Musical Creativity: Insights from Music Education Research

Oscar Odena, Oscar Odena

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317091479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

How do we develop musical creativity? How is musical creativity nurtured in collaborative improvisation? How is it used as a communicative tool in music therapy? This comprehensive volume offers new research on these questions by an international team of experts from the fields of music education, music psychology and music therapy. The book celebrates the rich diversity of ways in which learners of all ages develop and use musical creativity. Contributions focus broadly on the composition/improvisation process, considering its conceptualization and practices in a number of contexts. The authors examine how musical creativity can be fostered in formal settings, drawing examples from primary and secondary schools, studio, conservatoire and university settings, as well as specialist music schools and music therapy sessions. These essays will inspire readers to think deeply about musical creativity and its development. The book will be of crucial interest to music educators, policy makers, researchers and students, as it draws on applied research from across the globe, promoting coherent and symbiotic links between education, music and psychology research.

PART I
Conceptualizing musical creativity

Chapter 1
Rethinking ‘musical creativity’ and the notion of multiple creativities in music

Pamela Burnard

1.1 Summary

This chapter explores the question of what constitutes musical creativity. An argument is put forward against the historically linked and limited definitions of high-art orthodoxies that exalt the individual genius and legitimize dominant forms and practices. In presenting some contemporary (i.e. real world and grassroots) practices that support socially constructed views of musical creativeness other than those ascribed by and mythologized by the accepted canon of ‘great composers’, Bourdieu’s theoretical tools and concept of ‘practice’ and Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘systems perspective’ are used to highlight affinities and shifts in the dominant historical forms of musical creativity, particularly as they arise within differing cultural, social and activity systems. Illustrations drawn from recent studies invite reflection on differing systems and call for a rethink of the concept of musical creativity in music education.

1.2 Introduction

At the beginning of the third millennium, with affordable digital devices like mobile phones, video cameras and MP3 players for recording and sharing, our understanding of what constitutes musical creativity becomes increasingly important in music education. Despite the proliferation of interest in creativity in general – a defining feature of economic life and educational reform and a crucial component of our occupational potential1 – the problem of what constitutes musical creativity in education remains unresolved. While the dominant romantic values of Western art music favour the individual dimension, popular music favours the social dimension of collaborative and collective practices (Bennett, 2001; Csikszentmihalyi & Wolfe, 2001; Longhurst, 2007; Sawyer, 2003). This is what makes new perspectives on who is making the music, where it is being made and for whom as significant as the generative aspect inherent in practices such as sampling, resampling, mixing, mashing and songwriting as important as composing, arranging, improvising and performing, in the light of contemporary critical theory and cultural history. Competing explanations place a strong emphasis on specific psychological states or processes of individual composers and ‘private’ characterizations of individual composers working on their own (Sloboda, 1985). But do these ways of explaining musical creativity convey the kinds of collaborative, communal or collective venturing that underpin activity systems at the beginning of the third millennium?2

A collective and individualized understanding of musical creativity (one that traces beyond the common forms of composition and improvisation3) is an imperative. As Finnegan has argued, although ‘the one common form of musical creativity, is musical composition’ for which ‘this high-art model assumes a canon of accepted composers, notably the “greats” like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Chopin’ (2007: 160), there are a myriad of differing ways in which musicians, at both ends of the high-art and grassroots spectrum, are creative. What is more, the Western conception of ‘musical creativity’ becomes increasingly dominant when we seek out what are the values and norms of approval (i.e. what institutions legitimize) for measuring and standardizing its assessment. In making generalizations and claims about what others mean or have meant by musical creativity, I intend this chapter to be understood in terms of the creative work in music as done by individuals. The composer immersed and at one with the act of composing contemporary art music, the arranger of jazz charts, the conductor of scores for Broadway theatre or opera, the songwriter of popular music, the child in the playground composing within children’s communities of musical practice or the DJ’s performative role in creating distinctive club cultures from the interaction of records, DJ and crowd – each of whom potentially manifest different and distinctive practices of creativity in music or music creativities. Put in another way, to acknowledge that creativity exists in music is insufficient. The singular defined concept of ‘music creativity’ is outmoded. The argument in this chapter is not about the goodness of music creativity or identifying the creativeness of musics, nor is it about the mythologized and manifest forms of creative practice that are generally assumed to be realized by the individual artist as expressions of individual selfhood in specific social, historical and cultural contexts (for these and other related debates, see Burnard, forthcoming). The argument in this chapter is about broadening the concept of ‘music creativity’ from its outmoded singular form to its particular manifestations of multiple music creativities.

