Dr. Carolyn Barber’s lecture aims to demonstrate the importance of creativity within the music classroom; she believes that a different, innovative lesson plan is the key to student engagement. The importance of allowing students to explore the creative process — whether that be through composition or performance practices — is also examined. She uses a psychological explanation of the process to illustrate its gravity within a music education context. The concepts presented in her lesson and my personal opinions about them will be discussed.
At the beginning of the lecture, Dr. Barber draws an interesting comparison between music classrooms and escape rooms, indicating that music teachers are having trouble fleeing the confines of outdated curriculums. Or as she alludes to the words of John Maynard Keynes: “[t]he difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as escaping from old ones” (Barber, 2020). I have always agreed with such a comparison, as the traditional education model (based on technique and outdated pieces) fails to be inspiring in my opinion.
Students want their education to be relevant to their everyday activities. Music can be a very enjoyable, engaging subject! However, this approach has the opposite effect on students and teachers; students feel uninspired and are not motivated to become well-rounded musicians, and this negative attitude frustrates music teachers. Ultimately, teachers must introduce an element of spontaneity to fix this disconnect. During our wind ensemble rehearsal, Dr. Barber had the ensemble play a piece while being randomly dispersed around the rehearsal room, isolating each player from their respective section. This taught us the importance of part independence and is an excellent example of an original approach to music education.
Likewise, her reference to Robert Fritz’s words about creativity also resonated with me: “...[even though] [t]he most important developments in civilization have come through the creative process...[students are] not taught to create” (Barber, 2020). Improvising a performance or composing a piece of music teaches students logic, structure, and above all, the creative process — a transferable skill. However, to me, current music education methods across North American schools do not take advantage of this opportunity. Therefore, to inspire more students to enrol and engage in music classes, teachers must strive to teach students about the creative process. Even if such students do not choose music as their primary field of study, they will still take away valuable lessons from these courses.
In the end, this presentation opened my eyes to the current faults of standard music education practices and caused me to question my own methods of teaching and learning music. I have begun to brainstorm more ideas that will make my church choir rehearsals more interesting. For instance, if the congregants are having trouble with how the syllables sync with the pitches of a hymn, I could ask them to say the syllables rhythmically. This is just one instance of how creativity can be the cornerstone of any great learning experience.
References
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