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How are an individual’s ability and motivation to be creative shaped by the world around her? Why does creativity seem to flourish in some environments, while in others it is stifled? Many societies value creativity as an abstract concept and many, perhaps even most, individuals feel an internal drive to be creative; however, tremendous social pressures restrict development of creative skill sets, engagement in creative activities, and willingness to take creative risks. Becoming Creative explores how social and cultural factors enable or inhibit creativity in music. The book integrates perspectives from ethnomusicology, education, sociology, psychology, and performance studies, prioritizing the voices of practicing musicians and music educators. Insights are drawn from ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with classical, jazz, and traditional musicians in South Africa, Finland, and the United States. By comparing and analyzing these musicians’ personal experiences, Becoming Creative deepens our understanding of the development and practice of musical creativity, the external factors that influence it, and strategies for enhancing it. The book reveals the common components of how musical creativity is experienced across these cultures and explains why creativity might not always be considered socially desirable. It identifies ideal creativity-enabling criteria—specific skill sets, certain psychological traits and states, and access to opportunities and authority—and illustrates how these enablers of creativity are fostered or thwarted by a variety of beliefs, learning methods, social relationships, institutions, and social inequalities. Becoming Creative further demonstrates formal and informal strategies for overcoming inhibitors of creativity.

Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation and narration of disability. The most characteristic features of musical modernism—fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others—can be understood as musical representations of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Modernist musical representation and narration of disability both reflect and shape (construct) disability in a eugenic age, a period when disability was viewed simultaneously with pity (and a corresponding urge toward cure or rehabilitation) and fear (and a corresponding urge to incarcerate or eliminate). Disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about. This book draws on two decades of work in disability studies and a growing body of recent work that brings the discussion of disability into musicology and music theory. This interdisciplinary enterprise offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on social and cultural constructions of the meaning of disability, and shifting attention from biology and medicine to culture. Within modernist music, disability representations often embody pernicious stereotypes and encourage sentimentalizing, exoticizing, or more directly negative responses. Modernist music claims disability as a valuable resource, but does so in a tense, dialectical relationship with medicalized, eugenic-era attitudes toward disability.

This book considers the aims and impact of formative musical experiences, evaluating the extent to which music education of various kinds provides a foundation for lifelong involvement and interest in music. The discussion draws upon rich qualitative data, in which over 100 adults with an active interest in music reflect upon the influences and opportunities that shaped their musical life histories. The book addresses the relationship between the claims made for music education, the practice and policy through which those aims are filtered, and recollections of the lived experiences of learning music in a variety of contexts. This consideration of school music is set in the broader context of learning in the home and community, and illustrates the circumscribed yet immensely powerful role that music teachers and other potential role models can play in nurturing open-minded, active musicians. The four central chapters focus on generational change in home and school experiences of music; the locations in which musical learning takes place, including a cross-cultural comparison with respondents from Italy; the characteristics of teachers, parents and others as musical mentors and role models; and the lifelong outcomes of musical engagement for performers, teachers, listeners and adult learners. This analysis is then used to illuminate the claims made for music education in historical and contemporary debate, and to propose ways in which school music might better prepare young people for lifelong engagement in music. The book takes a long-term perspective on how formative musical experiences and opportunities have a lifelong impact on musical values, skills and attitudes.

This book draws upon his extensive experience to investigate an interventional approach to music making outside of formal teaching and learning situations. Working with historical, ethnographic, and theoretical research, the book provides a rich resource for those whom practice, advocate, teach, or study community music, music education, music therapy, ethnomusicology, and community cultural development.

This book addresses the needs of teacher-educators seeking to include composition pedagogy in music education curricula. Though several decades of scholarship have examined the processes and products of young composers and offered insight to their work, many teachers still report a significant degree of trepidation when asked to lead students in composition activities. This book provides guidance for developing pre-service and in-service teachers ability to confidently and effectively facilitate composition study in PreK-12 settings. Issues that frame the volume include why composition should be part of music education, and by extension, music teacher education; research bases in creativity and children's composition; and the changing nature of compositional practices in contemporary culture. Drawing on both research and practice, chapters provide models for leading composition study in elementary general music, choral and instrumental ensembles, and songwriting classes. Guidance is offered for those working with special needs populations and gifted-and-talented students, as well as those interested in expanding experiences beyond the classroom via technology. Moreover, specific programmatic approaches for addressing the professional development of pre-service and in-service teachers are offered in detail so that music teacher-educators may create environments where composition's potential to enliven and invigorate contemporary practices in music education can be fully embraced.

