Developing Creativities in Higher Music Education

International Perspectives and Practices

Pamela Burnard, Pamela Burnard

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134638987
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Música

This is the first book to critically address the issue of how we can enhance and develop creativities in higher music education. It features new international, richly diverse perspectives on the nature and practice of creativities in different cultural and institutional contexts, in varying roles and in response to diverse professional pressures and expectations of artistic and educational achievement.

This compelling and provocative book combines powerful social and educational commentaries and examples drawn from international sources based on original practices and experience of a diversity of creativities. The authors provide an important contribution by drawing attention to what is at the heart of all music and how we can understand and foster these multiple creativities at an individual and institutional level. It features new analyses of the question of creativities in higher music education, and offers illustrative and innovative examples of adaptive learning environments for teaching and learning creatively, considering the broader issue of the role of creativities in relation to educational policy in the context of increasingly interventionist governments and rapidly paced educational change.

Topics covered include:

-the conceptual tools for people to think about and debate multiple creativities
-the role of creativities in higher music education
-how musicians can develop multiple creativities in new ways
-new approaches to teaching and learning for multiple creativities
-what constitute leadership creativities in conservatoires and music departments
-creativities at the interface of institutional learning cultures
-assessing the multiple creativities of music.

Developing Creativities in Higher Music Education offers a multi-disciplinary research and practice focus, which will be essential reading for anyone involved in higher education and industry sectors. The book will appeal to academics and practitioners in music, researchers, instrumental and vocal teachers, curriculum and policy developers and institutional managers who want to enrich the higher education experiences of their students and enable them to develop more of their creative potential. It is also ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of music education who are looking for an authoritative selection of writings that define the fields of musical creativities in one comprehensive volume.

Part I

Perspectives

1 Championing the significance of creativities in higher music education

Pamela Burnard

Introduction

Digital technology allows for the mass reproduction of musics. New-generation commercial music, web space and the peculiar properties of the ever-expanding web world – the medium through which musical culture increasingly organizes itself – provide a dynamic and complex context wherein all kinds of creativities nestle in the nooks and crannies. Not surprisingly, the internet is enabling new musical creativities to emerge daily.

When discussing the complex, and often taken-for-granted, symbiotic relationship between consumer production and consumption in the global music economy, we can see that the globalization of taste and transformation of the consumer’s musical identity (involving the appropriation and mixing of existing musical material) can be found in techno-communal innovations in digital media space.

Virtual music-making is now a ubiquitous practice. In addition to console games, there are a number of interactive loop mixing sites where players share and exchange loops and mixes, giving rise to new kinds of creative practices, such as relayed creativity or hybrid genres where pre-existing sources are ‘blended’. These ‘mashups’ blur the boundaries between production and reception.

The need for a conceptual expansion of the idea of musical creativities to embrace the world of the internet is something of an imperative. How and where music is being created and creatively consumed may be valued differently in accordance with what is considered to be individually or historically novel. In the internet there are ‘virtual fields’ on which to make digital music. Meanwhile, social networking sites bring together musicians, DJs and audiences. Most recently, an iPhone application called ‘Street Orchestra’ lets you play classical music with up to 200,000 synched iPhones. The notion of unequally valued musical creativities is pertinent to the radical changes in the production and experience of music across the past twenty years.

Creativities in the context of concept expansion

The creativities from which music originates are evident in the interplay of myriad social and technological practices, in terms of popular cultural forms, the high-art orthodoxies that position musical creativity as a uniquely personal realm, and the generative forces that produce their own varied social relations in performance, in musical associations and ensembles, and in the musical division of labour. Cooperative categories of creativity can be perceived in the ‘cooperative maxims’ proposed in Benson’s (2003) analysis of the improvisation of musical dialogues, or in the collective conversation of jazz performance (Berliner 1994). The increased connectivity of producers and consumers has deconstructed the music industry and the music licensing sector, with new business models being developed by music entrepreneurs.

The rise of amateur creativity and increase of so-called ‘user-generated content’ are evidence of the changing conceptions of creativity in professional music-making. For professional musicians (whether their wildest ambitions are to be a scratcher, a digital composer, or a rock megastar, like Trent Reznor of the industrial pioneer collective Nine Inch Nails, who have no recording contract), building online communities is a fundamental part of the social interaction of developing new creativities. In the field of new music production, the peculiar, ever-expanding web world is the medium through which musical culture increasingly organizes itself. These new musical networks challenge the individualist conception of creativity, and demand a much broader collective and plural definition.

