Creativity at work in Bach: interview with musicologist Gilles Cantagrel

If creativity is not (just) a technique, but rather a relationship with the world, a form of being, what can great creators like Johann Sebastian Bach teach us on this subject? He was a prolific composer - more than a thousand works are listed - whose music, more than 300 years after its creation, still thrills the walls of concert halls and the hearts of listeners? Gilles Cantagrel, eminent musicologist and specialist in Johann Sebastian Bach, invites you to take a closer look at creativity as an "aptitude for creation" in Bach and his contemporaries.

Through a game of key words, the authors propose a playful and unexpected way of establishing a dialogue that reveals the creative work of the great composers. Creativity at work is revealed in all its richness and complexity. From the role of tools and the importance of curiosity, to anxiety, passion and the meaning of life, the comments made highlight the fine and irreducible interweaving of the act of creation with the life of the individual creator, itself inscribed in its own space-time.

What's more, our discussions with Gilles Cantagrel evoke the creativity at work, as traversed by a number of creative tensions. The composer/creator is thus called upon to reconcile rigor and imagination, doubt and faith, and to navigate between perfection and imperfection, experimentation and transmission.

Finally, Bach as a creator invites us to re-inscribe creation, creativity as work in the service of the common good, of something greater than oneself, as carried by a humanist and humanizing transcendence.