Of the many composers in the Western classical tradition who celebrated the marriage between psyche and sound, those explored in this book followed the lines diverging from Wagner in philosophizing the nature of desire in music. This book offers two new theories of tonal functionality in the music of the first half of the twentieth century that seek to explain its psychological complexities. First, the book further develops Riemann’s three diatonic chord functions, extending them to account for chromatic chord progression and substitution. The three functions (tonic, subdominant, and dominant) are compared to Jacques Lacan’s twin concepts of metaphor and metonymy, which drive the apparatus of human desire. Second, the book develops a technique for analyzing the drives that pull chromatic music in multiple directions simultaneously, creating a libidinal surface that mirrors the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, and the post-Freudians Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The harmonic models are tested in psychologically challenging pieces of music by post-Wagnerian composers. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk’s Asrael Symphony to an exploration of “perversion” in Strauss’s Elektra, from the post-Kantian transcendentalism of Ives’s Concord Sonata to the “Accelerationism” of Skryabin’s late piano works, and from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski’s Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland’s The Tender Land, the book cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity and digs deep into the psychological makeup of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Creative practice in music takes place in a distributed and interactive manner embracing the activities of composers, performers and improvisers—despite the sharp division of labour between these roles that traditional concert culture often presents. Two distinctive features of contemporary music are the greater incorporation of improvisation and the development of integrated and collaborative working practices between composers and performers. By blurring the distinction between composition and performance, improvisation and collaboration provide important perspectives on the distributed creative processes that play a central role in much contemporary concert music. This volume explores how collaboration and improvisation enable and constrain these creative processes. Organized into three parts, thirteen chapters and twelve shorter Interventions present diverse perspectives on distributed and collaborative creativity in music, on a range of collaborations between composers and performers, and on the place of improvisation within contemporary music, broadly defined. The thirteen chapters provide more substantial discussions of a variety of conceptual frameworks and particular projects, while the twelve Interventions provide more informal contributions from a variety of practitioners (composers, performers, improvisers), giving direct insights into the pleasures and problems of working creatively in music in collaborative and improvised ways.

This volume makes a unique contribution to music theory by building on recent research in cognitive science and theoretical perspectives adopted from cognitive linguistics to present an account of the foundations of musical grammar. Musical grammar is conceived of as a species of construction grammar, in which grammatical elements are form-function pairs. In the case of music, basic constructions are sonic analogs for dynamic processes that are central to human cultures. This volume focuses on three such processes: those related to emotions, to gestures, and to dance. The first chapter introduces the volume and explains how this approach connects with previous work in music theory. The second chapter reviews research on analogy and shows how it provides a basis for analogical reference, which is fundamental to musical grammar. The third chapter describes the connection between music and the emotions facilitated by analogical reference. The fourth chapter explores connections between human gesture and musical utterances, and shows how both rely on the infrastructure for human communication that is also exploited by language. The fifth chapter demonstrates how music provides sonic analogs for the steps of social dances, and how music combined with dance has been used to structure social interactions. The sixth chapter focuses on the combination of language and music that occurs in songs, making clear how the different grammatical resources offered by music and language shape how meaning is constructed in songs. Detailed musical analyses are offered in each chapter, as well as summaries of the basic elements of musical grammar.

No matter the excellence of a musician's performance achievements, upon entering the professional world, it is unlikely that any musician will depend solely upon performance for income. Those who distinguish themselves as both skilled teachers and skilled performers will have a significant advantage. This book provides the tools and information necessary for musicians to become effective teachers in terms useful to both pedagogy teachers and applied music instructors, and young music students learning to teach while perfecting their performance skills. Premised on the integral partnership between pedagogy and performance, the authors offer in-depth explorations of the essential components of instrumental performance, the nature of student–teacher interactions and the manner in which knowledge, skills and musicianship are most effectively conveyed. In so doing, they illuminate the profound resonance between music performance and education and show how musicians benefit as much from teaching as their students do from being taught. Included is a wealth of information and concrete examples on everything from setting up a studio, to writing a lesson plan, to soliciting constructive feedback from students.

