Qualitative Studies  
Vol. 8, No. 1, 2023, pp. 314-333 

ISSN 1903-7031  

 

 

Musical participation in studies of 

creativity 
 

Dan Hvidtfeldt1  

1Zealand Academy of Technologies and Business, Maglegaardsvej 2, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark 

 

This article explores new ideas towards qualitatively exploring and writing about musical creative 
processes within different domains. The inspiration for the theoretical points made are from the world of 

music and the practices of musicians, but the analysis and conclusions of the article discusses musicality 

as a general phenomenon. It is part of an ongoing research project within cultural psychology, seeking to 

understand how creative processes develop in dialog with the physical, social and cultural surroundings. 

Using the example of the music performance and music festivals, the article specifically discusses how 

ephemeral, social, emergent phenomena depend on musicality in creative processes. The article describes, 

how both a technical, mathematical and an ambiguous, poetic language is relevant when describing and 

writing about musical creative processes. Further, it argues how written studies of musically emergent, 

creative processes demands a close, dialogical relationship to the specific domain, beyond e.g. the 

phenomenological interview approach - a relationship, enabling the researcher to speak and write freely 

about musicality within the studied field, actively participate and engage with the processes around the 

explored phenomena with intuition, engagement and, essentially, musicality. 

Keywords: Musicality, emergence, creativity, socio-materiality, qualitative methodology, academic 

writing 

 

Introduction: Writing about musical creativity 

This article discusses the difficulties of and ideas towards methodologically exploring 

and writing about the musical creative processes. The inspiration comes predominantly 

from my work with music, musicians and music festivals, but when I, throughout the 

article, write “musical”, I refer to a broader and more general definition of the term, 

reaching far beyond the practices of musicians. When exploring the musicality of creative 

processes, I refer to the processes related to socio-material interaction more generally, as 

we find it in creative situations related to the production of major festival events, to the 

restaurant managers who seek to bring people together, all the way down to the 

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0103-6665


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communication between people in conversations. All social situations can be more or less 

“musical” (Hansen, 1990). The Danish author (and musician) Peter Bastian outright 

defined musicality as “tonal emergence” (Bastian, 1987, 2012) – an ability to make 

things, in his example notes, rhythm, harmonies, acoustics, material elements of the 

concert hall – come together in living, vibrant phenomena. Along these lines, this article 

broadly explores the musicality of socially emergent phenomena and specifically, ideas 

towards methodologically exploring and writing about them. Hence, in short, the purpose 

of the following paper is to begin the development of a language for musicality relevant 

for the methodological exploration of and writings about musical creative processes of 

emergence. 

Vignette: A language for living, musical phenomena? 

But before I rush into theoretical discussions, as a backdrop to the research presented in 

this article, I find it relevant to begin with real world experience of musicality, as it 

describes the starting point of the theoretical and methodological ideas presented – the 

experience exemplifies the challenges of exploring, writing and even talking about 

musicality and “emergent phenomena”, that I wish to describe and discuss in the paper.  

For several years, I have been working at Roskilde Festival, the largest music and 

arts festival in Northern Europe1. Each July, 130,000 people gather in Roskilde Denmark 

for the festival – in 2023 to celebrate the 51st edition of the major event. At the office 

curating the arts and music program, where I worked for four years as an industrial PhD-

student, the festival “spirit” was present all year long. As a newly employed PhD-student 

at the department of psychology, writing my dissertation on the creative processes 

forming the major event, I soon realized that both the character of and processes leading 

to the “result” – the product of the hard labor of the many participants – were hard to 

describe for people working in the festival organization. Many of my collogues had been 

employed for several years and possessed central positions in the festival hierarchy – still, 

it seemed difficult for (even) the festival management to describe what defined the major 

event, vital elements of its constitution and how it specifically differentiated from other 

festivals. When asked, in the interviews I conducted for my research project, the obvious 

facts where often presented: Roskilde Festival was, for example, different to other 

 
1 For more information on the history of Roskilde Festival, see www.roskilde-

festival.dk/en/about/the-festival    

http://www.roskilde-festival.dk/en/about/the-festival
http://www.roskilde-festival.dk/en/about/the-festival


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festivals in Denmark in terms of the number of participants. Roskilde Festival is created 

by 130,000 participants, while the other festivals in Denmark are much smaller. Also, the 

music program was described as different and highly diverse, compared to other festivals. 

