Creative learning and 'original' music performance

(John Rink – Cambridge)

Project overview | Project narrative | Workshops | Questionnaire | Fieldwork | Outputs

Fieldwork: Phase 1 (January to August 2011)

In order to explore some of the issues raised in the first workshop and questionnaire we designed an exploratory phase of research to map some of the beliefs and practices in the conservatoires with respect to creativity and originality, and to try different methods with a view to developing a more in-depth study for the coming year. We had two main research questions, broadly concerning constructs on the one hand and practice on the other. First, how do teachers and students construct meanings of creativity and originality and students' development of these? Secondly, what practices and experiences do they identify as being 'creative' or important for developing creative or original performance? These two areas of constructs and practices have led to the use of both introspective and observational methods in the project. Because it has been important for the project team to build trust and develop positive collaborative relationships with the collaborating institutions and individual participants, while also bearing a number of research considerations in mind, the methods were designed to give participants a high degree of control and ownership. The team has also tried to ensure that those taking part in the research would derive some sort of benefit.

Focus groups
Two focus groups were held in March 2011– one at each of the two conservatoires. Entitled 'inside the teaching studio: a project to explore what makes great performances and how students learn to produce them', these sessions allowed the teaching staff who attended to explore aspects of creativity and creative development with one another as well as with members of the project team. Each session lasted up to 90 minutes, and took the form of an open conversation around three discussion points, which participants also received in written form:

• the skills you think are necessary in order for students to be creative or original as performers
• where creativity and originality stand in the hierarchy of performance goals
• what you consider your role as a teacher to be in helping students achieve a creative or original 'voice' as a performer.

Both sessions were audio- and video-recorded so that transcripts could be prepared for analysis. The inductive methodology Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) allowed the project team to summarise and interpret the data and thus to discern various themes. Ambivalence was revealed about the notions under discussion: for example, unlike the term 'creativity', 'originality' sometimes had negative connotations, even to the point of being described as 'bizarre', 'weird' and 'barbaric'; on the other hand, the notion of originality was also associated with depth, authenticity and truth. Contradictions arose with respect to personality and the role of the performer: musical personality was described as the core of creativity, but there was a tension between requirements for the performer to speak with an individual voice while at the same time 'stepping back', that is, acting as a conduit for the composer's intentions by respecting the score. We inferred two quite different constructs of creative development from the discussions, which we describe respectively as 'toolbox' (a term that was actually used in the discussions) and 'flower bud' (our own term). Regarding the first, the development of a creative performer was described by participants as a process of gathering, building and increasing possibilities; the teacher's role in this 'outside–in' process is to provide knowledge, whereas the student's role is to acquire it. Complementary to this 'toolbox' notion was a growing and emergent process releasing something that is already inside. In this 'inside–out' process the teacher's role is to encourage the student's largely introspective learning and to remove barriers that might impede it.

Observation of one-to-one lessons with video-recall interviews
Another method that we employed during the last six months was the observation of individual lessons. Our decision to begin with one-to-one lessons reflected their enduring presence at the heart of conservatoire education on the one hand, along with a contradiction between the traditional (research) view of the one-to-one lesson being a poor arena for student creativity versus the high value placed by conservatoire teachers on students' development of an 'original artistic voice'. The recruitment process had two stages: teaching staff were brought on board first and were then asked to provide a list of all their students; we approached a number of the latter directly to avoid their feeling any pressure to take part. Six teacher–student pairs were recruited across three of the four undergraduate years as well postgraduate courses. Five different instruments were represented, including jazz bass. Mirjam James and Karen Wise filmed between two and five consecutive lessons, yielding three to six hours of footage per pair; this helped participants become accustomed to the camera and increased the likelihood of capturing lessons that were typical for them. In each case the researcher set up the video camera at the beginning of each lesson and then left the room.

A video-recall method based on that of Rowe (2009) was used, although in our study the participants were asked to select excerpts from the resultant footage which were of particular interest to them. The student participants were told:

When you watch a video, please try to identify moments in the lesson, when:

• you felt creative in your playing
• you understood something about the piece that you hadn't understood before
• something new emerged in your approach to the piece
• you learned something that will help you to be more creative or original in performance.

Teachers' instructions were similar but referred to their impression of the student's playing and learning, and in addition they were invited to choose excerpts in which they 'felt especially creative' in their teaching. Each participant had a video-recall session of 60–90 minutes with one of the researchers where their chosen excerpts were viewed and discussed.

The results have been interesting and provocative. Many of the chosen episodes fall into one of two broad categories: 'technical' and 'musical'. Some examples involved both aspects. In all cases, the impetus behind the particular discovery tended to emanate from the teacher, who gave instructions or demonstrated different ways of playing; thus they were examples of 'toolbox'-type learning and an outside–in process. But it was striking to observe that in many cases the chosen creative episode was the start of a longer, inside–out process where the student reflected on, internalised and developed the idea to make it his or her own.

Among the many insights gained from this study are the importance and use of gesture, both as a teaching tool and as evidence of creative performance picked up by teachers; issues to do with students' readiness to learn; and a possible link between creativity as perceived by our participants and a greater degree of self-awareness and self-reflectiveness, which could of course be a developmental issue.

This combination of methods has allowed us to start to model different components of creativity and creative development as experienced and defined by high-level performance students and teachers. For example, the video-recall method can illuminate the more subtle forms that creative learning and insights might take, in particular non-verbal and musical communication. Among other things, this has the potential to balance out previous research which was focused on the lack of creative possibilities for students, based solely on teacher–student conversation within the lesson. The challenges of capturing creative processes across time and location will continue, however, and we are trying to address these in the planning of the second year of fieldwork, the most intensive phase of which will begin in January 2012 after three months of scoping the research, gaining buy-in from our institutional collaborators, and obtaining ethical clearance from all parties.

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