Hegel’s Conceptual Group Action on Creative Dynamics in Music

Abstract

The present paper presents a mechanism to catalyze that crucial step in a creative process, where the critical concept’s “walls” (referring to the common “box” metaphor) are identified and opened. We propose a concrete, but generic body of six concepts and the action of a group of transformations of this body, a toolbox that should offer a set of operational perspectives onto the critical concept’s walls. The conceptual body and the group action are deduced from the first paragraphs of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik. On this body, a group, called the “Hegel group”, acts and reflects some of the relations and operations that are hidden in Hegel’s text. We then identify two technical themes from mathematical music theory, the Escher Theorem and the concept architecture of forms and denotators, as instances of this Hegel action. The Hegel action is applied to understand creative processes in two classical compositions — Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata op. 106, and Liszt’s Mephisto Walzer — but also to the creation of a small model composition.