But these arguments – as often consented by the informants – did not capture the true 

“nature” or “spirit” of the event, although Roskilde Festival was typically described as 

having its own “character” – a mysterious, living, social, cultural and ritual 

“phenomenon” (Hvidtfeldt & Tanggaard, 2019). Also, part of my task as a researcher was 

to interview musicians performing at the festivals – they also found it difficult to describe 

the character of the event, and thereby the challenges they met, when performing in the 

large festival space (Hvidtfeldt & Tanggaard, 2018) – they talked “around” the 

phenomenon, but found it hard to address it directly. 

I began to wonder about the nature of “musical phenomena” in general. I engrossed 

myself in a research project, which this article is based on, seeking to understand how 

these types of musical phenomena develop in creative processes and in this regard, for 

this article, the methodologies relevant for the exploration of how we can describe and 

write about the creative processes leading to results that are not tangible, but 

fundamentally social and ephemeral (see also Hvidtfeldt, 2019).  

Research focus: How do we explore and describe the indescribable? 

It was difficult for both the musicians and the festival participants I interviewed to put 

their musicality into words and thereby describe their creative processes directly, but it is 

arguably important to develop qualitative methodologies that enable us to explore and 

understand how our world develops creatively in social communities – just like it is 

important to explore creative processes leading to tangible products, typically studied in 

the psychological literature (Glăveanu, 2016b; Jacucci & Wagner, 2007; Tanggaard, 

2014). In researching creativity as musical practice – understood broadly, beyond the ones 

just musicians engage in – it thus becomes relevant to explore how we are able to 

qualitatively converse and write about musicality – the research focus of this article is 

therefore asking two questions: (1) what characterizes a “musical” creative language? 

(2) what does an analytical focus on creative processes of musically, emergent 

phenomena demand of the researcher empirically exploring and writing about it? 

Experienced musicians have no trouble rationally describing what their music is about, 

as the world of music is a well-established language they use when communicating on 



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notes, harmonies, metrics etc., just like the festival organizers I was working with knew 

exactly how to describe and work with the individual elements of the major event. But in 

order to explore and understand the musical and creative processes and the true character 

of the emerging phenomena, within various domains and from both a methodological and 

epistemological perspective, it became relevant to explore “languages for musicality” and 

their relevance for qualitative, written studies of creative, emergent processes.  

In an effort to theoretically position the article and link back to my previous work on the 

subject, the following section begins by presenting how creativity can be seen as a socio-

material practice dependent on musicality. 

Theoretical background: Creativity seen as a musical practice 

Psychological studies of creativity are interdisciplinary and diverse (Kaufman & 

Sternberg, 2021). Typically from various theoretical perspectives, they focus on 

developing new understandings of creative products, persons, processes or situations in 

which the work takes place. The research tradition, to which this article contributes, has 

developed in line with a more general “material turn” in the social and human sciences 

(Hastrup, 2011), perceiving creativity as a transactional process involving both intra- and 

extra-psychological processes in a constant, irreversible dialog between inner “mind” and 

outer “world”  (Glǎveanu, 2010; Glăveanu et al., 2014; Glǎveanu & Tanggaard, 2014; 

Tanggaard, 2011, 2013, 2014). Whereas some – especially in the earlier studies – 

emphasize personal traits, cognition and psychometric measurement as core elements of 

creativity, a cultural psychological socio-material perspective is underlining – inspired by 

for example James Gibson and Bruno Latour – that mental processes are not limited by 

the skin: when we work creatively, we tap into and depend on the “knowledge” of the 

environment. Both in the sense that we stand on the shoulders of others, and do not 

constantly start all over and invent from scratch, but also in the sense that the materials 

we engage in in creative work guide us and deliver cultural and social knowledge that 

afford specific actions (Gibson, 1979; Glăveanu, 2016a). The physical environment is 

therefore not passively framing, but actively shaping our way of life with all its history, 

materiality, potentials, barriers and qualities. 

We get inspired by someone or something, and sometimes we (hopefully) provide 

a little bit of inspiration to our surroundings. It might be a highly unconscious process, 



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but “the new” does not appear out of the blue in isolated mental processes – it often 

develops, when we engage with the surroundings and take them in, no matter if it is 

nature, people, bodily aspects, musical instruments, social settings with specific practices 

or rituals. In practice, the painter engages with the painting as it unfolds on the canvas 

and the musician communicates in an intimate dialog with the violin when performing. 