In music education, judgements are made by teachers about students’ written forms of composition at GCSE4 as well as those compositions that are not notated particularly at AS and A levels, using predetermined criteria (Fautley, 2010). The relationship between institutionalized assessment practices and the sort of creative works that are made in a particular place and time requires analysis. What meanings are attached to the conceptual invention of ‘musical creativity’ and how is this expressed in articulating the process in educational practice? In the music industry, the collective enterprise of studio practice and the studio producers are predisposed rather than predetermined to act in certain ways (McIntyre, 2008). Practices such as live-coding and sound design in video games produce distinct forms of music creativity which are qualitatively different from the more traditional notions of ‘the master work’: a high-art orthodoxy that exalts and validates the individual and the romantic notion of the Great Composer. With these ideas in mind, the question arises as to what constitutes musical creativity and how we should move forward in the process of rethinking this vexed yet vital concept in music education.

From their earliest childhood experiences, children’s global practices exemplify a myriad of forms of musical creativity which are practised and prominent in their spontaneous interactions in playground songs and games (Marsh, 2008), and in their invented song-making, which evolves from their early musico-communicative interaction with others (Barrett, 2006). Young people today are members of a ‘computerized generation’ whose musical creativity is infused with digital imagery, video games, YouTube, internet sites and a robust commitment to engaging creatively with affordable digital devices for recording and sharing music, particularly out of school (Lamont et al., 2003). Research shows that the lack of congruence between what students are doing outside of school and what we are able to offer them inside of school, along with teachers’ narrowly construed views on musical creativity, is the result of an array of factors, the most obvious of which are competing demands and discourses around teaching music, inadequate systemic support and the way creativity is actualized in classroom and studio practice. But, as I will argue, the unique challenge of musical creativity as it relates to music educational systems is to comprehend the multiplicity of forms, fluid roles and meanings defined in contemporary popular musics.5 There are astonishing illustrations of how technology can connect us to the creativity of world musics and their social meanings in a particular time and place. Young people are engaging in forms of symbolic creativity (Willis, 1977) with the musical modalities of their subcultural and post-subcultural practices, and other music ‘scenes’; they attempt to re-invent themselves at both the centres and the margins, real and virtual, of musical globalization and rapid change.

In order to make my argument, I draw on two studies and propose that the lack of alignment between education and what young people bring in response (as they put various forms of musical creativities into practice) can be best understood through a grasp of the most enduring assumptions and canonical challenges that are built into our language and that have shaped policy and practice in music creativity in relation to educational systems (Clarke et al., 2009; Cook, 1998). The sacred concept of ‘composition’ (the reigning object and activity of the great composers and composition-based approaches to music) is as far removed from most of the world’s traditional musics as it is from the globally spatialized internet forms,6 both of which were not originated through formal acts of ‘composition’. In order to demythologize the scholarly rhetoric, we need to recognize that it is a human construction, a product of culture, and accordingly varies from time to time and from place to place. We need to ask what ‘musical creativity’ means to us and think of how we might begin to situate creativity in music and music-making as it is mobilized in practice by social groups.

1.3 Music, education and creativity

One of the enduring beliefs (and hopes) in most societies is that musical creativity has a ‘real’ and/or ‘virtual’ existence in children’s and young people’s everyday lives as a result of societal practices. So, when children enter the music classroom in school for the first time, many of them come with positive attitudes towards creative activity, enjoying it and believing they are creative. There are some who don’t seem particularly interested in singing or playing an instrument in a group or the classroom as an activity system, but many parents report that their children create their own music happily and spontaneously at home. Some children may already have started to form views of themselves as music-makers/creators based on support (or lack of support) from pre-school teachers and parents and through comparison with siblings and friends (Butler, 2008). All, however, enter as music-makers, cultural creators and culture bearers (Barrett, 2006). All are involved in making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas, whether as musical collages or arrangements of known or unfamiliar musics. Creative ideas proliferate.7

As children progress through primary school, there will be progressions between those children who exhibit what Bourdieu (2006) terms the ‘well-formed habitus’ and those who do not. There may be some who change from believing that music is something in which everyone can be creative, to believing that specialized talent is needed; children’s self-perceptions as composers, songwriters, improvisers or creative performers in music decline to a greater degree than their self-perceptions in other curriculum subjects. They may start to feel less at ease generating original musical ideas; this leads to a loss of motivation for the subject. How teachers act, and how their students participate, how musical creativity is taught as part of school music exerts a strong influence on the way that formative practices are implemented. As they adapt and become accustomed to the school’s learning culture and classroom experiences, group compositional and improvisational activity can become bound by routine and conventions, time and resources; the choice and design of tasks is largely determined by the teacher.

