Creating Our Journeys

A Research Studyby

Clydia ForehandUniversity of Oklahoma

Presented at CSER, November, 2005

Research in context

This project explores the musical creativity of 45 eleven- and twelve-year-old students.

It explores the ways that learning and creating, rehearsing and performing reflect, or echo, each other.

It also explores the ways that individuals and the ensemble network to craft a resonant space.

Thoughts about creative processing that emerged from this study explored various notions of how “self” and “arts” are connected.

It considers them:

As mirrors of each otherAs bridges to each otherAs clearings, in which

phenomena are revealed As systems, with a focus on

processesAs subsystems, flowing into each

other; connected to a larger System.

Philosophies Addressing Opposites and Stasis. . .

Simplifying issues into extreme opposites limits the complexity of options that may be possible.

Static types of perception limit understanding of what possibilities may exist in movement, in sound, and in relationships.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. . . in terms of formulating its beliefs in Either/ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. (Dewey, in Noll, 4)

We would know nothing of time and motion if we did not believe we see what is at “rest” beside what is in motion. (Nietzsche, 1968, 281)

. . .Individuals and Groups.

Creativity is an “ensemble” phenomenon that includes multiple, and changing viewpoints, influences, and sense awarenesses.

Creativity involves each member in thoughts, in experiences and in caring that take them beyond their own skin.

Creativity can be a property of groups; creativity can be found in everyday life—in conversation, in teaching/learning, and in children’s play. (Sawyer, 20043 25)

Creativity grants a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, 2).

Philosophies Specific to Self and Arts

Some philosophers believe that the self and the arts are spaces in which insights are revealed:

Da-sein is like a space in which things let themselves be seen. If the phenomenal world is like a wood crowded with trees then Da-sein is the clearing in the forest. . . in which phenomena are made manifest. (Heidegger, in King, 2001, 140)

[A]rt lets truth originate. (Heidegger, 1972, 150))

Other philosophers believe that the self and the arts are bridges, to each other and to learning, understanding, and meaning:

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end. (Nietzsche, 1966, 14-15)

They believe that arts are bridges between people, between levels of mental processes, to nature, and other disciplines

Creativity, Self, and Creating the Self

Additionally, philosophers believe that the ways we conceptualize ourselves is, itself, a creative act.

Guattari: We weave our individual identities out of the options and influences of the cultures in which we live. Each of them is “a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm.” In this paradigm, “one creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from a palette” (Guattari, 1992, 7).

Csikszentmihalyi: Our concept of self should be “evolving,” toward greater understanding of the options that are available (differentiation) and toward greater complexity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, 5).

Bateson: Complexities of self are initiated and engaged through acting and relating with others “learn[ing] to think in a new way”—that extends beyond our individual minds and beyond “the limits of our skin” (Bateson, 1970, 456).

Statement of the problem

Emphasis on the visual limits the aural.

Emphasizing the analytical neglects the experiential and imaginative.

Considering creativity as a solely individual phenomenon limits the ways students think about both “self” and “group.”

Emphasizing either the self or the group limits understandings of relationship and conversational elements that exist within the ensemble.

Emphasis on the static and unmoving limits awareness of the unfolding aspects of music and how it “becomes.”

Questions

The questions that were explored encircled the thought,

“What is between the either/or?”

Beyond “self” or “group,” beyond written or aural, how does creativity occur within the complexities and relationships of the musical ensemble?

The specific research questions were these:

• What are the possibilities for creativity that exist within the moving, sounding aspects of music? and

• What relationships exist between the individual “self” and the social context in nurturing creative emergence?

Methodology This study was conducted as a

“narrative inquiry,” a methodology designed and implemented by Clandenin and Connelly (2000).

This methodology is well suited to a study of children’s ensemble creativity for two reasons:

• It is more “system-oriented” and less linear.

• It encircles a wonder or puzzle, more than a single question.