The painting or the music is not developed in a finite form inside the head of the artist, 

but as a work of art, in a socio-material, improvised process. In the words of 

anthropologists Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam (2007, p. 3), “the creativity of our 

imaginative reflections is inseparable from our performative engagements with the 

material that surrounds us”. The physical, material contexts of creative processes should 

arguably not be understood as passive frameworks for individual mental processes, but 

rather as substantial components of creativity in itself (Tanggaard, 2013).  

 

Musicality and emergence in creative processes 

In recent studies, I have applied and further developed the above presented socio-material 

take on creativity in explorations of work processes underlying musical practices 

(Hvidtfeldt, 2018, 2019). These studies build on my work at Roskilde Festival, described 

in the “vignette” above, in exploring how creative processes sometimes do not lead to 

tangible, physical objects that can be held in the hand – sometimes, in the rehearsal space 

or on stage, creative processes lead to music as a performed, social activity (Small, 1998), 

possessing other “material qualities” than that of – let us say – a chair. Obviously, music 

creation is dependent on musical instrument and other physical, tangible materials, but 

the final result – the music we experience – is temporary and ephemeral. The chair is in 

a sense also temporary, in that it will disintegrate over the years and eventually collapse 

(hopefully, empty seated and not underneath an unfortunate dinner guest), but performed 

music, and other forms of “emergent phenomena”, are fundamentally social and 

ephemeral – they only exist in the moment and depend on the involvement of and 

relationship between the specific social elements involved in the process (Sawyer, 2005). 

Yet, they hold material qualities, for the creative processes that initially and continuously 

create them (Hvidtfeldt, 2018).  

In our studies on creative processes, socio-materiality and musicality, Lene 

Tanggaard and I have specifically drawn on the philosophical concept of “emergence” in 



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describing the results and material qualities of musical creative processes. In developing 

a theoretical description of and methodological approaches towards understanding 

emergent phenomenon as “materials” for creative processes, we are especially inspired 

by Keith Sawyer’s (1999, 2000, 2005) work and the late Danish author and musician 

Peter Bastian’s descriptions of emergence in creative processes. Sawyer describes the 

emergent phenomenon as: 

[...]not a final end product, like a creative product or a connectionist 

network end state; it is a constantly changing ephemeral property of 

the interaction, which in turn influences the emergent processes that 

are generating it. This results in both top-down and bottom-up 

processes; the emergent is ‘initially’ created with bottom-up 

dialogical processes, but immediately it takes on constraining, or top-

down, characteristics.  

(Sawyer, 1999, p. 465) 

Sawyer’s conception of emergence is arguably relevant to the understanding of creative 

processes leading to musical phenomena, as it provides a theoretical framework 

describing the simultaneous and bi-directional process of emergence. Creativity depends 

on the musical ability to make “things come together”, and that this “emergent whole” 

immediately has consequences for the creative processes that continuously create it 

(Hvidtfeldt, 2018). Emergence is described as an ongoing process, where the whole 

appears as something “other” than the sum of its parts (Ferrell, 2014, p. 436). Along 

similar lines, though from the specific perspective of the musician, Peter Bastian wrote: 

When things are not working out, you have chaos. Chaos is not death; 

it is a potential death or a potential life. It can go either way. Chaos 

means that there is a diversity, but disorder. The aspiration when 

creating music is a tremendously complex articulated unity, and that 

is cosmos. Chaos is a great place to be. It is the border between the 

old and the uncreated. It can go either way - towards death or towards 

life. As a creative person, you do everything you can to go in the 



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direction of life. Towards greater intimacy, towards a situation where 

things start to play together or emerge, to use a foreign word.  

Lyhne (2011) [translated by the author]  

Both Sawyer and Bastian provide articulate notions of musical creative work and what 

creative people, who develop socially emergent phenomena, strive to achieve. Still, they 

leave many questions out in the open and leave no clues as to how to reach the goal: 

sometimes it works, sometimes it does not and sometimes music arises into something 

“in itself”. “Something” that cannot be reduced to the sum of the parts, but that arises 

when “everything” falls into place and makes sense as a meaningful, musical 

phenomenon. 

