What role can memory play in creativity?

Sometimes memory can help creativity take place as concrete as it can be, and without any effort. I experienced this thing yesterday. Should I tell you the story?

I can describe it.

'I am walking down a workplace hall. I hear a guy listening to a Bach tune on his computer, which coincidentally I too have heard more than once. It involves Organ music. But as I reach nearer and nearer to his open cabin, the music starts changing into non-monotonous beeps of a Photocopy machine. Finally, as I cross him, I realize that it 'was' a photocopier dubbed by my senses as Mr. Mozart! And instantly, the creative part of the story emerges, I imagine a sitcom taking birth out the what I had just experienced, as an irony: Modern photocopier playing, with its non-monotonous beeps, a classical, out-of-date Mozart tune with actors (i.e. workers) acting as Orchestra team members in a conventional hectic workplace?'

Details can be worked out. And it can be funny. One must be an opmistic.

However, there is a serious fault in this kind of intuitive and spontaneous process; which is of lack of 'originality'. This is so because nothing lies outside the memory. Nothing. Such scenes have often been acted upon in various serials, dramas, films, etc. And this observation can lead one to conclude, one way or another, that after all no artistic, creative piece of work can be totally original, in absolute terms.