Guilford's Theory Of Attractive Flexibility

1.2.2 Flexibility – The ability to adapt
Fluency is not the only attitude that is central on Indaba. Flexibility is considered just as important. Flexibility, for Guilford, is the readiness to change direction or method (Guilford, 1962, 1971, 1987). As Arnold (1962) writes, flexibility is “facilitated by having a great many tricks in your bag, knowing lots of techniques, [and] having broad experience” (129). In the creativity tests that Guilford describes, fluency is tested by looking at how well a subject is able to respond to a certain context or task, while flexibility is tested by looking in how many different categories these responses fall. In his own work, Guilford distinguishes between two forms of flexibility: ‘spontaneous flexibility’, where the subject chooses himself to work in different categories, and ‘adaptive flexibility’ where a switch of category turns out to be necessary to fulfil a certain task (Guilford, 1962). Within a musical context, perhaps the most obvious form of flexibility is the ability to switch between musical genres. Each genre, then, asks for different kind of playing techniques, sounds, tempi,

While Gibson mainly wrote about visual perception, recent scholarship also connects his theory of affordances to aural perception (Lopez Cano, 2006; Windsor and De Bézenac, 2012; DeNora 2000; Clarke 2003). In ‘Music and Affordance’, for example, Windsor and De Bézenac (2012) show how musical sounds tend to afford certain bodily gestures or movements and others not. This is something which is crucial in dance, as dancers need to be attuned to the different possibilities and constraints of the music they are working with, such as rhythm, tempo, and metre. In musical performance, sounds can also afford other sounds. We see this for example in jazz improvisations where, as Windsor and De Bézenac describe, “the types of chord voicing’s used by a pianist are likely to have an impact on the melodic choices of a soloist who has become attuned to harmonic features specific to that idiom” (2012: 111). We could say that a musician (in this case a pianist) cues the potential melodies, tones, and rhythms of the other musicians. This does not mean that he is forcing the behaviours of the other musicians. In the case of music (or art in general), affordances never dictate use. It merely suggests that the pianist makes certain musical choices more likely (and perhaps more natural) than others. As Windsor and De Bézenac argue, even in the most free expressive improvisations, there are certain cues that make us understand if a solo is “going with” or “going against” the shared context, and it are these cues that guide a musician through an improvisation (2012: