The creative music workshop: event, facilitation, gift

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the desires and tensions inherent within the act of facilitating creative music-making workshops. Following the introduction, the article is divided into three sections: (1) a discussion of the workshop event as a contingent structure through which creative music-making may take place; (2) an exploration of the facilitation process as a mechanism of engaging participants in creative music-making; (3) as a heuristic framework, a notion of the gift is shown as a means to think through face-toface musical encounters. This article concludes that the ideas and concepts presented may assist workshop facilitators in thinking more deeply about the processes they engage in.

Learning to facilitate arts-in-health programmes: A case study of musicians facilitating creative interventions for mothers with symptoms of postnatal depression

“…Ethical approval was granted by the Conservatoires UK Research Ethics Committee, and participants provided written informed consent. Throughout this article, both leaders and assistants will be referred to as workshop facilitators, drawing upon Higgins’ (2008) definition of facilitation as a ‘self-reflective process that assists groups of people in a journey together to reach their goals’ (Higgins, 2008: 334).…”

Recognizing creativity in the music classroom

“…This is defined as an active, constructed and dynamic mental process which swings between convergent (factual) and divergent (imaginative) thinking (Webster, 1990(Webster, , 2002. Creativity is closely related to the development of imagination (Higgins, 2008) and original thinking in order to generate a practical solution in response to a problem (Hargreaves, MacDonald & Miell, 2012). According to Odena and Welch (2009), creativity can be defined as 'imagination successfully manifested in any valued pursuit ' (p.417).…”

Musically Human-Made World. Possibilities for Recomposing and Creating a Human World Through the Activity of Music

“…Yet the conditional hospitable workshop is the only possible solution and as such has set boundaries, however faint they appear." 32 Higgins, from his understanding of the unconditional welcome, and the striving towards the impossible, introduced the idea of safety without safety that is the central practice, or even the method of the workshop as event.…”

“…It is a future desire that resists any sense of a fixed and static presence." 34 Higgins also stressed the importance of the role of the facilitator, the guide that leads the process, the one who "makes it easy" for the participants to involve in community music making. He said that "… facilitation is concerned with encouraging open dialogue among different individuals with differing perspectives."…”

“…It is this desire for the impossible that haunts any real decision the music facilitator may make." 36 In Higgins' method of the performance of community music, one might recognise how to put into practice the ethical gestures that were contemplated in the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Noticeably, his practice joins responsibility, openness towards the other, hospitality, and the unconditional as the impossible towards which one should strive.…”