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This chapter explains some of the educational applications of musical creativities, which are broadly interpreted as a composite of practices. It shows how the three dimensions of authorship, practice, and mediation basically change the way musical creativities can be used. It tries to describe the guidelines that have sufficient utility, and still resist the tendency to prescribe methods. The chapter also provides some narratives and sketches from the field of music in education.

This chapter provides a framework that can help in understanding musical creativities. It emphasizes that musical creativities can take many forms, can play a wide range of functions, and are deeply embedded in the dynamic mutation and flux of a musician's personal and sociocultural life. First, it examines the musical creativities found within the music industry, and then studies the social and political relevance and economy of musical creativities. Next, it discusses the concept of the ‘culturally arbitrary’ and its relation to power, as well as the differentiating features between musical creativities. The chapter also discusses the new forms of authorship and the temporal modalities, technological mediations, and the practices of musical creativities.

This chapter aims to widen the concept of musical creativity from its singular form, which would allow it to accept certain manifestations of multiple musical creativities. It introduces the concept of musical creativity and its connection to the ideal of individual heroism, or to the individual genius of the Great Composers. It studies the conceptualization of creativity in collective and individual improvisational performance, which was believed to be crucial to the training of instrumentalists. The chapter also considers some modern conceptions of music creativity and studies the technological, social, and temporal dimensions of music.

This chapter examines the musical creativities of three modern composers who explore the many ways of musical composition for opera houses, concert halls, music theatres, and popular music venues. It briefly discusses composition as an object, and takes a look at identifiable composed musics. It then describes the practices of three modern post-classical composers and illustrates their creativities by discussing the nature of their compositional work, their work in performance, and through performances of their compositions. The chapter also shows how musical creativity becomes a part of the composer's habitus.

David Elliott argues for a multidimensional and contextual view of musical creativity. He proposes a dialectical process between the standards and traditions of a musical style domain, the music makers and listeners who make up the domain's human field, and individual music makers as performers, improvisers, composers, arrangers, and conductors. Elliott's concept of creativity goes far beyond traditional notions of creativity as composing to include all forms of music making including composition and improvisation. This chapter examines the relationship between Elliott's praxial philosophy of creative experience in music education and the findings of a range of current research studies investigating children's creative processes, products, and achievements.

This chapter discusses improvised musics that are embedded in real time. It shows that this topic is relevant in questioning the narrowness of the customary concept of musical creativity. It studies five musicians that improvise in real time and represent a variety of practices. These accounts help explain the status adding to the improvisational creativities in the fields of folk/traditional, electro-acoustic, computer, and community music.

For a sociologist the ‘question of creativity’ is not why some people are creative and others not, nor how we can develop and encourage creativity in everyone, nor even what sort of mental processes creativity involves. Rather, sociologists are interested in creativity as a discourse — the social and cultural circumstances some human activities considered ‘creative’ are under — and an ideology. Why is human creativity considered to be such a good thing? This chapter argues that what is at issue in our understanding of creativity is not ‘creativity as a special sort of human activity’ nor creators as people with ‘special powers’ but creativity as a social fact, a way of thinking about what people do such that certain kinds of activity give people a particular social status. Such a way of thinking is the effect of social institutions. This argument is illustrated with reference to musical creativity, but the most useful starting point for this discussion is the recent history of ‘creativity’ as a more general term in political debate.

This chapter explores musical creativity as social agency. Using the activity of German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) during periods of significant situational incongruity — World War I, Weimar Republic, early Third Reich — it explores how music is mobilized for social agency in self situation and social action. Central to this is a consideration of how music is involved in ‘connecting personal and social change’. Key concepts developed include: music as a resource for reflexive thinking to situate the self (particularly through counterfactual reasoning); music used to colonize the future; music as a resource and tool for managing and acting situational incongruity.

This chapter focuses on one of the most fundamental sociocultural determinants of creative activities: ideology. Drawing from ethnomusicological ethnographic research, it examines differing cultural belief systems, values, and attitudes that may restrict, inhibit, encourage, or liberate musical creativity. It presents six case studies that demonstrate widely varying beliefs and conventions concerning musical creativity. They are: Venda traditional music from South Africa; pre-1970s Suya ceremonial music from Mato Grosso, Brazil; Western Classical and Romantic art music as studied and performed in Western Europe and North America in the late 20th century; American post-revival folk music; Finnish contemporary folk music; and festival music of the Aymara-speaking indigenous people from Conima, Peru.

Music improvisation is a universal and diverse form of musical expression, yet it retains a shadowy presence within the study of music from both a research and a performance perspective. This chapter focuses on the importance of improvisation as a particular site for creativity in music. It explores contemporary notions of improvisation in a broader than usual context (i.e., looking not just at jazz) and draws out some important aspects of improvisation for furthering our understanding of musical creativity in general. It suggests that improvisation affords the opportunity to challenge musical and cultural hegemonies and develop new ways of collaborating and thinking creatively in music.