This methodology blends:

• Individual and group narratives from children as they create their musical works

• The teacher/researcher’s narratives of each ensemble’s creative processes and transcriptions of conversations with students

• Video photography, used to capture sound and movement as children go through the creative process and then share their musical works with each other and other audiences.

FindingsStudents’ participation in this

project crafted a space in which to form questions.

Individually, students questioned:

• What is creativity?• Am I creative?• Where does creativity “come

from?”

Corporately, they questioned:

• How do we create?• How does creativity happen in

our ensemble?• What are our beliefs about

creating?

They also questioned differences:

• What is the difference between being a performer and being an audience?

• What is the difference between rehearsal and performance?

Types of ProcessingThere were 12-14 different

ensembles that were involved in this project.

• Members changed and shifted in all but two of the groups.

The reasons they gave for moving to a different group were:

• To learn from [the other group or another player.]

Or• To get fresh ideas.

Four different types of creative processing were revealed from these groups.

The four types of processing were:

“Everybody come up with something on your own and we’ll put it together.”

“Discuss it ahead of time and make a plan.”

“Let’s all starting playing together and see what happens.”

“Just tell me what to do.”

My Conclusions

The significant factors for fostering creativity that emerged from this study were:

Relationship (including the taking of risk, the acceptance of difference, and the interacting of ideas,) and

Reflection (between issues of self—caring, supporting, accepting—and arts) both have significant support as factors for enhancing creativity.

Other significant factors include:• Time to experience movement

and practice• Access to resources• Freedom to make mistakes• Understanding of musical and

cultural expectations, and • Interaction

The activity of creating music provides a framework of unity, but allows for diversity

The purposes of music—the making of music—also played a significant role.

Final Thoughts About the StudyOur historical beliefs about music

and creativity suggest that both have “beginnings” and “endings.”

I would suggest that we consider what exists before “beginnings” and after “endings” and look into the conditions and processes that have been crafted by the classroom, school, society, and ensemble:

Expectations of acceptance, diversity, risk, trust, and caring.

This focuses awareness on thinking about music and creativity (also self and ensemble) as “systems.”

Such thinking emphasizes the processes of creativity. (Linear thinking emphasizes the “product,” suggesting that there is a definitive “beginning” and that when the song is “over,” the process stops.

This study suggests that the system of music is continuous—that it begins before the beginning and does not end—but “rings” out.

Where Does the Music End?Not every end is the goal. The

end of a melody is not its goal and yet, if it has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal. (Nietzsche, 1986, 204)

For although there is a bounding horizon, it moves as we move. We are never wholly free from the sense of something that lies beyond. . . . whether the scope of vision be vast or minute, we experience it as a part of a larger whole and inclusive whole, a part that now focuses our experience (Dewey, 1934, 193).

The findings of the study support a belief that self is a clearing and a system. The

arts and self echo each other; the arts also serve as a bridge between the

conscious and subconscious of each self

and outward into other self-systems and cultural

systems.

M.C. Escher's Concentric Rinds ©1998 Cordon Art B.V. - Baarn - Holland. All rights reserved Used with permission

In this study, self, others, sound, sight,

movement, experience, and practice connected

in the mirroring, echoing, ringing complexity of

musical creativity; these experiences resonate, as

well:they are created in—and work to create—what I

have called a resonating space.

Ringing in this sense has a double meaning: as a reverberating sounding

and as a circle of belonging (Heidegger,

1971, 178).

BibliographyBateson, G. (1972). Form, Substance, and Difference, from Steps to an Ecology of Mind:

Selected Essays in Anthroplogy, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Clandinin, J. & Connelly, D.(2000). Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1993). The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millenium. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Dewey, J. (1934/1980). Art As Experience. New York: Pedigree.

Guattari, F. (1992). Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. (P. Bains & J. Pefanis, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1971). Language, Poetry, Thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row.

Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power: A New Translation (W. Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale, Eds.). New York, NY: Random House.

Sawyer, R.K. (2003). Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.