Listening to Music / Creating Music

 

It's a truism to say that listening to music is learned and enriched over the course of a lifetime, through concerts and recordings, with steps of discovery, zones of comfort and discomfort, strategies for deciphering, and specific aesthetic pleasures. Some ears can be expert, like those of music critics comparing classical recordings, or those of music lovers in this or that particular genre.

 

Another point is striking. Every musician's composition integrates and adapts the memory of the works he has listened to, and the musical genres that have accompanied him throughout his life. In other words, his musical sensibility, his creativity and his sound universe retain traces, obvious or discreet, of the music that has shaped his own listening and sensibility.

 

We might therefore ask ourselves whether every musician is not engaged in a process of repetition, or rather in an attempt to return to the sources of his inspiration and to the models and references that have shaped his own musical personality, and have, in the end, given him the desire to pass from the status of listener to that of creator.

 

Another way of putting this idea... Is it possible to innovate when you carry the memory of everything you've heard, of all the musics you listened to? This question is equally valid for the writer, who carries the memory of all the texts he has read, or for the visual artist, who carries the memory of all the works he has seen...