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Musical Creativity of Hausa Children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2019

Willard Rhodes
Willard Rhodes*
Affiliation:
Pound Ridge, New York
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Extract

The process and act of artistic creation has engaged psychologists and philosophers in an attempt to explain its mystery in rational terms. If the meaning of art is to be found in significant form as maintained by aestheticians, Clive Bell (1914) and Roger Fry (1925), the investigator's approach must be made in terms of the media in which the artist is working. Painting, sculpture, architecture, and the plastic arts may be regarded as static, spatial arts. Even poetry, though written to be read aloud, exists in printed media, and it is generally communicated in that form. Music, on the other hand, is a temporal art and exists only in time. Music is what we hear. The music score is nothing more than a prescriptive record of the composer's intentions directed to the musicians who will realize the work in living form. Unlike the spatial arts which are composed of familiar symbols that have meaning within the culture which produces them, music exists in abstraction and is composed of tones that have no symbolic meaning or significance until they are organized horizontally or vertically into patterns in which time plays an important role.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council , Volume 9 , 1977 , pp. 38 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 By the International Folk Music Council 

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References

Publications Cited

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