Instrumental music teaching traditionally emphasizes the cognitive, motor, and motivational processes of score reproduction, often at the expense of creative musical activities, such as improvisation or composition. Since today’s international art school curricula prominently include creativity competencies, opportunities to integrate creativity in instrumental lessons must be explored. This study investigates instrument teachers’ conception of musical creativity: its scope, opportunities, and risks. About 273 teachers completed an online questionnaire on their use of creative class time, beliefs, and barriers to creative instrument teaching. Although the majority acknowledged the benefits of creative activities for score-playing, they invested little in improvisation and composition due to a lack of time and training in musical creativity. Teachers considered interpretation a valuable form of musical creativity, next to improvisation and composition, but questioned its feasibility in instrument lessons. Implications for instrument-teacher training are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.