This book develops a theory of musical meter based on psychological research in temporal perception, cognition, and motor behavior. Meter is regarded as a kind of entrainment, a synchronization of attention and actions to the rhythms of the environment. Drawing on research on the ability to make durational discriminations and categorizations at various tempos, as well as evidence from neurobiology, the “speed limits” for meter are given: the inter-onset interval for metric elements must be greater than 100ms (10 per second) and less than 1.5-2.00 seconds. Care is taken to distinguish rhythms or patterns of duration from meters, the listener/performer's complex patterns of expectation and attention. It is thus shown that metric behaviors are highly tempo-dependent. Ambiguities may arise when a rhythmic pattern may be regarded under more than one meter, and conflicts may arise when a pattern of durations contradicts the ongoing meter. The music-theoretical core of the book is its development of a set of metric well-formedness constraints, which limit the temporal range and organization of patterns of metric entrainment. A consideration of the rhythmic practices of various non-western cultures, including some African and Indian music, leads to an additional well-formedness constraint, that of maximal evenness. This allows for meters that involve uneven (i.e., non-isochronous) beats or beat subdivisions. The book concludes with the many meters hypothesis, which proposes that a large number of expressively timed temporal templates are acquired that are readily used when listening in familiar musical contexts.

This book is not so much about how to teach as it is about how to think as a teacher confronting a variety of learning challenges. The challenge for music education, for music teachers, is to create meaningful learning opportunities for all children, preparing them to participate happily and successfully in rewarding music experiences throughout their lives. The principal features that characterize such experiences are universal in the sense that they are applicable in ways that engage diverse groups of children in common experiences that are valued by their teachers, their parents, and their peers. This book focuses on a universal approach that recognizes the needs of individual students and includes learning environments in which all students participate in the same activities, experience personal success, and contribute to the success of their classmates. The four chapters focus on the uniqueness of children, biases, and stereotyping; designing meaningful music programs; using governing principles to guide decisions (e.g., increasing positive peer interactions, fostering self-determination, collaboration), and accomplishing music goals using universal strategies. The book provides context with a historical timeline and chapters tracing the development of laws and significant changes in teaching practices, including those concerning music and the disabilities movement, laws, and music education.

Answering fundamental questions about musical preference, ability, and communication, the field of Musical Cognition and Development is critical to the understanding of how music is processed, grasped, and learned. This book covers the latest theoretical and practical techniques that explain meaning and understanding in music. Chapters offer cogent and concise insights giving up-to-date information and references. The book covers the most important topics in this field, including skill development in music performance, research on communicating music expressiveness, the neurobiology of music, the cognitive constraints in the listening process, and music and medicine as applied to neuroscience.

This book brings together the best and most current research on methods for music learning, focusing squarely on the profession's empirical and conceptual knowledge of how students gain competence in music at various ages and in different contexts. The book takes a broad theoretical perspective on current, critical areas of research, including music development, music listening and reading, motivation and self-regulated learning in music, music perception, and movement. The book's companion volume, Applications, builds an extensive and solid position of practice upon the frameworks and research presented here. Focus is placed on the musical knowledge and musical skills needed to perform, create, understand, reflect on, enjoy, value, and respond to music. A key point of emphasis rests on the relationship between music learning and finding meaning in music, and as music technology plays an increasingly important role in learning today, chapters move beyond exclusively formal classroom instruction into other forms of systematic learning and informal instruction.

This book brings together the best and most current research on best practice for music learning, focusing squarely on the profession’s empirical and conceptual knowledge of how students gain competence in music at various ages and in different contexts. The collection of chapters, written by the foremost figures active in the field, addresses a range of best practices for approaching current and important areas in the field, including cognition and perception, music listening, vocal/choral learning, and the needs of special learners. The book’s companion volume, Strategies, provides the solid theoretical framework and extensive research upon which these practices stand. Focus is placed on the musical knowledge and musical skills needed to perform, create, understand, reflect on, enjoy, value, and respond to music. A key point of emphasis rests on the relationship between music learning and finding meaning in music, and as music technology plays an increasingly important role in learning today, chapters move beyond exclusively formal classroom instruction into other forms of systematic learning and informal instruction.

Shape is a concept that is widely used in talk about music. Musicians in wide-ranging genres of music use it to help them rehearse, teach and think about what they do. Yet why is a word that seems to require something to see or to feel so useful to describe something that sounds? How is sound shaped? And how does shaping help performers and composers, and engage listeners? If the concept is so ubiquitous among practitioners, why has it been missing from music studies until now? Music and Shape examines numerous aspects of this surprisingly close relationship, with contributions from scholars and musicians, artists, dancers, filmmakers, and synaesthetes. The book opens up new perspectives on musical performance, music psychology and music analysis, making explicit and open to investigation a vital factor in musical thinking and experience that was previously overlooked as a mere metaphor.

