The creative space is a conceptual space that represents the sum total of creative opportunities in music. It is bounded absolutely by what is physically possible, and bounded practically by pragmatism and cultural restrictions.
These boundaries within the creative space form patterns. Patterns are one of the most important aspects of music, and understanding musical patterns helps us understand why music is such an important aspect of the human experience. Human beings are naturally talented at recognizing patterns, and this ability is a crucial survival strategy. It helps us make sense of the world, to recognize familiar things and associate them with acquiring the things we need to survive and avoiding the things that endanger us.
Patterns in music are charactarized by two properties that describe how they fit into a composition. The first is granularity, the measure of a pattern’s scope. Is the pattern restricted to a brief interval of time relative to a composition, or is it “spread out” over the piece’s lifetime?
The second property is flexibility. Is the pattern a specific assembly of notes, intervals, and/or harmonies, or is it a very general description of a procedure that can be applied musically in many different ways?
A melody is an example of a pattern with fairly limited scope and low flexibility. When a melody becomes a theme, its scope becomes inherently wider…it is a pattern that is repeated as part of a compositional strategy.
Musical forms are examples of patterns with extreme flexibility and global scope. Clearly, patterns such as the sonata-allegro form are flexible enough to serve as the basis for many widely varied compositions. There are thousands of examples in the standard repertoire.
There are also patterns of low flexibility and global scope. This would include repeated harmonic patterns such as the blues sequence or that of a lament.
Finally, there are patterns of high flexibility and local scope. This would include systems of harmony, which are recognizable in very short passages. It normally takes only a few seconds to determine, from harmony alone, whether a piece was written by a composer from the early eighteenth or late nineteenth century.
Creativity rarely produces completely novel ideas. In order for a new idea to be comprehended by the listener, it must be constructed on a framework of something familiar. This is why patterns are so important in the composition of music.
