“I don’t know how musically creative they should be at that age”: A qualitative study of parents’ and teachers’ beliefs about young children’s creative and musical capacities

There has been a recent expansion of school curricula and extra-curricular activities emphasizing musical creativity and collaboration. Parents have a crucial role in providing children with access to such experiences; their views on music and the nature of creativity influence the types of musical engagement their children will access. Teachers also have an important role, yet can have difficulties when supporting children in open-ended tasks. A qualitative study investigated parents’ and teachers’ constructions of creativity and music. Interviews were held with 11 parents and 4 teachers of preschool children who took part in improvisation workshops. Data were analyzed with thematic analysis, resulting in identification of three themes. Creativity and musicality were described as fundamental to children’s “human nature” but positioned as a non-fundamental part of their own adult identities. “Values” explored conceptualizations of creativity through artistic products; musicality was appreciated demonstration of technical skill. “Frames for engaging” identified adults engaging with their children in creative tasks mainly through child-led narratives; in contrast, parents took on the role of “teacher” in musical tasks. Understanding these influential views offers insight into the types of activities and guidance offered to pre-schoolers and how they can be built on to foster children’s musical creativity.

Exploring Ethiopian Instrumental Music and Musicians

In many Ethiopian traditional cultures, vocal music dominates the musical repertoire. It is only in a handful of traditional contexts, where solely instrumental music becomes part of the repertoire. Contrary to this, however, the modern music domain in Ethiopia offers a wide range of instrumental music. The root of instrumental music in Ethiopia is, most probably, connected with the emergence of independent/private bands in the early 1960s. These modern bands with highly trained Ethiopian musicians, among others, offered ‘light-music’ in hotels and restaurants. In the initial periods, their repertoire mainly entailed re-arranged international melodies. The advancement of the modern music paved a way to increasing musical creativity over the decades to follow. My presentation will attempt to look at instrumentals performed with western music instruments, of which the large part derives from already existing traditional and modern songs. Representative musical pieces will be given special focus in terms of their instrumentation, rearrangement, melodic and metro-rhythmic structures, form and style along with their function, meaning and understanding.

Collaborative Musical Creativity between Students and Adults: The Sonorous Paella

While creativity is a key element of contemporary curriculum frameworks around the world, it is still insufficiently fostered in formal education settings. This study analyzes a project for collaborative musical creativity, entitled The Sonorous Paella. Participants (N = 12) were eight Year 4 secondary students, two professional musicians, an artist-in-residence, and a music teacher. Drawing on a graphic musical score, the participants worked together for 1.5 months to produce a group composition and performance. They were provided with various sound producers (instruments, everyday objects, technological devices) and were encouraged to flexibly utilize the physical space to maximize collaborative participation. Field notes and pictures taken during working sessions and rehearsals, audio recordings from the final concert, and individual interviews with all participants were qualitatively analyzed. In response to the three study objectives, we conclude that: (1) the design of this collaborative project was consistent with current research-based creativity discourses; (2) drawing on the quality and originality of the final concert, the project fostered the musical creativity of the group; and (3) participants’ perceptions of and opinions about their creativity learning processes were unanimously positive. Our final aim is to inspire music teachers in designing curriculum units that foster collaborative musical creativity.

Analysis of the seminar of creative music exercises

During the research entitled Teaching Creative Music, the focus is on getting to know creative music, which is becoming more and more widespread in Hungary, however using it, but still takes up little space in our music education, and its impact in high school and university environments is limited. The Kodály Concept contains a number of well-established practices also László Sáry’s collection of Creative Music Exercises (Sáry, 1999), mainly evoking Christian Wolff and John Cage, evoking the work of Stockhausen, also works well, but there is no teaching aid for the secondary school classes (9-12) based on different combinations of systematic vocal and rhythmic tasks – although in the 2017 NAT [“National Curriculum”], creative music activity as a reproduction is included as a requirement among the development tasks. There is also less experience among those pursuing higher music studies in terms of methodological preparation at the national level. We believe that much more student-based assignments should be used in high school singing and music education so that their classroom motivation and musical creativity can develop further, and their subject-related knowledge deepen. We are interested in the “rehabilitation” of this field, as there are a lot of opportunities in the creative music exercises, during which repetitive activity and musical creativity are essential, and Odena and Welch have already studied the latter (Odena–Welch, 2007). Music pedagogical research supports the need to study the field, as high school students are undermotivated in their lessons and their musical creativity is not sufficiently exploited (Deliège–Wiggins, 2006). In this article, we would like to explore an analysis of some of the practices of a creative music course over a semester in terms of how student activity and creativity changed during the 9 hours of the practice (measured with 3 groups per week). For all of this, we also use elements of Teachout and McKoy’s model, who examined music teacher attributes in terms of teacher success and failure.