Therefore, to begin to experiment with the theoretical framework introducing 

emergence theory to a socio-material perspective on creativity, with the ultimate ambition 

to develop new understandings of how, when and why musically emergent phenomena 

appear, Lene Tanggaard and I began to empirically explore the creative processes of 

musicians – though from our perspective, musicians cannot take out a patent on 

“musicality”. This is both because musicality is named after the practice of performing 

music, probably because it is a natural outlet of the quality we write about, and also 

because I have been working as a musician for many years, and therefore understand the 

rational, technical language of the domain very well. Specifically, we were interested in 

understanding how musicians developed their musical products in dialog with “materials” 

involved in the processes (Hvidtfeldt & Tanggaard, 2018). Generally, we concluded, 

among other arguments, that the musicality of creative processes within the field demands 

fragility (see some of the narrative presented below). Secondly, we began to broaden the 

empirical exploration, and applied the developed theoretical framework in an exploration 

of Roskilde Festival as a musical, emergent phenomenon (Hvidtfeldt & Tanggaard, 2019) 

– in both cases acknowledging that the creative product (the emergent phenomenon) is, 

in reality, immaterial and temporal by nature. Still, we argued, despite the ephemeral, 

living nature of results of the creative processes – the music performed or the music 

festival itself – that the socio-material transaction between creative “person” and 

“product” was evident, in both cases, in the empirical material. Musicians use the 

ephemeral, emergent phenomenon as a material reference, guiding the creative process 



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forwards and the Roskilde Festival participant involves the festival, seen as an emergent 

phenomenon, as a material to the process (Hvidtfeldt, 2019). 

In summary, the above presented explorations of both musicians, specifically, and festival 

participants work processes, generally, where I define creativity as dependent on 

musicality. Inspired especially by Glăveanu (2010), Mason (2003) and Sternberg (2006), 

I define creativity as ‘acting in and on the world, in new and musical ways’ (Hvidtfeldt, 

2020, p. 30). Typically, creativity is simply defined as novelty + appropriateness  

(Amabile, 2018; Sternberg & Kaufmann, 2018), where “appropriate” serves as an 

umbrella-term broadly relevant within different domains. Here, in relation to the 

exploration of creative processes leading to emergent phenomena, the musical is exactly 

understood to be appropriate and why the term seems more accurate in the definition: 

Creativity is therefore understood as a musical process making social situations 

meaningful; an process, bringing together a multitude of chaotic elements (being notes, 

rhythms, harmonies or other elements of musicians performances or stages, acoustics or 

participants involved in the creation of the music festival as a social event etc.) into a 

cohesive, living unity – the emergent phenomenon. Creativity is here, in other words, 

defined as a concerted, musical effort.  

I the following section, I leave this introduction to the theoretical background of 

the study, and begin my exploration of the two research questions presented above. 

Firstly, what characterizes the musical language used when communicating about the 

creation of emergent phenomena?   

 

Languages of musical creativity 

Sentences, formulated by Bastian, Sawyer and myself, repeating notions of “sometimes, 

something, phenomena, wholes, other and everything” when describing processes of 

emergence are vague – just like the interviews from Roskilde Festival on musicality and 

emergence presented in the introduction tended to be. These are slippery concepts 

(probably why they are also alluring), however, it would be conducive to studies of 

musical creative processes leading to emergent phenomena to take a step just a little closer 

in an exploration of how, when and why emergent phenomenon appear, and further, how 

they can be studied and written about. Musical, emergent phenomena are something 

special and it is in a sense tempting to leave them as these mystical objects out of reach, 



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but from a scientific point of view, we need more solid ground and established methods 

for the exploration of the trajectory towards these ephemeral creative results – where we 

cannot describe the emergent phenomenon directly, we can work on the development of 

methods enabling us to understand and write about prerequisites for their development. 

For that, we need a well-established language on musicality, useful in dialog with 

practitioners and other informants, as well as methods that enable us to get close to the 

creative, musical processes. In an effort to understand the creative processes related to 

the development of emergent phenomena, the following sections attempts to take the first 

methodological steps towards understanding the musical language inherent to the creative 

processes, seen as a socio-material practice, leading to musical, emergent phenomena.  

Musicality has, over the past 100 years or so of studies on the subject (Gembris, 

1997), been defined in a number of ways – here, in an early attempt to begin the 

development of language for writing about and methodologically exploring musicality of 

emergent processes, two broad and opposing categories of understandings are presented. 

These two “languages for musicality” should be understood as overall, idealized 

categories of arguments pointing in the same direction, and again, I return to the world of 

music as a good example and my “mother tongue”, though musicality can be found in 

many other situations.  

 

An oxymoron: Musicality as mathematical and ambiguous language 

In a sense, music is math. When learning how to play the drum set, when I was around 

12 years old, my teacher at the local music school thought me how to understand and read 

the different musical symbols in the notation system: metrical rhythms written within 

bars, with specific time signatures, measures, pauses and note values notated on a staff – 

a mathematical notation system, describing how to play rhythms, using specific drums 

and cymbals in certain tempos. The challenge was, first and foremost, to keep the tempo 

and coordinate arms and legs, so that the music was played “right”. In that sense, music 

is a mathematical, rational challenge that – as the student gradually progress and learns 

to master the instrument and read the sheets – can be “figured out” and played “correctly”.  

Musicality – understood as an ability of musicians to produce music – was originally 

studied using these terms. One of the first attempts to define musicality was developed 

by Seashore (1919, 1967), with the ambition to measure people’s abilities to work with 



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and understand music. If, for a second, we turn to a general understanding of musicality, 

festival producers have rational, technical abilities and knowledge relevant for the 

production of major events, such as knowledge on sound systems, crowd safety and 

logistics. Just like the restaurant manager, who seeks to develop the musical experiences 

for their costumers, they have technical rational understandings of for example how to 

prepare food, arrange the dining room and provide good service at the tables. 

But let us return to the world of music, as it is such a good example of musicality. 

In another sense, music is abstruse and ambiguous: a “poetic” language, communicating 

emotions, touching our feelings, like nothing else. Music is, in this sense, not about what 

is right or wrong – it is communicating sounds, harmonies, dynamics, but it is not 

evaluated in a distinct, numeric sense – but from this understanding a “mathematically 

bad” performance, with bad pitch, inconsistent tempo or bad interplay between the 

musicians in the group, can still be the best – and most musical! - performance profoundly 

engaging the audience (see e.g. Bonde, 2011).  

Peter Bastian writes about this distinction between mathematical and poetic 

language:  

The sentence: ‘she is neither beautiful nor ugly, and still she is the 

most beautiful creature I have ever seen’, is immediately 

understandable; we know what the author is talking about and 

recognize the emotional state. If we had unambiguously defined the 

meaning of the word beautiful, the sentence would become 

meaningless and of the type: ‘the book costs neither five nor ten euro, 

and still it costs ten euro. So, we see that by refraining from 

unambiguity in the parts, we can achieve an astoundingly 

comprehensive and precise whole.  

Bastian (1987, p. 18)2 [translated by the author] 

 
2 Original quote: ”Sætningen: “hun er hverken smuk eller grim, og alligevel er hun det smukkeste 

væsen jeg nogensinde har set”, er umiddelbart forståelig; vi ved godt hvad forfatteren taler om og 

genkender følelsestilstanden. – Havde vi nu lagt os entydigt fast på hvad ordet smuk betyder, ville 

sætningen være meningsløs og af typen: “bogen koster hverken fem eller ti kr., og alligevel koster 

den ti kr”. Så vi kan se, at vi ved at afstå fra entydigheden i delene, kan opnå en forbløffende 

omfattende og præcis helhed’. ” 



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Scholars like Adorno (Adorno, 1984) were among the first to criticize the positivist, 

mathematical perspective on musicality, seeking to measure musical abilities, in arguing 

that the meaning of music is left out. Sloboda defines musicality as the ‘ability to make 

sense of music.’ (1993, p. 106), whereas Stefani argues that musical competence is the 

“ability to produce sense through music’ (1987, p. 7). Using similar terms, Blacking 

describes musical intelligence as the ‘cognitive and affective equipment of the brain with 

which people make musical sense of the world’ (1990, p. 72). Hence, musicality arguably 

demands other qualities than the “right ones” – as pointed out in the below quote, 

computers in the world by far outshine humans in terms of musical qualities, if the 

opposite was the case:  

”Computers with appropriate software could do better than most 

humans on tests of pitch, melody, and rhythm included in music 

aptitude measures, but they certainly are not more musical than 

humans.”  

