Collaborative Creative Thought and Practice in Music

The notion of the individual creator, a product in part of the Western romantic ideal, is now troubled by accounts and explanations of creativity as a social construct. While in collectivist cultures the assimilation (but not the denial) of individual authorship into the complexities of group production and benefit has been a feature, the notion of the lone individual creator has been persistent. Systems theories acknowledge the role of others, yet at heart these are still individual views of creativity - focusing on the creative individual drawing upon the work of others rather than recognizing the mutually constitutive elements of social interactions across time and space. Focusing on the domain of music, the approach taken in this book falls into three sections: investigations of the people, processes, products, and places of collaborative creativity in compositional thought and practice; explorations of the ways in which creative collaboration provides a means of crossing boundaries between disciplines such as music performance and musicology; and studies of the emergence of creative thought and practice in educational contexts including that of the composer and the classroom. The volume concludes with an extended chapter that reflects on the ways in which the studies reported advance understandings of creative thought and practice. The book provides new perspectives to our understandings of the role of collaborative thought and processes in creative work across the domain of music including: composition, musicology, performance, music education and music psychology.

Margaret S. Barrett is Professor and Head of the School of Music and Director of the Creative Collaboratorium Research Group at The University of Queensland, Australia. She has served as President of the International Society for Music Education (2012-2014), Chair of the World Alliance for Arts Education (2013-2015), Chair of the Asia-Pacific Symposium for Music Education (2009-2011) and President of the Australian Society for Music Education (1999-2001). Her research has investigated creative thought and practice across the lifespan and the use of narrative and arts-based research methods in music. Margaret's research is supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and has been reported in the major journals and edited collections of the field. Recent publications include: A Cultural Psychology of Music Education (2011), and Narrative Soundings: An Anthology of Narrative Inquiry in Music (with Sandra Stauffer, 2012).