This chapter examines how creativity can be understood in relation to children's musical development and the specific lines of development that interact to create the dynamics of change in children's musical creativity. It tries to show that the locus of development, for many children in the 21st century, gives prominence to the influence of peers and other social-cultural influences in children's lives. Similarly, hearing something differently, feeling differently about something, or having new ideas, thoughts, and feelings, can be considered as constituting the development of musical creativity, whereby children construct meaning through a variety of musical experiences situated in social contexts.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the definition of creativity in singing. It then highlights the uniqueness of this human ability by contrasting it with the absence of creativity in birdsong. However, consistent with the notions of critical periods for the acquisition of birdsong, the potential for creativity in singing at different stages in the lifespan is discussed. Examples of creativity in singing in Western culture, as revealed in research, are reviewed, and examples found in music performance are discussed, specifically skat singing in jazz improvisation. A new initiative which is developing a test battery of singing skills is then described as a means to obtain answers to questions of universality in the emergence and maintenance of creative singing across the lifespan trajectory. The chapter aims first to show that singing provides one of the most important contexts for future studies of musical creativity, and second to encourage increased opportunities for young and old to develop their abilities for song making.

The art of music, its inalienable essential quality, lies in the ability to convey a feeling of communality and the merging of all into one; the more openly this feeling is expressed, the more popular the kind of music embodying and supporting the feeling becomes. The aesthetic sense of the person endowed with an architectonic ear, who understands the correspondence of the parts and the whole in music, signals whether it is ready to accept the fruits of compositional fantasy for further development. Whereas the expressive ear for music takes on the principal burden of recognition of the emotional expressiveness of a musical passage, musical beauty is primarily the province of the architectonic ear. The work of the architectonic ear demands a significant degree of hierarchical arrangement in musical perception. The architectonic ear and the aesthetic sense stand at the origins of musical creativity and at the root of musical talent. This part also discusses the creative abilities of a composer, the composer as listener, the neuropsychology of a composer's musical talent, and the musical giftedness of a performer.

From its evolutionary origins, our culture has organized and shaped the role of creativity in music. For example, many people in Western culture will agree that Beethoven was a creative genius, and that his third symphony was a creative work, if not a hallmark of creativity in that era. Cultural momentum has perpetuated and reinforced, and at various times re-invigorated, these kinds of beliefs about creativity. The same is true of the child composing a piece in primary school, or a soloist improvising; our culture has established some more or less unwritten rules about which versions of these products (the composition and improvisation) are creative, or creative to some degree. The evolutionary pressure to be creative was associated with some concomitant use or development of brain function associated with creativity. This chapter explores a cognitive model that can be used to explain the mental functions of creative processing, and particularly for music. It draws on principles of spreading activation in associative networks.

This chapter discusses the notion of imagination and creativity in music listening, viewing perception as creative construction of knowledge. It proposes three networks of cognitive association. The first are networks of musical association: these are the connections that people make between different musical materials, pieces, and styles, and they could be thought of as people's ‘musical geographies’, i.e., the mental maps which they use to interpret any new pieces of the music they might encounter. The second type are networks which are based on the cultural aspects of musical reference, and the concept of ‘musical fit’ is helpful in understanding this: it is simply that certain pieces and styles are seen by members of particular cultural groups as being more appropriate to some situations than to others. Thirdly, it suggests that people construct their own personal networks of association by linking their cultural networks — the key people, situations, and events they have experienced in their lives — with their musical geographies. These may well form the basis of our musical identities.

This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions. Where traditional models of creativity were oriented towards enduring products, such as musical works, this book focuses rather on creativity as something you do, something that not only generates social or aesthetic meaning but is also inherently pleasurable. It locates the core of musical creativity in social interaction, and accordingly grounded in the larger social and institutional systems of which it is, in a sense, a product. When creativity is understood as subsisting in social interaction, the kind of individualistic creation that formed the focus of traditional, genius-oriented creativity research becomes a special case. The chapter also discusses the irresolvable tension between two approaches which both feature strongly in this book: on the one hand the sociocultural and ecological approaches that understand creativity to be socially produced, and on the other hand those physical and biological approaches which locate ‘musical creativity in the musician's brain’.

This introductory chapter discusses modern creative practices and the changing meaning of musical creativity. It explains the primary purpose of the book, which is to offer a powerful corrective to mythological and historical conceptions that are focused solely on the notions of creation as a singular activity. The chapter also presents an overview of the three main sections of the book.

Since composers and musicians are susceptible to the influence of the social world, this chapter describe how composition and musicianship are influenced by this factor. Making music is almost certainly important to people because of social psychological factors such as achievement, motivation, creativity, and identity. The chapter describes musical creativity and what the main theoretical explanations are of how it occurs. The chapter also discusses composition and how the nature of the music a person composes can be influenced by the prevailing musical zeitgeist and also the aspects of the composer's biographical milieu. The chapter also discusses several aspects of musicianship. These include personality differences between people who play different instruments; identity as a musician; environmental influences in the development of musical skill; evaluations of musical performances; performance anxiety; and the much-discussed ‘Mozart effect’.

This chapter investigates the largely pedagogical literature on children's musical creativity as a precursor to developing an understanding of creativity in children's musical play in school playgrounds. Theories of oral transmission and their relationship to children's creativity are also explored, along with factors influencing creativity such as intentionality, social interactions, and social situatedness. Some of the most influential studies of children's musical creativity have endeavored to provide models that predominantly focus on children's composition or improvisation. The models they present are seen to apply to all forms of children's composition or improvisation, in much the same way as early ethnomusicological studies of children's music propounded the idea that general structural elements underlie all children's songs, and studies of children's playlore focused on universal characteristics.