Musical Creativity Revisited

Educational Foundations, Practices and Research

Oscar Odena

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367232078
• eBook ISBN: 9781315464596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Éducation secondaire

How is creativity understood and facilitated across music education settings? What is the power of creativity in enhancing individual and group learning? How is musical creativity used as a tool for cross-community integration? How can we research the interactions of those engaged in musical activities aimed at creative development? These are just some of the questions addressed in this fascinating new monograph. Musical Creativity Revisited is an authoritative volume of insights from theory, practice-based research and methodological analyses. Its chapters celebrate the diversity of the many different ways in which young and adult learners develop musical creativity. Following on from Musical Creativity: Insights from Music Education Research (Ashgate, 2012) Odena offers novel examples from practice and precise suggestions on how to research it. This book will be an essential point of reference for students, researchers, practitioners and practitioner-researchers interested in music education and creativity across the arts and social sciences. The chapters have been organized into three sections – Foundations, Practices and Research – including examples from in-depth studies focussed on a secondary school in England, higher music education in Spain and out-of-school settings in Northern Ireland. This is a book that will fascinate readers, inspiring them to think deeply about the many different ways in which musical creativity can be developed, its purposes and how to research it.

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Part I

Foundations

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1 Conceptualizing creativity in musical development

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to review key research in, and practices of, creativity in music and music education in order to assist the reader to better understand what is known about the development of musical creativity.¹ The chapter aims to support interested readers in promoting musical creativity across diverse contexts. The choice of studies reviewed focuses on key research-based publications, mostly based in education settings, and embraces all types of methodological approaches. More extensive literature reviews are available elsewhere (Burnard, 2007; Haddon & Burnard, 2016; Odena, 2012a; Webster, 2009).

‘Creativity’ is a complex and fairly vague term, and in order to think about creativity in music and music education, it is necessary to look at the concept of creativity itself. The current wide use of the word in many fields, including arts and science, has arguably led to confusion about the different uses of the term. The first part of the chapter is devoted to an examination of some of the meanings attached to the word ‘creativity’, drawing on aesthetics, musicology, psychology, and education. The second part focuses on a conceptualization of musical creativity for educational settings, incorporating a cross-cultural perspective. The chapter concludes with a discussion of promising practices and some final considerations.

Unveiling its complexity: how is ‘creativity’ identified in different research traditions?

A review of the ever-expanding academic literature on general creativity reveals four distinct but closely related main study themes: the characteristics of the creative person, the facilitating environment for creativity, the creative process, and the assessment of creative products (Odena, 2001; Odena & Welch, 2009). The proportion of enquiries focussed on creativity in music and music education is small when compared with the investigations on general creativity, but its total number is nevertheless considerable. Hickey (2002) reviewed over 170 creativity research studies in music and arts education published since the 1940s, and came up with a similar categorization comprising four main themes: studies describing what students of different ages do when they are described as creative (developmental studies), enquiries focussing on the elements that appear to converge for creativity to occur (confluence studies), explorations of the thought processes of people engaged in creative activity (cognitive studies), and studies centred on the evaluation of creativity in musical outputs (assessment studies).

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Intermingled with these themes are two versions of creativity, which have been called the traditional and the new. The traditional, which is implanted in the uses of our ordinary language, refers to people who bring new things into being, such as professional sculptors or composers, and who are recognized by the community. This type of creativity has also been called historical creativity or Creativity with a capital C. In contrast, the new concept (in the sense of being contrasted to the traditional) is related to the psychological notion of imaginative thinking and can be displayed in any valued pursuit. It is a thinking style manifested in actions. This latter concept has broad applications in the school context, but confusion is likely to arise ‘when accounts of the new concept are presented as if they were characterizations of the traditional one’, for instance when we try to evaluate the students’ work using historical creativity criteria (Odena & Welch, 2009, p. 417). For instance, a pop song by a group of students aged 12 may do poorly if compared with the song that is at number 1 in the pop charts, but for the students the process of composing it may have been an outstanding creative achievement in its own right.

In generalist education the word ‘creativity’ has been largely associated with progressive and reconstructivist movements, where there is an emphasis on the interests of the students and democratic ways of behaving. Progressive education was widespread at the beginning of the twentieth century, and terms such as ‘problem-centred enquiry’ and ‘growth’ were used for defining education by Dewey (1938) and his contemporaries. After the Second World War, the rapid development of science and industry shifted the emphasis of many scholars to the production of materials for developing ‘creative ability’. Research in the field grew rapidly, and a turning point is acknowledged to be Guilford’s (1950) presidential address to the American Psychological Association. In the 1960s and 1970s research programmes multiplied, for example under the headships of Barron and Torrance in the USA. The Journal of Creative Behavior was established (1967) and a great deal of research on general creativity has been carried out since then, as evidenced with the establishment of other journals such as Creativity Research Journal (1988) and Thinking Skills and Creativity (2006). For the interested reader, Kaufman and Sternberg’s volumes (2006, 2010) offer comprehensive reviews on creativity research and its worldwide development.

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Contemporary Western education scholars seem to agree that creativity should be seen as a universal potential, a view that relates to the concept of creativity defined as a thinking style manifested in actions. In psychology the word ‘creativity’ is an umbrella label encompassing different aspects of personality, ability, and motivation. In education, the interest in creativity has been strong in the perspective of informal and student-centred teaching methods, where the same term carries different connotations, which are linked to creative teaching (Savage & Fautley, 2007; Haddon & Burnard, 2016). Research into creativity, thus, is pursued from several disciplines and may be approached from the four different themes named above: person, environment, process, and product. In the following sections further consideration is given to these four themes. In spite of the confusion over its meanings, at least two concepts of creativity, traditional and new, continue to permeate thinking on the topic.

