PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Roseanne Rosenthal, VanderCook College of Music
The Hard Work of Creativity
Our January conference, focused on Te Creative Mind, will be a celebration of creativity in music teaching, music making and music innovation. Creativity is the hallmark of the arts and music educa- tors are in an excellent position to foster environments in which creativity can blossom. But how do we do that?
Creating a creative environment is complex: Too much freedom risks chaos but too much structure stifles. Creativity springs from deep understanding of content. To build content knowledge and skill, one needs to work within the context of a stable framework such as music notation, the range of a musical instrument or the technique involved in playing it. To be creative one needs the freedom and space to combine things together to make something new.
Sam Hope, Executive Director of the National Association of Schools of Music, describes how a creative person thinks and behaves.1
It goes something like this: If I am creative, everything, small
and great, can be combined to make something new. I can do this in my imagination and then in projects. Te more I make connections the better I get at doing so. To communicate with others, I need to know the language and frameworks in which I am working. Te more I can fluently use these frameworks, the more I learn. Te more I create, the more I learn that problems have multiple solutions. I also learn that planning helps to sharpen one’s work but that I also need to allow my work to shape itself (p. 43, paraphrased).
For these understandings to flourish, we need environments that foster acquisition of content while supporting open-ended work with low consequences for failure. Ideally, the pursuit of content drives time; bureaucratic mindsets are kept to a minimum; and creativity is valued more than technique. Evaluation is in service of the creative product. Within a creative environment, it is understood that creative breakthroughs cannot be scheduled but are more likely to occur when everyone is able to work responsibly with the freedom that a creative environment provides.
We need to be realistic about the hard work of creativity. “Exposure” to the arts is often inspirational but is no substitute for hard work and practice. Demands for teacher conformity, whether regulated by standardized methods, evaluations, or other accountability processes, are counter productive to creativity when they become a central point of focus. In the end, we need teachers willing to advocate for environments that support the hard work of creativity. Tose who work within those environments will be enriched and our profession will be enlivened.
As always, I welcome your thoughts and can’t wait to share in the creative products of the children and teachers of Illinois in January.
1 Hope, Samuel (2010). Creativity, Content, and Policy. Arts Education Policy Review, 111, 39-47.
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Illinois Music Educator | Volume 72 Number 1
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