Musical Creativity

Promoting Creativity

Different teaching styles have been studied with the aim of recognizing their effects on the development of creative thinking in music. The teacher-controlled style can undoubtedly promote positive outcomes in the student's musical development, but only the learner-centered teaching style can support and enhance learners' creative improvement, not to mention their psychological and social development. Creative teaching has therefore been proved to be essential for creative learning.

A creativity-promoting music education can be based on many different, not alternative but complementary methods. The main ones are as follows:

• Cultivating students' music awareness
• Showing students the products of musical creation and analyzing the creative processes that led to these products
• Contributing to students' active involvement in the learning process
• Giving students opportunities to experience music as their own
• Encouraging analysis of musical products
• Enhancing students' ability to think critically
• Stimulating students' imagination
• Encouraging students to find analogies and differences between basic elements in music and the arts (e.g., such as dot, line, color, form, texture, rhythm, balance, repeated modules, ornamental elements, etc.)
• Allowing students to seek analogies and differences between musical motifs and body movements (e.g., walking, jumping in place, jumping from A to B, slithering)
• Establishing comparisons between music pieces and paintings, sculptures, architectures, poems, dances, and the like
• Appraising and encouraging students' self-expression through musical products

In the past, it was thought that musical creativity could be expressed mainly through composition and improvisation. Nowadays, music pedagogues claim that creativity is central to all musical activities and takes place in different kinds of tasks: listening, analyzing, and evaluating music, performance, improvisation, and composition.

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