Magazine, 15 May, p.1, in The Birth of Bebop: a
Social and Musical History, ed. S. DeVeaux (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press)
Starko, A. J. 2001. Creativity in the Classroom: Schools of Curious Delight, 2nd edn (Mahwah., NJ, Lawrence
Erlbaum)
Sternberg, R. J., and Lubart, T. I. 1999. ‘The concept of creativity: prospects and paradigms’, in Handbook of
Creativity, ed. R. J. Sternberg (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), chapter 1, pp. 3–15
Tafuri, J. 2006. ‘Processes and teaching strategies in musical improvisation with children’, in Musical Creativity:
Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, ed. I. Deliège and G. Wiggins (Hove, Psychology Press),
chapter 8, pp. 134–57
Treffinger, D. 1995. ‘Creative problem solving: overview and educational implications’, Educational Psychology
Review, 7/3, pp. 301–12
Wallas, G. 1926. The Art of Thought (New York, Harcourt Brace)
Webster, P. 2002. ‘Creative thinking in music: advancing a model’, Creativity in Music Education: Research to
Practice. CMWA Biennial Series. http://www.peterrwebster.com/pubs/WillinghamBook.pdf (accessed 19
September 2012)
Weisberg, R. (1993) Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius (New York, W. H. Freeman)
Discography
Melissa Etheridge, ‘4th Street Feeling’. Island Records, B0017306-02. 2014
Phil Collins, ‘One More Night’. Virgin Records, VS795. 1985
Phil Collins, ‘Do You Remember?’ Virgin Records, VS1305. 1990
Phil Collins, ‘Can’t Turn Back the Years’. Atlantic Records, PRCD 560. 1994
Marvin Gaye, ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’. Tamla Records, T 54176. 1968
Max Roach, ‘Drum Conversation’. Debut Records, Deb-124. 1953

A Breed Apart and A Breed Below: Creative Music Performance and The Expert Drummer

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Breed Apart and A Breed Below: Creative Music Performance and The Expert Drummer

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Popular Music (2020) Volume 39/2. © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press, pp.

A breed apart and a breed below:

Creativity and music performance

Creativity in music performance now tends to be located within an interactive

1. The components of creative performance

Figure 1. The components of creative music performance.

or communication to an audience. These options are selected within multiple con-

2. The Five As framework

to an Audience (listeners, non-performing colleagues, co-performers, promoters et al.)

3. A functional/compositional continuum of control

Four case studies

Table 1. Principal attributes of functional and compositional performance

Hard functional performance: Paul Bonney

Having honed his personal contribution, the work continues collectively

Soft functional performance: Blair Sinta

Sinta’s description is a sophisticated micro-analysis that goes to the heart of the

Soft compositional performance: Asaf Sirkis

Evoking the sociality of Glăveanu’s formulation, Sirkis’s conception of ‘func-

among drummers, Sirkis’s highly developed finger technique is a key determinant in

Hard compositional performance: Max Roach

of his performance practice resulted in hard compositional performance which chan-

You might also like