A mycelial model for understanding distributed creativity: collaborative partnership in the making of ‘Axis Mundi’ (2013) for solo bassoon

Drawing upon Tim Ingold’s work in ecological anthropology and a recent project examining aspects of distributed creativity carried out together with Eric Clarke and Mark Doffman, I explore a ‘mycelial’ model as a metaphor for collaborative creative practice in contemporary music. A consideration of the structure of fungal mycelia systems with their complex meshwork of catalytic transformation and an active distribution of nutrients, leads to potentially new ways of thinking about distributed creativity beyond a more mechanistic modelling of creativity as a hierarchy of levels and cogs, or even as the distributed model of a rhizomatic morphology of branching connections and nodes. I discuss a recent composition for solo bassoon, Axis Mundi (2013), aiming to shift the view of a structure of creative exchange apportioned or pre-determined via a role (performer offers techniques; composer acts upon these to make a piece), towards an understanding of collaboration as the current that carries the participants into an intertwining world of practice in which materials themselves become the tools of perception.