For years, creativity was seen as a talent of a few gifted people. Now, many countries have developed teaching programs incorporating creativity, specifically in music. Today, Professor Øystein Røsseland Kvinge from Western Norway University of Applied Science (the Norwegian university involved in the Europavox Campus project) and Cypriot musician/producer Freedom Candlemaker, offer us their input on the importance of creativity in music, and therefore, in life.
We humans, thanks to the cooperative skills needed for our survival, also have the special ability to pursue activities that make us happy. Art and creation, playing music, reading for pleasure; all the enjoyable things that make it so pleasant to be human may be considered pointless in the part of our modern world that is obsessed with immediate profitability. “Do we want to get famous, make money – and this is not bad, of course – or do we want to expand ourselves, to influence, to make a difference?”, Freedom Candlemaker, aka Lefteris Moumtzis, one of the most established musicians and producers in Cyprus, asks. “Does being creative mean producing music all the time? We can be creative in every task we take on, like in the way we communicate. To be moved, to make things better around you: that’s what creativity means to me.”
Freedom Candlemaker (CY)
For Freedom Candlemaker, music has been his path since he was a kid. At the age of six he started learning the piano. At fourteen, he took saxophone lessons, and he’s self-taught on guitar, bass and drums. He studied music in Boston, Massachusetts, and later in Birmingham, UK. Even if he acknowledges that his extensive music studies were beneficial, he believes experience is crucial.“What my music education brought me is a small portion of what I have ended up doing. The way I learned things was mainly through experience, making things by doing them,” he says.
Apart from his huge array of musical work, from his neo-rebetiko band Trio Tekke to his dreamy pop and nu folk solo releases, Freedom Candlemaker is also the founder of the independent label Louvana Records, the artistic director of Lefkosia Loop Festival, Fengaros Festival, and Fengaros Music Village, which offers arts education through a series of music, theatre and movement workshops. For him, creativity is a universal means of expression that allows people to tap directly into their imagination, and communicate their thoughts and feelings vibrantly. “Creativity is freedom. Being creative is like self-care, meaning that you’re looking within to find answers. If people are suppressed, then the world becomes problematic, and this can trigger violence on a small or larger scale”, he says.
Learning to be creative
Research shows creativity is an essential human skill for lifelong learning – possibly an evolutionary imperative in our tech-driven world. It inspires collective thinking, nurtures ideas, and motivates and supports resilience. There is evidence suggesting that creativity can be developed through training and facilitated through creative environments, particularly in music. This is a fact that has not gone unnoticed in Europe: each year, there are 66 music summer courses taking place across the continent. Among them is the ‘Young Artists Summer Camp’ operated by the Reina Sofia School of Music, in Madrid, for ages 8-18 to develop their music skills and have fun. There’s also ‘Berlin: Music and Sound in the Digital Age’ operated by the Freie Universität Berlin International Summer and Winter University (FUBiS), where one can explore conditions for musical creativity and technical development. The course is intended for students of any discipline, with no prior music and technology backgrounds required. In Greece, the Greek Society for Music Education shares the basic principles, functions and goals of the International Society for Music Education (ISME), to build a community of music educators, foster cooperation and promote music education for people of all ages.
But can creativity really be fostered in students? According to the Western Norway University of Applied Science’s associate professor Øystein Røsseland Kvinge, it certainly can. “I teach music at the department of Arts Education, where we also offer drama and arts and craft education. Some of our master students ask themselves about the characteristics of creativity. They study the phenomena of ‘flow’ in their own music making activities. ‘Flow’ is the state you are in when you forget about time and space and completely immerse yourself in the task you are working on. They seek to find out what may stimulate the sense of flow and try to bring their personal experiences into the classroom to let pupils enter this ‘flow’ state of mind. Other students experiment with what can trigger creative responses in music making activities. One of my students selected images and photographs and developed ways of interpreting and translating images to music as a method to come up with ideas. Many of our master students explore creativity as a topic for their own research.”
Pr. Øystein Røsseland Kvinge
Kvinge’s students also learn creative processes based on established methods. This autumn, they worked extensively with the ‘Write a science opera!’ (WASO) method, a way of organizing a class into an opera company. WASO is a creative professional development approach to inquiry-based music and science education in which students, supported by teachers, opera artists and scientists, are the creators of an educational performance.
This method builds on the idea of STEAM-education, which blends arts with the hard sciences such as maths, technology and engineering. “We also celebrated hip-hop’s 50th anniversary this fall by spending a week exploring what values and practices hip-hop pedagogy might offer,” he says. Students spent time exploring the nature of hip-hop culture, and its themes, such as freedom of thought, flexibility, truth-telling, authenticity, and confidence. “Doing so, my students worked on creating moves, rap lyrics and beats for their own performances at the end. The processes of sampling sounds and musical materials using Ableton Live opened up for reflections about creativity,” he adds.
Elements of great teaching
If creativity can indeed be taught, music professors can face challenges. “One of them is to find enough time to stay in a continuous exploratory process. Creativity may require time to explore complex problems that you may not be aware of in the first place. And to get into the mode of flow, you will need to work over longer time spans.” Another challenge encountered by teachers who are committed to creative learning is the infinity of ideas the students can come up with, and finding the right way to react to them. This adaptation skill has been theorized by professors of the Stord-Haugesund University College and the University of Bergen in the ‘Improvisation in Teacher Education’ (IMTE) research study. “One of our conclusions was that a great teacher can respond to all the actions and activities in the classroom. For example, to be able to develop and give directions to topics that are being discussed, and to have a repertoire of ways of responding to both the foreseen and unforeseen”, the study said.Teachers need to continually update their professional knowledge base and to improve or revise their practices so as to meet the learning needs of their increasingly diverse students.
Much like in music, teaching is an inherently improvisational activity, and both teachers and students from Kvinge’s university are aware of that. “In one of our Masters programs, we’ve asked the students, as an assignment, to read literature about improvisation, both within the arts and in education. Then they observed teaching in action and later interviewed the teacher. The students both learn about conducting research and improvising. We also emphasize that the ability to improvise in the classroom requires experience and a repertoire, two important things the students often lack early in their career.”
Being a jazz player himself, Kvinge says he uses lead sheets – the chord and melody basis on which jazz musicians can improvise once they’ve mastered them – as a metaphor: the Power Point presentation that often accompanies a lecture in higher education is the essential lead sheet, but interesting ideas can be born out of it. “Using this metaphor, I involve students in these presentations and classes. I also think beforehand about how slides should be designed to prompt discussions about their content.”
Kvinge says that in Norway, creativity is central in to national curriculum’s overarching principles. “Schools must let the pupils experience the joys of creation, being immersed in learning (in a flow!) and in the urge to explore”, he explains. According to the Professor, music education in all its varieties has many qualities as it is, although recruitment in the arts is low these days, at least in Norway. “The focus on core subjects like science or languages diverts many potentially excellent music teachers from selecting music as part of their teaching education. I hope and believe that music and the arts will gain momentum and become a strong force in educating people and shaping communities. Europavox Campus is a great example of how music involves so much more than just the performances themselves (although they are essential). It shows that music has the power to create meaningful meeting points across borders and cultures.”
A combination of experience, knowledge, imagination and creativity all help teaches enable students and their own creative outlets. It’s something we can all benefit from.
Astroturf (NO) & elen in wavs (DE) @ Europavox Campus 2023 © Yann Cabello
Written by Maro Angelopoulou
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