Rock music and creativityAs the reader will be able to verify by looking at my name, I am originally from Cyprus, a Greek island in the Mediterranean Sea. Growing up in a Greek environment, Greek music predominated in my listening with a glimpse of classical music thrown in when my piano studies encouraged it. My short stay in the United States, among other things, introduced me to rock music. According to Google.com, “rock 'n' roll can be defined as a genre of popular music originating in the 1950s; a mixture of black rhythm and blues with white country and western; rock is a generic term from rock'n'roll. The purpose of this essay, however, is not to provide an analysis of rock music. I know I have a lot to learn, many hours of listening to be considered a “rock fan”. Nevertheless, rock provides a perfect example where all three areas of Margaret Boden's creativity appear explicitly. Margaret Boden, dean of the School of Cognitive and Computational Sciences and professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Sussex, has written numerous essays on creativity. In The Creative Priority, she divides creativity into three main branches. The first is to "make unusual combinations of familiar ideas", new ways of joining already existing ideas in order to generate a completely new creation, whether it is a poem, a painting or a a scientific invention. The “exploration of conceptual spaces”, the search for possibilities in an area that no one has thought of before and the realization of the potential they may have, involves the second branch. Finally, the third includes "the transformation of conceptual spaces in people's minds", pushing and modifying previously imposed limits to achieve the triumph of creation. This classification constitutes a synthesis of what various authors have illustrated in their work on the creative process. As the definition of rock music states, rock was born from the combination of black rhythm and blues and white country and western. These two genres of music had predominated on the music scene since the beginning of the 20th century. Both were familiar to the public of the time. What Elvis did, which shook the waves and started a revolution in music, was to combine these two familiar ideas in an unusual way. The result was a new musical genre – for its time – which, as such, had much to offer and much to explore...