Art & Creativity Quote by Barbara Januszkiewicz

Januszkiewicz is doing something sly: she takes a piece of insider musical trivia (C# major and Db major are the same pitch collection, not the same feeling) and uses it as a metaphor for how artists survive the trap of categorization. Enharmonic keys are a technical paradox that only matters once you care about notation, history, and the social life of sound. That is exactly her point. “Same-yet different” is the creative condition in late modern culture, where every new gesture risks looking like a remix, a quotation, or an algorithmic echo.

The C# / Db pairing isn’t random. On paper, C# major is all sharps: spiky, overdetermined, a key that looks like work. Db major is flats: smoother to read, more “natural” to the eye, used constantly in romantic and popular writing. The music you hear may be functionally identical, but the performer’s body and the composer’s choices are guided by the interface. Januszkiewicz is arguing that perception is engineered. Context edits content.

“Here we play in exchanges” frames jazz less as a genre than as a method: conversation, call-and-response, friction that becomes form. “Capturing, reflecting and improvising” maps a whole creative workflow: take in the world, refract it through your sensibility, then risk the unrepeatable moment. The subtext is an artist’s manifesto in an era obsessed with fixed identity: the real freedom is in the pivot, the translation, the choice to rename the same material and make it land differently.