Oscar Odena’s monograph explores musical creativity through the lens of musical development, providing a set of case studies of educational practices in different settings as well as considering some of the issues that face music psychologists and educators in researching this topic. The book sits alongside work by other scholars such as Pamela Burnard (Reference BURNARD2012) and Margaret Barrett (Reference BARRETT2012) whose writings similarly ask questions about what it means to be creative in music and underlines the importance of developing creative practice as part of a rounded music education.
Odena has divided his book into three sections – foundations, practices and research; eight chapters in all. The first section, foundations, consists of two chapters. Within the first, the author covers various conceptualisations of creativity that have shaped current thinking about this contested term, and he presents his own framework for examining musical creativity. In the second chapter of this section, the focus moves to neuroscience and Odena assesses some neuroscientific techniques and their implications for understanding the development of musical creativity over our lives. From this broad opening, the book shifts to a closer examination of educational practices through three case studies with which the author was involved. Two of the case studies look at the development of musical creativity in distinct settings – first, at secondary level, and then at tertiary level within a conservatoire. The third chapter works to a rather different end by considering how creativity might be used as a tool that has broader implications for social inclusion by presenting a case study of cross-community music making for young children in Northern Ireland. The final section of the book, research, looks at how educators and psychologists might conduct research into this area. The three chapters in this part provide an overview of the different approaches taken to researching musical creativity, summarising some of the research designs and paradigms that structure empirical work in this area. As well as summarising the challenges of going about this work, the author discusses the use of qualitative software in creativity research in Chapter 7 before, in the final chapter, thinking about the future of research on musical creativity.
Few works on creativity start without a disclaimer that the subject is difficult or confusing; this book is no different, and to some degree, it is a warranted caveat, with oppositional readings of the term coming from different disciplinary viewpoints. Psychological approaches (which dominate music scholarship) tend towards the taxonomic, often adopting a reductionist approach, and have emerged from a view of creativity as a facet of human potential in line with ideas about intelligence and its measure. On the other hand, more critically persuaded scholars are sceptical of the term, even suggesting its abandonment, as an ideologically compromised word (see Frith, Reference FRITH, Hargreaves, Miell and MacDonald2012). Even within a psychological framework, it is a difficult task to set up the notion of creativity in a relatively constrained format that is highly focused on one area of creativity – musical development within educational settings. Bringing the reader from an overview to the details of a set of studies is not easy. Odena succeeds to some degree.
In providing an overview, the distinction that he makes between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ ways of thinking about creativity seems unhelpful. It is a rather loaded way of unpacking an already loaded distinction, though it is obviously an attempt to set up new ways of thinking for educators about how they might view creative work in their students. The main thematic narrative of the opening chapter develops, more usefully, around four ideas in relation to creativity: person, environment, process and product. It is not quite clear from where this ‘original fourfold framework’ has emerged. Mel Rhodes (Reference RHODES1961) proposed a Four-P framework, which is rather similar in its scope to the one proposed here – that is, product, person, process and press (press being similar to the notion of environment). Where the chapter becomes more focused on education, then this use of these themes to shape the discussion becomes more effective. The attempt at an overview is understandable but falls a little between two stools of being comprehensive and attending to the focus of the book. As a comparison, the introduction to Burnard’s Musical Creativities in Practice perhaps succeeds rather better in introducing creativity by restricting its assessment to the field of music and education.
The second chapter of the opening section focuses on neuroscience in the study of creativity. Neuroscientific studies point to a number of features of creativity that are fundamental to some of the arguments in the book; that creativity is part of our human birthright and is quotidian, rather than exceptional, and that plasticity – the brain’s capacity to re-shape and to be re-configured in relation to human development – is a key component in thinking about education. There is a welcome nuancing of the many recent studies that provide contributions to our understanding of creativity from a neuroscientific perspective, and this chapter is quite helpful for educators to have some sense of ‘how the mind works’ in this domain.
The second part of the book (practice) focuses on three separate case studies, involving the author, which examined creative work in different educational environments in relation to group work in composition, music performance anxiety (MPA) and cross-community integration. The linking of creativity, particularly to the last two topics seems valuable. What can a creative approach in education yield in terms of broader benefits, while at the same time avoiding instrumental rationality? However, the relationship between MPA and creativity was left rather unstated in Chapter 4. This appeared to be a very fruitful study of the ways in which students might use drama to reduce MPA in a conservatoire, but the relationship between drama, musically creative work and reducing anxiety was not completely clear. In the final chapter of this section, which examined a cross-community project in Northern Ireland, I was left wondering about the relationship between creativity and music making; are these the same? Is music making always creative? Is the power of cross-community work mainly due to the fact of interacting with others in the same room who would normally not be co-present in education? In this study, it was not clear to me what would be lost if the term ‘creativity’ or ‘creative practice’ was simply replaced by ‘making music’.
The final section on doing research in creativity offers some useful ideas for researchers and students who are interested in musical creativity as an important part of the educational process. Practical examples and ideas are offered in terms of research design (Chapter 6) and using qualitative data analysis software (Chapter 7). These chapters could be particularly useful for postgraduate students who are working on music educational projects; Odena provides lots of welcome ideas about how to do this sort of work.
To summarise, this book is a welcome addition to the literature on music education; other texts offer more thorough and developed introductions to music and creativity (and creativity tout court) but the sections of the book that focus on the detail of doing research into musical creativity, in terms of either ‘what was done’ or ‘how to do it’, will provide others, perhaps students rather than experienced researchers, with some helpful ideas and insights into thinking about and uncovering the creative process in music.
