Musical Virtuosity and Creativity - Computers and Creativity - page 113

Fig. 5.1 The Ryoanji stone garden in Kyoto. It is said that all stones are visible except one, wher-
ever the sitting position
effect is similar to looking at a city photograph on which the figure would have
been added with a digital picture editor. Moving away from this precise viewpoint
slightly distorts the figure; moving further away breaks it into fragmented shapes,
thus breaking the illusion, which reveals the unsuspected virtuosity of these appar-
ently simple creations.
Similarly, artist Liu Bolin paints himself so as to become almost invisible, when
he stands exactly at specific locations (near a balustrade, in a cinema with red chairs,
etc.). In both cases, what is at stake, from our viewpoint, is the production of sim-
ple objects (geometrical figures in the case of Varini, mundane backgrounds in the
case of Liu Bolin), together with evidence of the difficulty inherent to their realisa-
tion.
Another example in the visual domain is the Ryoanji stone garden in Kyoto.
This garden is well-known for the calm and serene atmosphere it creates and many
studies have attempted to uncover the reasons for its attraction (see e.g. Van Tonder
et al. 2002 ). However, one reason stands out: wherever the watcher sits, only 14 out
of the 15 stones are visible at a time (Fig. 5.1 ). Such a property turns an apparently
random configuration of stones into a fascinating, singular creation. We argue that
a reason for this fascination may also be that the object to see is again both simple
and understandably difficult to create.
Virtuosity exists, or rather, occurs, also in time-related performance. People
trained in performing fast mental computation compute operations several orders
of magnitude faster than normal humans. Alexis Lemaire, world champion of the
extraction of the 13th root of very large integers (200 digits), exhibits spectacular
performance in all sorts of mental calculations. He calls this activity hypercalculia
(Lemaire and Rousseaux 2009 ). What he produces is simple, but almost no one else
can do it.
Virtuosity (from the Italian word virtuoso ) is an essential dimension of music per-
formance. In the Western culture, virtuosity in performance is a controversial notion
and is the subject of many debates. On one hand, virtuosity is considered the great-
est possible achievement of the art of solo instrumental performance (Valéry 1948 ,
Penesco 1997 ). On the other hand, virtuosity is often considered in opposition to