Music, Subjects, Creativity

Authors

  • Emma Ruiz Martin del Campo University of Guadalajara

Abstract

Starting with several examples, I propose a reflection about music as a sort of language that makes feasible the expression of imagination, desires, and emotions, which exceed the communication possibilities of other codes like any verbal or pictorial. Music puts different rhythms, tones, and melodies at an individual’s disposal. These elements are flexible enough to refer to natural and corporal phenomena, to human feelings, fantasies, passions, to vivid realities that are complex and powerful. Symbolically, we can express in music the flow of life, the constant human transformation. We could say that the musical language has a place in a space of creativity with no fixed limits. In such a hypothetical space, it is possible to move beyond the social musters and roles to allow for the spontaneous expression of an individual and the creation of new ways of expression and communication. Occasionally and in certain contexts, the musical language can support and express rebellion, because it may become a form of fighting against the subordination of individuals and groups to restrictive and possibly intolerable social conditions, for example, the role of music in the communication of some groups of slaves. In some contexts, music can be a last resort to generate hope and strategies for survival.

Author Biography

Emma Ruiz Martin del Campo, University of Guadalajara

EMMA RUIZ MARTIN DEL CAMPO, is a professor and researcher at the Departamento de Estudios en Educación of the Universidad de Guadalajara, México. Her focus research concerns Culture, Psychology and Pscychoanalysis. She began her academic studies at ITESO, Guadalajara, México examining, in particular pedagogy and psychology . Emma graduated in October 1987 with a PhD in Social Sciences from Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Following this were four years of work in Guadalajara as a psychotherapist at an orphanage. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the life conditions of the children there, and the institutional influences on their emotions and psychological development. Emma’s current interest is the phenomenon of creativity related to the possibilities of personal and cultural change. From January to April 2003, she was participant observer in Refugio, a German psychotherapeutic institution for immigrants. There she had the opportunity to reflect upon certain moments of interaction between the psychotherapist and immigrant, where an intermediate space emerges, where intersubjectivity, in the sense of communication beyond cultural differences becomes possible. Emms’a paper for Festival 500 contains her reflections upon music taking place in a space of creativity with no fixed limits that can open the possibility of communication in intolerable social conditions and can help to generate hope and strategies to survive.

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Published

2013-10-29

Issue

Vol. 6 (2007): The Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium VI

Section

Articles