One of the key concerns is how we come to train professional musicians, and teach the creativities that are valued in preparing musicians to enter diverse careers in music. The idea that mass consumerism engages us in passively listening to and appreciating music is something sold to us by the advertisements of record companies. The idea of exceptionally charismatic performers is sold to us by distributors who sell concert tickets. Yet audiences are an active and crucial component in decisions about what sort of space the music will be performed in, and what sort of people might be expected to form an audience.

The professional significance of music and music teacher education is concerned with professional knowledge and knowledge specializations, and questions of what it means to be enabled in/by creativities, what underpins the real-world practices of professional musicians and what this means for the way in which higher education artist teachers (and their students) learn and why they change (or do not change), what motivates them, and what factors help or hinder their developing creativities.

It is important to society that music institutions are aware of and support the increasing research focus on creativities generally and build an understanding of musical creativities. Music teacher thinking and higher music teacher education has experienced an increasing recognition – by higher music teacher educators (usually academics developing professionally focused courses in increasingly beleaguered higher education institutions), policy makers, and the community at large – that the quality of teachers and our understanding of teacher knowledge and teaching in higher music education are key factors in students’ learning and achievement. Higher music educators can significantly influence attitudes towards music learning and learners’ motivation to learn, not only through developing their creativities, but by understanding what we consider to be the most important aspects of higher music education for understanding the music profession are, and by preparing musicians for careers in music.

As professionals, higher music education teachers are engaging in the development of professional teacher practice. At the initial and on-going professional development phases of music teachers, the traditional higher-education concern with disciplined, codified, propositional knowledge (which comes closest to traditional academic discipline-based theories, practical principles and propositions about particular cases in the applied field of professional action) has usually triumphed, together with the emphasis on constellations of practices such as was the case for Stravinsky, who differentiated between composing and performing in relation to creativity by the degree of enacted creativity inscribed in originating a piece compared with that of realizing it in performance.

The point I am making is that the way we think about musical creativities can lead us to assign a ‘hierarchy of value’ (Cook 1990: 20), with a subordinate status for the production of music compared to its creation (as in the fetishization of composition), particularly if creativity is not a peculiar quality of the art. The status of individual charismatic performers is totally at odds with the adulation of stardom (the view of individual charismatic performers who make creativity manifest in music). All of this shows the intricate relationships of various musics with their environment and the relationships between composer and performer, the artist and the audience for whom composers/songwriters/sound artists write and artists perform.

We have plenty of evidence for challenging the singular and individualist discourses which define musical creativity in terms of the Western canonization of musical creativity, with its limited definition of high-art orthodoxies. A broader reconceptualizing of musical creativities is now championed through a multiplicity of contemporary practices. For example, for people involved in the dance club scene, the forms of collective association which are built around musical tastes and stylistic preference, exhibited at counter- or sub-cultural music scenes, offer clear examples of the very acts of consumer autonomy and creativities that open up and reconfigure the potential multiplicity of creativities in music.

Evidence from national and international research studies shows higher music educators as being continually in the grips of educational change and rapid reform, as observed by Lang et al. (1999: 11) over a decade ago:

Teachers do not work in isolation. Those who work with them are caught up in the reform process. The professional self is developed in a community of persons involved in teaching and learning as colleagues, students, researchers, teacher educators, administrators, parents or politicians in an environment of openness, mutual help, trust and understanding. But there are also many pressures from diverse stakeholders. Many and conflicting good intentions exist for schools driven often by insecurities which flow from international testing and changes in the workplace. Conservative forces want productivity measures – liberal and socially oriented groups want autonomous and self-responsible developments and there is much in between. These many good intentions have the power to influence teacher practice. The means are embodied in curricula, syllabi, standards, financial incentives, school structures, teacher and student assessment systems, textbooks and computer purchases. Researchers, no less than others, contest the nature of education and its assumed contribution to a good life, and all involved have a point of view and an agenda.

In higher music education, there is much evidence, in research on innovative practices, which contests the nature of the profession’s claim to a specialist knowledge base in, for example, developing values, determining cultural norms, participating and linking with communities and drawing on the attributes of a spectrum of practices of musical creativities. As Jorgensen (2011: 71) argues:

One of the most pervasive models underlying music education is that of community. Whether it be the Hindustani sitarist instructing his disciple in traditional manner, the Western classical pianist conducting her masterclass, the Australian Aboriginal songman teaching his young kinsmen a love song, or the Balkan mother singing her daughter a lament, all participate in a community in which music making and taking plays a central role.