The Law of Musical Borrowing

Creating music often involves borrowing from preexisting sources. Copyright law applies to a range of common borrowing practices including sampling, remixing, linking, and creating user-generated content for online platforms. When analyzing musical borrowing, it is important to first establish what aspects of musical creativity copyright does and does not protect. A series of cases illustrate when the law identifies borrowing of unprotected aspects of prior works, such as musical ideas, common melodic sequences, and chord progressions. Other cases illustrate how the law also permits some borrowing of protected expression if the borrowing is fair use. Digital technology facilitates musical borrowing, and certain online practices such as posting hyperlinks to other musical sources are permitted unless the person posting the links knows that the link leads to infringing material, intends to encourage others to infringe or meets other requirements for secondary liability for copyright infringement.

Forming the fundamentals of social culture and cultural competence in school students in the process of mastering the content of musical pieces

Students’ mastery of the content of musical pieces in different artistic genres provides for a versatile development of their moral culture as the basis of social culture and cultural competence. The condition for the success of this process lies in the musical activity transcending to the creative level allowing access to the imaginative and emotional “overtones” in the sound of music. Involving all children and adolescents in musical creativity is possible through the implementation of the pedagogical technology of interactive music-making that involves a complementary interaction with the outside source of sound. A pedagogical experiment conducted as a part of concerts of the artistic and educational project “Music-making for all” that were designed based on the aforementioned technology demonstrates students’ successful mastery of the content of the performed pieces, as well as the development of the required characteristics of social culture in them.

On the Protection of Intangible Heritage of Russian Folk Oral Music in the Context of Intercultural Communication (Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia)

The article discusses the issues of preserving the genre of Russian folk oral musical creativity in the village of the Argun and the city of Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia, located in the northern part of China. The issue is viewed in the context of intercultural communication between descendants of Russian immigrants and Chinese locals. The article considers the factors in the formation of the ethnic group of Chinese Russians in Hulunbuir, an area of Russian immigrants’ compact settlement, and the markers of their distinct ethnic identity. Chinese Russians are a specific ethnic group since over several generations they fused with the local ethnicities yet preserved their unique cultural background. One of the peculiar aspects of Russian culture observed within the community of Chinese Russians is chastushka, or ditty, a short witty song expressing an individual’s attitude to any happening. The authors give records of the texts of ditties on various subjects, such as love, daily life, politics, etc. The folk genre of chastushka indicates intercultural communication between China and Russia and the integration of ethnic Russians into Chinese society. The article reveals the problems of protection of the Russian chastushka in the region and possible measures of state provision of its protection as intangible cultural heritage. Both national and local authorities take steps to ensure the continuity of various identities within the national identity of China. Several proposals have been put forward for the protection of the local heritage of this genre of the city of Hulunbuir. Such measures may include further research of cultural materials, enhancing tourism in the region, and incorporating ditties into local festivities Based on the historical and cultural significance, the research points to the real impact of Russian folk oral musical creativity in the processes of Russian-Chinese intercultural communication. The authors underline the significance of the ditty as intangible cultural heritage and the need to include the ditty in the list of the cultural heritage of Chinese Russians. The need to create conditions and state-organizational support for various forms of popularization of this genre, especially for those studying the Russian language, to preserve the oral folk musical creativity of Chinese ethnic Russians is substantiated.