One of the most significant movements in musicology over the past thirty years has been deceptively simple: a shift from noun to verb. Increasingly, music has come to be understood, not as an object that is reified in the score, but as performance: an embodied, social, and inherently creative activity (Cook, Reference Cook2013). A key aspect of this move has been its challenge to two previously dominant forces in music: the score and the composer. Creativity is no longer seen as the preserve of the composer, working in isolation and transmitting their intentions through their notation, to be interpreted and conveyed by the subservient performer. Rather, it is increasingly understood as a collective, emergent phenomenon that takes place in everyday contexts of music-making, and distributed across a variety of cultural and social factors. What do these developments mean for scholarship on music pedagogy? And, equally, what insights can music education offer to the study of the creative process?
Musicians in the Making (MitM) assembles a range of empirical and theoretical work on the creative development of musicians. The volume's focus on learning as an active process is foregrounded in the ‘making’ of its title, which suggests a conception of learning as a trajectory rather than an endpoint, particularly emphasising the tacit, processual, and contextual aspects of music-making. As the editors identify, ‘learning is an ongoing, lifelong process which involves not only oneself but the teachers, friends, family members and listeners with whom one comes into contact along the way.’ (Rink, Gaunt & Williamon, Reference Rink, Gaunt, Williamon, Rink, Gaunt and Williamon2017, p. xxii). The volume is an output of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP; see www.cmpcp.ac.uk); specifically, the project, Creative Learning and ‘Original’ Music Performance, led by John Rink. The project focused on creative development (largely) in the Western classical tradition, located in contexts including the practice room, teaching studio, and rehearsal, and was particularly concerned with the experiences of musicians in higher education and in the early-career stages of their development.
The volume encourages an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach: many of the chapters are co-authored and engage with work from subject areas including (among others) music education, music psychology, performance studies, (ethno)musicology, sociology, philosophy, and performance science more broadly (including educational and sports psychology). Sixteen chapters are presented alongside ten ‘Insights’: shorter contributions from practitioners (mainly professional musicians and educators) who offer personal reflections on their own creative pathways. As well as being of interest to scholars and students whose work is concerned with music education, performance studies, and creativity, it is likely that the volume will also directly engage music educators, teachers, and practitioners.
The book is organised into three sections, the first of which comprises chapters investigating the factors that influence and/or facilitate creative learning: the ‘catalysts’ of musical development; inter-personal dynamics cultivated within particular pedagogical settings such as one-to-one lessons, small groups, and masterclasses; assessment procedures; and informal learning models from non-Western musics. The contributions to Section 2 examine the dynamics and processes of music-making, revealing the qualities of musicians’ creative practice that are often tacit, or have tended to be overlooked by existing literature. The chapters address creativity and originality in the practice room; small ensemble rehearsal practice; creativity and leadership in choirs and orchestras; applications of self-regulated learning and performance profiling for music performance anxiety; and improvisation as a (creative) tool in classical performance. The focus of the third section shifts to notions of interaction and exchange within music-making at various levels: the relationship between the musician and the wider ideologies of western classical music culture; holistic approaches to ‘academic studies’ and performance; contributions of embodiment research to conceptions of musical expression; interactive dynamics in ensemble performance; and the performer-audience relationship.
Several of the chapters consolidate research on key topics of music education and performance studies from leading scholars in their fields, making the volume an authoritative resource for readers seeking comprehensive and up-to-date texts on topics such as musical abilities, conservatoire pedagogy, ensemble rehearsal, co-performer interaction and communication, and audience research. To examine one of these chapters more closely, ‘Learning to Perform’ by Davidson and McPherson critically examines the concepts of ‘giftedness’ and ‘talent’, showing how they are often based on social and cultural assumptions. The authors triangulate research from biographical case studies, longitudinal studies of the trajectory from young learner to adult professional, and other investigations undertaken with high-level performers, in order to map out the factors that facilitate the acquisition and maintenance of musical abilities. They employ a syzygistic model of musical attainment to account for the wide range of individual, social, cultural, and wider environmental factors that exert a ‘gravitational pull’ on a musician's development, while also recognising the autonomy of the individual within this system.
As well as the volume being a useful point of reference for the latest scholarship on the above topics, a number of chapters show how employing an interdisciplinary approach to attend to the processual and embodied qualities of the creative process can shed new light on some of the established research questions of music psychology. For example, in their chapter, ‘Musical Expression from Conception to Reception’, Crispin and Östersjö present a historical account of musical expression, relating nineteenth-century conceptions of ‘interpretation’ and ‘expression’ to the work concept to show how these characterisations have often been based on a concept of fidelity to the score (the residual nineteenth-century ideologies of music are also considered in Hunter and Broad's chapter). By elevating the co-creative roles of the performer and audience, and by attending to the corporeal and embodied dimensions of musicians’ knowledge, the authors build on established models of expression to put forward a paradigm that accounts for the mutability of musical ‘works’ and thus challenges commonly-held notions of creative authorship in music. This model in turn, could have wider implications for music pedagogy.
In starting from a view of creative practice as an embodied and situated activity, the book makes an important contribution to scholarship beyond the fields of music education and music psychology. This is exemplified by Cottrell's chapter, ‘The Creative Work of Large Ensembles’, which asks the question: (how) do large ensembles facilitate creativity? Existing research on creativity in music has tended to assume a somewhat stereotypical view of social organisation in orchestras (e.g. Sawyer & DeZutter, Reference Sawyer and DeZutter2009). Cottrell sets out a distributed model of leadership in orchestral practice, showing the multifaceted nature of conducting styles which are contingent on the size and character of the ensemble. The creative relationship between conductor and orchestra is thus shown to be less hierarchical, more complex, and more socially distributed than it might appear at face value.
While MitM is wide in its intellectual scope it is clearly not intended to address all aspects of music education, and, given the research questions underpinning the CMPCP project, it is not surprising that on the whole, contributions prioritise formal rather than informal learning contexts (Smart and Green's chapter notwithstanding). However, although the Insights might have offered the opportunity to engage with a broader spectrum of musical expertise, this was not the case, with four of the ten being written by pianists. If one of the editors’ primary conclusions was that ‘it is important to determine who is doing the making’ (Rink, Gaunt & Williamon, Reference Rink, Gaunt, Williamon, Rink, Gaunt and Williamon2017, p. xxvii), this lack of diversity in representation felt like something of a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, the volume's somewhat narrow focus in this one aspect does not diminish its overall contribution to the field, or its relevance to BJME readers. Inevitably there are several overlaps of subject matter between chapters (e.g. 3, 8, and 15; 12 and 14) which are not immediately apparent at first glance or identified in the preface. Consequently, I recommend reading the entire volume rather than isolated chapters in order to draw out and benefit from the fruitful dialogue that exists between them (similarly, the volume speaks to many of the themes addressed by the other four volumes in the SMPCP series).
While there have been a number of recent or updated publications on musical development from a broadly psychological perspective (e.g. Hargreaves & Lamont, Reference Hargreaves and Lamont2017; McPherson, Reference McPherson2015), in its interdisciplinary approach and its synthesis of tacit and explicit knowledge, MitM has the potential to widen the scope and aims of this research, and thus to facilitate innovative ways of examining the rich, complex, and dynamic processes that contribute to the making of musicians.