(Gembris, 1997, p. 20) 

Along similar lines, one could wander about the consequences for the musical experiences 

of other types of emergent phenomena, if merely relying on the rational, technical abilities 

of the concept. The festival organizers, who I encountered in the organization, found it 

hard to find a language for their creative process but arguably had some collective ability 

to work with the ambiguities of the event in a manner that most participants – based on 

the 50 years of success of the event – would agree is highly musical.  

Although the presentation of musicality as a technical, mathematical ability that 

can be measured seems static (and perhaps antiquated), when we talk about musicality in 

the creative processes leading to emergent phenomena, we are arguably in need of both 

the rational and ambiguous categories. Namely because the emergent phenomenon is 

irreducible; it cannot be understood based on a partial, reductionist analysis or 

descriptions – the parts can be described individually, but the emergent phenomenon is 

“out of reach”, so to speak, which is why the gathering of empirical material, analysis and 

synthesis seems limited, if primarily relying on one or the other language.  



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Examples from the world of music 

How are these two overall categories of languages present in methodological explorations 

of musical creative processes of emergence? In the following, I begin in the world of 

music and describe how I see them as relevant for studying the practices of musicians 

and, from there, develop a more general argument on what kinds of writings this 

methodology allows for.  

Math – the rational, distinct language – is a core component of music. It should be part of 

the research frame and vocabulary, if researching the musicality of musicians in their 

creative processes. Also, the ambiguous language is present, all the time, when 

interviewing musicians. To give a concrete example from a recent paper, where Lene 

Tanggaard and I (2018) explored musicians’ involvement of digital “zeroes and ones” in 

musical processes on stage, a key point made was that the musical way to involve 

computers on stage is to “crack the code”. Whereas the challenge in the analogue era was 

to “make things come together”, the challenge in the digital age is to make things “fall 

apart”. Some of the main arguments of the article are that emergence depends on 

“fragility”, “taking risks” and “imperilling the situation”. Here are some examples of how 

the musicians describe their approach towards musicality in processes of emergence:  

 

“One should have the experience, that the music comes alive (App. D:43); 

 ‘You need some chaos, you need a ’margin of error’ before the music can 

live’ (App. F:95);  

‘One could say, that the reason why we bring “real”, or analogue 

instruments, with us on stage – it is exactly to make the concert more 

vivacious’ (App. C:33):  

‘In reality, it is actually just a matter of having something at stake. It is 

extremely important. I’m not a guitarist, but I play. I really do my best. I’m 

really into it. Really. I have to play the music to feel that I am passing it on 

to someone.’ (App. I:162);  

‘Even though you do actually know that of course Bruce Willis will not die, 

the mood of ‘will he make it?’ makes the situation exciting. Reaching that 



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point in a performance is just great. And that goes for all genres, all ages. 

I’m absolutely sure about that.’ (App. F:105)  

(Hvidtfeldt, 2019, appendix B-I) 

The informants use both their mathematical and technical terms as well as an abstract, 

metaphoric language in their description of their creative practice. In the above quotes, 

the dialog is woven back and forth between the two, with technical, “grammatic”, 

symbolic and metaphorical nuances. Their creative process could not be expressed using 

only one or the other – it evolved in a living, open, inspired transactional dialog. My 

work, as an interviewer and researcher, would not be possible with an understanding of, 

or language for, only one or the other. Both abstract and technical conversations on how 

emergent phenomena serve as material for ongoing musical creative processes sets high 

lingual and domain-specific knowledge demands for both interviewer and interviewee.  