Creative learners

Psychological studies approach creativity focussing on the individual. Main areas of research include cognitive styles and personality characteristics (Feist, Reiter-Palmon, & Kaufman, 2017). The assumption here is that it is possible to identify a range of attitudes and behaviours that are indicative of a creative learner. Some researchers study those human beings assumed to have creative ability in an attempt to identify particular personality traits. Research in this area has tended to view creativity as a normally distributed trait, and there have been attempts to correlate creative ability with intelligence, although they have been inconclusive (not least because of the difficulty in agreeing what factors to measure for ‘intelligence’ and ‘creativity ability’). Personal skills facilitating creativity would include sensitivity to pinpoint and restate problems in ways that provide new insights; fluency to generate large numbers of relevant ideas; flexibility to switch to a new approach; originality to generate unusual ideas; analysis to break down a problem into its constituent parts; and synthesis to see connections between its parts and other areas of experience (Cropley, 2001).

Some studies have concentrated their attention on the personality of adults deemed as creative. For example, Cropley (2001) argued that apart from special cognitive processes, creative individuals display similar personal traits. Descriptions of the creative personality reflect an impulsive, nonconformist, and intelligent individual capable of sustained hard work, coupled with a desire to seek change, and who may show a certain disregard for observing detailed plans and rules. In Western musicians, high levels of imagination and sensitivity have been linked to low self-esteem and increased anxiety (Gaunt & Hallam, 2009). A combination of these traits can lead to apparently disorganized behaviour, which would be linked with a romanticized or traditional view of creativity.

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Hickey (2002) outlines a discrepancy in the developmental models of creativity emerging from general creativity and music education studies. Researches in general creativity indicate a U-shaped development model. This ‘begins with a period of high creativity in early childhood (marked by play and freedom from conformity)’, which ‘is followed by a slump in the middle years, and then re-emerges in a more sophisticated form of creativity for some in adulthood’ (p. 400). In contrast, music education studies of creative development indicate that the model is progressive, and that children go through a sequence of different stages of mastery. It is nevertheless difficult to compare the models as they focus on the development of different skills. While the U-shaped model appears to measure complexity and originality, understood as novel to the professional field, the music education studies measure music mastery skills in the students’ compositions (metric regularity, phrase structure, completeness), embracing the new concept of creativity as imagination successfully manifested in a valued pursuit. What clearly emerges from the literature is that the personal abilities of the students will affect the way they approach any classroom activity with a degree of creativity (defined as a thinking style).

Environment: the context for creativity

While research into creativity during the 1960s was characterized by studies about cognitive processes and personality traits, the environment necessary for developing creativity was considered more deeply during the later decades of the last century. Csikszentmihalyi (1994), after spending 20 years studying the personality and thinking of creative people, came to the conclusion that to begin to figure out what creativity was, the context in which individuals operate was of paramount importance.

Several educators have given descriptions of the classroom environment or climate more conducive for the development of creativity (Odena, Plummeridge, & Welch, 2005; Savage & Fautley, 2007). Three main aspects appear to form the classroom climate: the physical climate, the intellectual climate, and the emotional climate. Some advice in order to enhance pupils’ originality or the ability to generate unusual ideas – which is seen as a major aspect of creativity – is with reference to the layout of the room for a range of activities (physical climate). Resources would need to be available to support problem-solving, group work, exploration, and aesthetic appreciation. Students would need to be encouraged to use the resources without strictly fixed boundaries. Concerning the intellectual climate, students would need to be challenged in order to stimulate their abilities, taking into account their capabilities. With regard to the last feature of the classroom climate, the emotional aspect, students would need to feel safe to take risks and to experiment without frequent fear of failure, and their efforts would have to be rewarded. Although the whole classroom is considered a resource for learning, in creating the right climate or ‘setting the stage’ the educators play a key role. Creativity, in the new sense of the term, starts with the teacher and not with the classroom setting. Teaching that encourages children to be creative may flourish whatever the physical resources.

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Cropley (2001) analyses the role of the teacher in fostering creativity in similar terms. He suggests that the educator’s role is to overcome stumbling blocks to the emergence of divergent thinking (understood as the ability to find multiple ways to solve a problem), which he sees as the main aspect of creativity. In doing this, teachers need to eliminate negative attitudes towards divergence, prevent contempt from peers, and reduce anxiety about correctness or incorrectness.

The creative process

As with the term ‘creativity’, there seem to be two opposing views of the creative process in the literature, the systematic and the romantic. The systematic view involves a good deal of hard work and persistence, and creativity is seen as an everyday affair. Creative work is rational and somehow ordinary. For example, many professional composers and songwriters timetable their work in a daily routine. This is in opposition to the romantic view, characterized by irrationality, mystery, unconsciousness, and even ideas such as ‘previous incarnations’ (see, for example, Deliège & Harvey, 2006). A good example of the romantic view is Mozart’s explanation of his own composing:

When I am . . . entirely alone, and of good cheer – say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them . . . my subject enlarges itself . ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Musical Creativity Revisited
• Sempre Studies in the Psychology of Music
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Vignettes
• List of Tables
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Foundations
• Part II Practices
• Part III Research
• Index