Dementia Praecox and the Audacity of the Artistic Endeavor

From the BBC, 10 July, 2001:
Professor Dr Sean Spence, of the department of psychiatry at the University of Sheffield, was speaking to representatives at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' annual conference.
He said jazz music arose from the attempts of a cognitively impaired performer to execute novel performances.
He said that Bolden's mental health problems meant his motor functions were impaired.
Bolden could not read music and the only way he was able to play his cornet was by improvising.
Dr Spence said: "It may be that he had to improvise because he could not play tunes in a useful way.
"He could not read music and he had to make up things as he went on.
"If we had not had this improvised music then it would just have continued as ragtime."
Dr Spence said that Bolden was diagnosed as suffering from "dementia praecox", which later became known as schizophrenia.

The Honorable Dr. Spence, bless his heart (a phrase my mother would often say, before genteelly disparaging some poor unfortunate’s errant behavior, lack of intelligence, or misguided, albeit well-intentioned act) gets my nomination for academic shrunken-head-of the year, retroactive to ought-one.It’s just that an attempt such as this, to explain away the holy and unknowable crucible of an inherently lonely genesis, the act of mortals and monsters, to create, with the trickery of and the imagined infallibility of logic, well, I guess it just gets, my moaning goat! You might as well spend your life “proving” the existence (or non-existence, it doesn’t matter) of God, with all the rigorous and impassioned precision and detail you can muster—and when you’re done, and publish against a great but fleeting fanfare, your particular choir, I’m sure, will sing your praises from some mountain top. But, I doubt any members of the other choirs in our global neighborhood, will pay much attention, and will quietly and stoically continue to follow the banner of their truth—the point is, you can’t get there from here! Or, should we feel sorry for the poor, deranged Borden—after all, he was forced, to improvise, to make things up, because “he could not play tunes in a useful way” (according to our learned investigator)?