 

Bilingual engagement with the creative process 

In this section, I will approach the broader, general understanding of musicality in creative 

processes of emergence and methodological challenges related to exploring and writing 

about them. In my research practice, related to both the development of my dissertation 

(Hvidtfeldt, 2019) and ongoing work on creativity and musicality (see e.g. Hvidtfeldt, 

2018; Hvidtfeldt & Tanggaard, 2019, 2021), much of my empirical material has been 

developed in close dialog with a field I have been engaged with as a practitioner. I have, 

as a musician, interviewed and observed other musicians, as we were working together 

on recordings. Also, I have written about creative processes at the Roskilde Festival where 

I have been a guest, volunteer and PhD candidate employed in the organization. I have 

taken part in the production process, on equal terms with the other musicians and festival 

participants; a special position which has given me a place and opportunity to explore 

creative processes up-close. I needed to get close to and explore how creative processes 

unfold, as processes with the informants are often unpredictable and fragile. Hence, the 

methodological argument for exploring musicians at this close range was to approach the 

creative process with specific knowledge of both technical and abstract dimensions of the 

domain and, arguably, the “musicality”. It is difficult – in retrospect – to explain how 



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music was created using written or spoken terms, and fundamentally put “music into 

words”.  

What I needed to gain access to was the lifeworlds of the “musical experts” – 

especially inspired by Kvale and Brinkmann (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2015) and Tanggaard 

and Brinkmann (Tanggaard & Brinkmann, 2015), to perceive in the interviews using 

phenomenological lenses, emphasizing, for example, the importance of putting 

“brackets” around the interviewer and openly asking the informants about their 

experiences with the musical practice. The challenge for me, as the interviewer, was to 

gain access to the “essence” of the explored phenomenon, without challenging the 

perspectives presented by the informants and without bias, to explore what is understood 

is intersubjectively valid (Jacobsen et al., 2015), seen as the “truth” about the given 

subject.  

I did so, knowing that my informants would challenge me and knowing that I 

would challenge them, as I had epistemic ambitions of exploring and developing a 

specific theoretical position. The interviews relevant for exploring musical creative 

processes of emergence will often be characterized as “elitist interviews” (Harvey, 2011), 

with informants in a relatively strong position, holding substantial domain relevant 

knowledge. Therefore, it is arguably relevant, as a contrast, to leave behind the 

phenomenological principles and push the informants a little bit and challenge their 

position.  

Access to the required material – the musical lifeworlds – is arguably only 

possible if engaging in a dialog using both the mathematical and the ambiguous languages 

of the domain; of speaking fluently both of (as the unit of analyses) and with musicality 

within the domain. This is a methodological position that enables the interviewer to 

challenge positions in a trustworthy and confidence-inspiring manner. The languages of 

different domains are obviously not the same – the interviewer needs to build an intuitive, 

technical and ambiguous understanding of the field, be it service industries, theatre, music 

or other social processes, and this is why research skills on musical creativity are not 

easily transferred. Further, it is paramount, from an ethical perspective (Brinkmann, 

2012), to build trust with the informant who too puts something at risk. It is a challenging, 

fragile situation, and trust needs to be built, and while general social skills are naturally 

relevant, a “feel” for the domain specific bilingual engagement is key to the exploration 



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of creative practices, as it allows a conversation where both interviewee and interviewer 

can read between the lines, and new knowledge on musical engagement can develop.  

If perceiving the qualitative studies of musical, creative practice in themselves, it 

demands having something at stake. The phenomenological approach seeks more passive 

engagements, putting brackets around the interviewer, enabling a “essential” 

understanding of the studied phenomenon. But if the studied creative process is the 

musical phenomenon, I would argue the interviewer needs to have something at stake too 

– something that cracks the interview situation and mathematical language around music, 

so that the interview-situation develops as a creative, musical process in itself.  

 

Writing about the indescribable? 

What consequences does this have for writing about various kinds of musical practices 

and emergent phenomena? How is it possible to write about a lived practice and its 

knowledge that flow between practitioners and hardly can be put into words? It cannot – 

obviously – be described in any direct manner, but with the above presented argument 

for a “lived”, musical methodological approach, I will argue that the mediation of 

creative practices in written form demands some of the same skills – the quality of a 

representation of musicality depends on the ability of the writer to translate in a musical 

manner, synthesizing the analyzed empirical material into a musical and coherent unity, 

irreducible to the sum of the individual linguistic parts. Musicians learn how to play 

music in apprenticeships and it takes years to develop a profound musical language, as 

the music teacher cannot directly tell a student how to perform with musicality – it is 

arguably a major challenge for the researcher to gain access to musical domains, as the 

dialog in the interviews depends on an intuitive, musical feel only mastered through 

practice – one needs to be able to “read between the lines“ when exploring the musical. 

