Theories of Creativity in Music: Students' Theory Appraisal and Argumentation.

Erkki Huovinen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.612739

Abstract

Most research on people's conceptions regarding creativity has concerned informal beliefs instead of more complex belief systems represented in scholarly theories of creativity. The relevance of general theories of creativity to the creative domain of music may also be unclear because of the mixed responses these theories have received from music researchers. The aim of the present study was to gain a better comparative understanding of theories of creativity as accounts of musical creativity by allowing students to assess them from a musical perspective. In the study, higher-education music students rated 10 well-known theories of creativity as accounts of four musical target activities—composition, improvisation, performance, and ideation—and argued for the “best theoretical perspectives” in written essays. The results showed that students' theory appraisals were significantly affected by the target activities, but also by the participants' prior musical experiences. Students' argumentative strategies also differed between theories, especially regarding justifications by personal experiences and values. Moreover, theories were most typically problematized when discussing improvisation. The students most often chose to defend the Four-Stage Model, Divergent Thinking, and Systems Theory, while theories emphasizing strategic choices or Darwinian selection mechanisms were rarely found appealing. Overall, students tended toward moderate theory eclecticism, and their theory appraisals were seen to be pragmatic and example-based, instead of aiming for such virtues as broad scope or consistency. The theories were often used as definitions for identifying some phenomena of interest rather than for making stronger explanatory claims about such phenomena. Students' theory appraisals point to some challenges for creativity research, especially regarding the problems of accounting for improvisation, and concerning the significance of theories that find no support in these musically well-informed adults' reasoning.

Highlights

Theories and Informal Conceptions Regarding CreativityGeneral theories of creativity are based on the assumption that there is something we can call human creativity—that we can see creativity as one phenomenon, despite its apparent plurality
While early theories of creativity might have appeared as unduly focused on cognitive aspects such as Divergent Thinking (Guilford, 1968) or “dissociation” (Koestler, 1964), the contemporary theoretical landscape is broader, addressing questions regarding creative lives, creative collaborations, creative products, the social and societal contexts of creative work, the neurological underpinnings of creativity, and more
Differences between target activities were smallest for theoretical summaries making no claims about the creative process (Developmental View, Systems Theory, Componential Theory), whereas some other theories were deemed relatively unsuitable either for musical improvisation or performance

Summary

Introduction

Theories and Informal Conceptions Regarding CreativityGeneral theories of creativity are based on the assumption that there is something we can call human creativity—that we can see creativity as one phenomenon, despite its apparent plurality. Definitions of creativity most typically share such characteristics as uniqueness (or novelty) and usefulness (see Plucker et al, 2004) While often sharing such basic assumptions, most contemporary theories of creativity are rather self-consciously demarcated to addressing only particular aspects of the multifarious phenomenon. This is easy to see in any of the Theories of Creativity in Music introductory volumes and reviews available on the topic. It seems clear that different creativity theories may address somewhat different sets of core questions (for a review, see Kaufman and Glaveanu, 2019). Many general theories of creativity tend to take a substantialist approach to creativity in the sense that the phenomenon (even in its societal aspects) is treated extrahistorically, as a human attribute, rather than as intertwined in historically contingent discourses and values (see Nelson, 2015, 2018)

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