Music, Creativity, and Mental Health: William Fitzsimmons - Roundtable

Our roundtable discussion of the William Fitzsimmons podcast explored a range of fascinating ideas including: that music, as an aesthetic form of creativity, is about expressing and communicating feelings, and is in fact a force for therapeutic healing; that creative process is about suspending judgment and making music for the sake of making it, rather than being focused on whether it is good enough; the important role of intuition, born of experience and expertise, in recognising the 'gems' in one's output; suffering as a negative factor for creativity itself, but as a stimulus for a later reflection; the power of our reflexive consciousness in connecting to the creator through similar experience and feeling; the challenge for artists who are more sensitive in navigating an industry so focussed on algorithms, on metrics, especially when the artist is a young person who is navigating all the normal developmental challenges.