From this perspective, the writing process on creative processes starts early: When 

forming an intuitive understanding of both the mathematical and the poetic languages of 

the domain. Not to conclude anything specific of the format of academic texts and how 

certain writing styles are more or less musical – the main argument presented here, is that, 

for the researcher to formulate anything at all, which is meaningful about musicality of 

creative processes within any domain, and how emergent phenomena move from “chaos 

to cosmos”, they need a solid understanding of specific language of the domain. The 



D. Hvidtfeldt: Musical participation in studies of creativity 

Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 314-333   ©2023 

 

 329  

findings of these studies could obviously be presented in a number of in themselves more 

or less creative, musical ways, but the packaging is irrelevant, if the present is empty; if 

the content, the empirical data, is not profoundly saturated with musical meaning. 

Therefore, the first task, when writing about musical creative phenomena, is to get 

confident as a researcher, with the domain studied, as the interview situation will become 

superficial and written representation of the findings inexpressive, if all involved actors 

do not speak the domains specific language of musicality fluently.  

There is potentially a language barrier between the musical, living domain and the 

written texts mediating knowledge in the scientific literature, but it can arguably be 

broken down, if the researcher – building on domain specific experience – interviews, 

observes and writes, using both the mathematical and ambiguous languages of musicality, 

about the temporal, fleeting musical material of the emergent phenomenon. 

 

Conclusions 

A music journalist once wrote that it is much easier to review a really bad album, than a 

really good one. It is somehow more difficult to describe why music works, compared to 

describing why it does not. Along similar lines, I have learned, both musicians and the 

organizers of musical concerts have a really difficult time describing the character of 

musical phenomena. In further developing a socio-material perspective on creative 

processes currently developing within cultural psychology, this article seeks to present 

methodology exploring and describing musical, creative processes leading to emergent 

phenomena.   

It finds that the qualitative description of creative processes of emergence 

demands musical engagement in itself. The implicit, embodied language used by 

informants, and in the written texts, presenting prerequisites for processes of emergence, 

relies on a technical, mathematic and an ambiguously abstruse language – it is therefore 

a complex, musical task of the interviewer or observer to engage in an improvised, 

informal and equal conversation, challenging positions and intuitively reading between 

the lines.  

I would not have had the chance to interview the musicians for my articles without 

having an intuitive access to their lifeworlds, based on my previous experiences as a 

musician and festival organizer.  Rather than putting “brackets” around one’s self, as is 



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typical in phenomenological interviews, the situation must rather be equal, so that all 

participants have something “at stake”, to make the situation musical in and of itself. 

Academic studies of creative processes, typically communicated in a written language 

and often based on data from interviews inspired by the phenomenological tradition, are 

not necessarily capable of capturing and communicating the meanings of music, 

musicality or creative processes. Epistemological ambitions of exploring and writing 

about the lifeworlds of musical experts – within the various domains where they are found 

– is a complex, demanding task of the researcher. The arguments presented in this article 

suggest that studies of and writing about musical creativity demands a bilingual 

understanding of the specific domain. The researcher needs to translate from a technical 

and ambiguous musical language, to a written, formal and scientific language, without 

losing the essential meaning of the lifeworlds presented, which is exactly the temporal, 

emergent phenomenon. Hence, the language barriers between the musical and the written 

texts mediating knowledge in the scientific literature can be broken down, if the 

interviewer – building on domain specific knowledge – is able to speak and write freely 

– having both the mathematical and ambiguous languages of musicality as their mother 

tongue – about the temporal, fleeting musical material of the emergent phenomenon.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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About the Author 

My background as a musician has shaped my research practice. To me, writing academic 

texts has become a musical activity, why I generally try to participate, listen, improvise 

and write based on craftmanship and trust in intuition. In my upcoming work, I explore 

emergent phenomena within other domains than my stomping ground, the music industry.  


	Musical participation in studies of creativity
	Introduction: Writing about musical creativity
	Vignette: A language for living, musical phenomena?

	Research focus: How do we explore and describe the indescribable?
	Theoretical background: Creativity seen as a musical practice
	Musicality and emergence in creative processes

	Languages of musical creativity
	An oxymoron: Musicality as mathematical and ambiguous language
	Examples from the world of music

	Bilingual engagement with the creative process
	Writing about the indescribable?

	Conclusions
	References
	About the Author