Hence, in relation to higher music education systems, we are starting to value and incorporate creativities, including the nurturing of community and industry partnerships, in order to bring together the collaborative and change cultures in ways which recognize creativity as a change agent. We are now coming to critically view higher music education sectors as sites which need to be challenging values and assumptions, for navigating both failure and success, for coming to terms with relevancy and building on the multiplicity of students’ roles, interests and experiences.

Traditionally, higher music educational institutions have been responsible for providing initial teacher education (ITE) and continuing professional development (CPD) and for deciding the quality of the profession’s intake and degree-entry routes. Professionally focused courses are, however, increasingly disappearing. All around the world there are courses that develop professional music teachers with significant professional knowledge and skills, qualifications and practices that are able to create effective learning environments. In spite of this, there is considerable evidence that CPD is, all too often, under-supplied and is, therefore, minimally effective in advancing and developing new professional knowledge. Music teachers and music educators continually strive to achieve improved social status and legitimacy (see Chapter 4, this volume). Yet the framework for promoting and facilitating professional learning depends upon the professional knowledge of the teacher educators themselves and how policy reforms and reform agendas embody images of professional ideals and models of creative practice (Chapter 4, this volume).

We can think about professional learning and particular ways of conceptualizing creativities as an evolving configuration of role sets which are co-constructed and shared, questioned and reformed in relationship with other colleagues. This requires openness to the new and unexpected, listening to ideas and theories, risk-taking, adaption, mutual support and relational trust; preconditions for which need to be built into the everyday work patterns of the learning community.

Reconceptualizing creativities: reconstructing professionalism

There is general agreement that governments are increasingly taking control of the teaching profession (Alexander 1992: 2004). Teachers are expected to perform in specific and regulated ways. While forms of knowledge provide variation, within pedagogic practices knowledge determines the way that the ‘what is to be learnt’ is written and taught. We know that a specialized language specializes in consciousness – specialist music teachers determine and realize a more skills-based music pedagogic discourse (where elements of professional knowledge are presupposed by the curriculum) and generalist teachers develop de-specializing ‘content-rich’ pedagogy (Moore et al. 2006). That allegiance to a discipline, such as music, specializes teachers’ identity and strongly classifies and frames teachers’ confidence and makes claims on specialist knowledge and cultural creativities (Chapter 5, this volume). In other words, cultural, political, social and pragmatic perspectives matter greatly. Possession of empirical or theoretical perspectives is perceived by higher music education teachers to be as important in defining identity as is achievement.

Within the field of education, generally speaking, Alexander (1992) proposes that, although teaching is a complex and unpredictable activity, ‘good’ practice lies within the intersection of five overlapping considerations, which are particularly relevant to the context of the initial teacher and continuing professional education: (i) the policy-making context, where the concept of ‘standards’ and assertions about standards and accountability are defined in political discourse by policy milestones; (ii) the academic context, where theoretical knowledge may be related to practice and practical knowledge may be used to generate theory and where professional knowledge can be validated by research; (iii) the school context, which corresponds with this educational discourse, debates and discussions on accountability and school improvement, is aligned with what initial teacher training and teacher education say and do to shape professional knowledge; (iv) the curriculum context, which corresponds to knowledge about curriculum and wider questions of value and purpose of how and what children should learn and what knowledge matters; and (v) the classroom context, which corresponds with locally devised contexts. How knowledge use is depicted in these contexts is what shapes teachers’ expertise. Within them normal professional practice can be produced in a relatively routine, situated manner (which can be described as richly elaborated and tacit knowledge about curriculum, classroom routines and students that allows teachers to apply and dispatch what they know as professional knowledge) with or without questioning the assumptions on which the practice is based. In this way, questions about what constitutes good teaching for different teachers can also be distinguished by the way in which people learn to operate, grow and develop as professionals (by writing, talking or doing) and by the way knowledge is validated (by expertise, by stakeholders’ support, or by personal knowledge).

The overlapping considerations for professional teaching are:

1 Cultural: What creativities do higher music educators value and believe in? Which creativities are culturally sensitive to musical development across musical learning communities?

2 Political: What practices do ministry officials and school leaders advocate/not advocate?

3 Empirical: What are the most important prerequisites for the continued development of creativities for the scope and dynamic ch...