Until recently, ideas of creativity in music revolved around composers in garrets and the lone genius. But the last decade has witnessed a sea change: musical creativity is now overwhelmingly thought of in terms of collaboration and real-time performance. Music as Creative Practice is a first attempt to synthesize both perspectives. It begins by developing the idea that creativity arises out of social interaction—of which making music together is perhaps the clearest possible illustration—and then shows how the same thinking can be applied to the ostensively solitary practices of composition. The book also emphasizes the contextual dimensions of musical creativity, ranging from the prodigy phenomenon, long-term collaborative relationships within and beyond the family, and creative learning to the copyright system that is supposed to incentivize creativity but is widely seen as inhibiting it.Music as Creative Practice encompasses the classical tradition, jazz and popular music, and music emerges as an arena in which changing concepts of creativity—from the old myths about genius to present-day sociocultural theory—can be traced with particular clarity. The perspective of creativity tells us much about music, but the reverse is also true, and this fifth and last instalment of the Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice series offers an approach to musical creativity that is attuned to the practices of both music and everyday life.

This book is an in-depth and practical resource for educators and parents who wish to introduce music to children with hearing loss. The author makes a compelling case for offering music education to children with hearing loss before presenting a series of up-to-date teaching strategies meant to inform their educational experience, including preparations for the classroom, communication strategies for parents and teaching staff, and tips on more specific or technical matters such as conducting musical audiograms. These resources provide a solid background for hands-on instructional materials such as music lessons, supplemental activities, educational resources, discussion points, and journal samples for the classroom and home. The author offers detailed suggestions for specific classroom settings such as general music, choral ensemble, and instrumental ensemble as well as a set of recommended listening lessons that take this potential variety of settings into account. The book provides suggestions for incorporating music into everyday activities and also presents an overview of recent research which reinforces the benefits of music upon social and emotional development as well as speech and language development. As hearing aid and cochlear implant technologies improve and become increasingly widespread, all teachers—especially music teachers—should expect to see more deaf and hard-of-hearing children in their classrooms. Awareness and preparation are not only vital in aiding these children in the classroom, but are required of teachers by federal law. This book is a comprehensive resource for teachers and parents who wish to gain a better understanding of the emerging field of music education for students with hearing loss.

This book addresses the impact of musical experiences on the quality of life of senior citizens. “Evergreen Town,” a retirement community in the southeastern United States, serves as the backdrop for three research studies examining the role of music in the lives of its residents: a two-phase study (survey and focus group interview) and two in-depth case studies (a church choir and a bluegrass group). Evidence suggests that music participation does indeed play an important and positive role in the quality of life of senior citizens. The authors incorporated the literature from the fields of music education, adult learning, lifelong learning, gerontology, medicine, music therapy, and interdisciplinary studies in the research findings while reflecting on music education from a lifelong perspective. The book concludes with a proposition of a new mindset to chart a new direction in the facilitation of the musical lives of people of all ages, so that everyone may live life to the fullest with the richness of music as a substantial contributor to quality of life. Music education for life is a sine qua non to achieve a high quality of life.

Musicians are continually ‘in the making’, tapping into their own creative resources while deriving inspiration from teachers, friends, family members and listeners. Amateur and professional performers alike tend not to follow fixed routes in developing a creative voice; instead, their artistic journeys are personal, often without foreseeable goals. The imperative to assess and reassess one’s musical knowledge, understanding and aspirations is nevertheless a central feature of life as a performer. Musicians in the Making explores the creative development of musicians in both formal and informal learning contexts. It promotes a novel view of creativity, emphasizing its location within creative processes rather than understanding it as an innate quality. It argues that such processes may be learned and refined, and furthermore that collaboration and interaction within group contexts carry significant potential to inform and catalyze creative experiences and outcomes. The book also traces and models the ways in which creative processes evolve over time. Performers, music teachers and researchers will find the rich body of material assembled here engaging and enlightening. The book’s three parts focus in turn on ‘Creative learning in context’, ‘Creative processes’ and ‘Creative dialogue and reflection’. In addition to sixteen extended chapters written by leading experts in the field, the volume includes ten ‘Insights’ by internationally prominent performers, performance teachers and others.

Repetition is stunningly pervasive in music from all over the world. People often place their music players “on repeat”—relistening to the same recordings again and again. The prevalence of this practice suggests the existence of some sort of underlying psychological principle; however, people have been slow to acknowledge and study music’s repetitiveness, finding it an embarrassing or suspicious practice. This book argues that repetitiveness lies at the core of musical experience, and adopts the perspective of cognitive science to examine the puzzle of this human appetite for musical repetition. Work on subjects as diverse as the structure of bird song, the psychology of ritual, the nature of infant-directed speech, the neural basis of hearing, and pathologies of repetitiveness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder are marshaled to shed light on the everyday behavior of repetitive music listening. This perspective draws new distinctions between music and language as communicative forms, and offers new ideas about the cognitive basis of musical pleasure.