As young people progress through the upper secondary school years a ‘hierarchy of value’ (Cook, 1998) between composing and performing emerges. Music creativity is more often explained as a singular process located within the individual (i.e. that being the composer as author is an individualized practice), and in group work within the classroom, contextualized in a social space with a particular time and setting. The community comprises multiple individuals and/or subgroups who share the same object, such as the making of a piece. The division of labour may be shared between the members of the group with the division of power and status distributed evenly or unevenly and norms and conventions that constrain actions and interactions defining the activity system within which the visible actions undertaken within the system are directed towards achieving the goal of composing a piece (for an analysis of the activity system of composing using Engeström’s activity system, see Burnard and Younker, 2010).

The social and cultural sites and activity systems in which music creativities arise are increasingly complex and offer up daily reminders, Boden argues, that it involves ‘ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable’ (2004, p. 2; see Boden’s H-creativity8). How and where music is being created and consumed will be defined and valued differently in different cultures. In the world (or habitus9) of the internet, e-learning and virtual realities, we also have ‘virtual fields’, the fields of the media and globally networked or spatialized internet fields, in which to make digital and mobile music. Social networks and the fluid roles in contemporary popular musics between musicians, DJs and audience feature strongly, as in the use of YouTube. Most recently, an iPhone application called ‘Street Orchestra’ lets you play classical music with up to 200,000 synched iPhones.10 While the production and consumption of music and the human experience of music has changed radically, the notion of equally valid creativities through which we can fluidly move is important and yet these features go unrecognized; this is a major threat to, and a potential tragedy for, music education.

1.4 Researching musical creativity

The particular context in which the musicians situate the output of creativity (such as Western classical, funk, rock, rap or reggae, and creativity in music is understood and engaged with in the micro-cultures of the family, classroom, studio, street or playground) and the differing systems for creating original music affect how it is studied. Values spill out untidily at every point in the analysis of musical creativity, and it is one of the abiding weaknesses of much mainstream research that it tends to play down their significance in shaping and explaining observable practice.

Depending upon whether scholars are allied to psychology, sociology or humanistic disciplines (such as art history, aesthetics or criticism), they start from different premises. This extends to the ways in which they formulate questions related to musical creativity. Because the subject of research itself is a matter of debate between competing intellectual orientations, researchers differ among themselves in the ways they view society, social actors and processes. Added to this lack of consensus is the problem that musical creativity is conceived differently and constructed differently within different historical practices.

We know creativity in music arises within and depends upon the legitimizing frameworks of public opinion and conventions (i.e. ways of doing something, such as the way musicians use conventional patterns of melody, harmony and rhythm to create emotional tension and release, and thus musical meaning). Yet research evidence is still patchy on what counts as ‘musical creativity’, the development of the conception of ‘musical creativity’ itself and what is made of it in educational systems.

As with general creativity, several literature reviews of musical creativity research exist (see, for example, Burnard, 2006a, 2006b, 2007 and Hickey, 2003, 2007 for some of the latest reviews; Webster, 1992 for an earlier review; Deliège & Wiggins, 2006 for a comprehensive discussion interwoven with a distillation of the literature in which musical creativity has been construed, constructed and contested from early childhood through to adulthood). The reviews bring together musicians of various kinds, people in education, in artificial intelligence, in philosophy, sociology, psychology, neurosciences and psychotherapy and provide a variety of perspectives, methods and goals for examining music creativity. Yet the lack of congruence that emerges between research, policy and practice about what renders creativity in music education remains problematic.

The common ground among social perspectives is that they are based on the conviction that creativity is vital to all societies, to all fields, domains and cultures. Social perspectives on music education are not, as some have suggested, ‘just political’; they represent the lived meanings of musical culture and communities. Interestingly, both Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and illustrations
• List of music examples
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I CONCEPTUALIZING MUSICAL CREATIVITY
• PART II EXAMPLES FROM PRACTICE
• PART III PATHS FOR FURTHER ENQUIRY
• Index