Creativity In Music Performance Research Articles

Cultivating music students’ creativity in piano performance: a multiple-case study in China

ABSTRACT Although creativity in music performance is a global issue among music educators, it has nevertheless received less attention in China. How do piano teachers in China cultivate their students’ performance creativity? This article reports on a multiple-case study undertaken in a university located in Guangzhou, China that aimed to examine the teaching strategies of three piano majors and observe their learning responses. The first author taught the students for 14 lessons within a semester, the data coming from a combination of video recordings for observation, self-reflection and semi-structured interviews. Qualitative data from the interviews and video recordings were coded based on the categories and themes that emerged from repeated observations of the video clips. The results indicate that teachers may cultivate performance creativity by nurturing students’ imaginations as it relates to individual knowledge and experience. Autonomy in musical expression should be encouraged through teaching genres other than Classical music.

Performers as Creative Agents; or, Musicians Just Want To Have Fun

In this paper, I explore conceptions of creativity in musical performance in both popular and Western art musics. I examine Cyndi Lauper’s iconic performance of the song “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” which transformed the meaning of Robert Hazard’s original demo of the same song. I then analyze performance choices relating to structural cadences in Mozart’s Sonata in A minor, K. 310; Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007; and Beethoven’s Sonata in ".fn_flat("A")." major, op. 110.

Collaborative Musical Creativity: How Ensembles Coordinate Spontaneity.

Music performance is inherently social. Most music is performed in groups, and even soloists are subject to influence from a (real or imagined) audience. It is also inherently creative. Performers are called upon to interpret notated music, improvise new musical material, adapt to unexpected playing conditions, and accommodate technical errors. The focus of this paper is how creativity is distributed across members of a music ensemble as they perform these tasks. Some aspects of ensemble performance have been investigated extensively in recent years as part of the broader literature on joint action (e.g., the processes underlying sensorimotor synchronization). Much of this research has been done under highly controlled conditions, using tasks that generate reliable results, but capture only a small part of ensemble performance as it occurs naturalistically. Still missing from this literature is an explanation of how ensemble musicians perform in conditions that require creative interpretation, improvisation, and/or adaptation: how do they coordinate the production of something new? Current theories of creativity endorse the idea that dynamic interaction between individuals, their actions, and their social and material environments underlies creative performance. This framework is much in line with the embodied music cognition paradigm and the dynamical systems perspective on ensemble coordination. This review begins by situating the concept of collaborative musical creativity in the context of embodiment. Progress that has been made toward identifying the mechanisms that underlie collaborative creativity in music performance is then assessed. The focus is on the possible role of musical imagination in facilitating performer flexibility, and on the forms of communication that are likely to support the coordination of creative musical output. Next, emergence and group flow–constructs that seem to characterize ensemble performance at its peak–are considered, and some of the conditions that may encourage periods of emergence or flow are identified. Finally, it is argued that further research is needed to (1) demystify the constructs of emergence and group flow, clarifying their effects on performer experience and listener response, (2) determine how constrained musical imagination is by perceptual experience and understand people's capacity to depart from familiar frameworks and imagine new sounds and sound structures, and (3) assess the technological developments that are supposed to facilitate or enhance musical creativity, and determine what effect they have on the processes underlying creative collaboration.

Creativity beyond innovation: Musical performance and craft

While creativity has been defined in a multiplicity of ways across disciplines, scholars generally agree that it involves the generation of ideas or products that are novel, of value, and appropriate to the field. Yet by too readily connecting creativity in musical performance to innovation, does this model neglect the more inconspicuous and unrecognised, but no less valuable, dimensions of creativity in score-based performance? This article offers a characterisation of musical performance situated within a framework of craft, by tracing rehearsal strategies employed in two new performance projects: the rehearsals for, and first performance of Four Duets for clarinet and piano (2012) by Edmund Finnis, written for Mark Simpson and Víkingur Ólafsson; and a recording made by Antony Pay of Alexander Goehr’s Paraphrase for solo clarinet Op. 28 (1969). My argument draws attention to “everyday” aspects of music-making, in which musicians make decisions in engaging with their work which are less explicit than the conventional “moments of revelation” that are prevalent in the literature, but which are nonetheless significant. Acknowledging these attributes of musicians’ performance practices can serve to develop a more nuanced understanding of creativity based on processes rather than outcomes, in order to move beyond a paradigm that opposes notated permanence to improvised transience.

A theory of alpha/theta neurofeedback, creative performance enhancement, long distance functional connectivity and psychological integration

Professionally significant enhancement of music and dance performance and mood has followed training with an EEG-neurofeedback protocol which increases the ratio of theta to alpha waves using auditory feedback with eyes closed. While originally the protocol was designed to induce hypnogogia, a state historically associated with creativity, the outcome was psychological integration, while subsequent applications focusing on raising the theta-alpha ratio, reduced depression and anxiety in alcoholism and resolved post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). In optimal performance studies we confirmed associations with creativity in musical performance, but effects also included technique and communication. We extended efficacy to dance and social anxiety. Diversity of outcome has a counterpart in wide ranging associations between theta oscillations and behaviour in cognitive and affective neuroscience: in animals with sensory-motor activity in exploration, effort, working memory, learning, retention and REM sleep; in man with meditative concentration, reduced anxiety and sympathetic autonomic activation, as well as task demands in virtual spatial navigation, focussed and sustained attention, working and recognition memory, and having implications for synaptic plasticity and long term potentiation. Neuroanatomical circuitry involves the ascending mescencephalic-cortical arousal system, and limbic circuits subserving cognitive as well as affective/motivational functions. Working memory and meditative bliss, representing cognitive and affective domains, respectively, involve coupling between frontal and posterior cortices, exemplify a role for theta and alpha waves in mediating the interaction between distal and widely distributed connections. It is posited that this mediation in part underpins the integrational attributes of alpha-theta training in optimal performance and psychotherapy, creative associations in hypnogogia, and enhancement of technical, communication and artistic domains of performance in the arts.

Studying a creative act with computers: Music performance studies with automated discovery methods

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how advanced computer methods may be able to provide new insights into a complex creative activity such as music performance. The context is an inter-disciplinary research project in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods are used to analyse patterns in performances by human artists. In asking how the computer can take us closer to an understanding of creativity in music performance, we identify two pertinent research strategies within our project: the use of machine learning algorithms that try to discover common performance principles and thus help separate the “rationally explainable” aspects of performance from the more genuinely “creative” ones, and the use of data mining methods that can discover, visualise and describe performance patterns that seem to be characteristic of the style of particular artists and thus may be more directly related to their individual creativity. Some preliminary results are briefly presented that are indicative of the kinds of discoveries these algorithms can make. Some general issues regarding (musical) creativity and its relation to Artificial Intelligence are also briefly discussed.

Teaching for Creativity in Music Performance

Teaching for Creativity in Music Performance