Huovinen Erkki
Department of Music Education, Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 25;12:612739. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.612739. eCollection 2021.
Most research on people's conceptions regarding creativity has concerned informal beliefs instead of more complex belief systems represented in scholarly theories of creativity. The relevance of general theories of creativity to the creative domain of music may also be unclear because of the mixed responses these theories have received from music researchers. The aim of the present study was to gain a better comparative understanding of theories of creativity as accounts of musical creativity by allowing students to assess them from a musical perspective. In the study, higher-education music students rated 10 well-known theories of creativity as accounts of four musical target activities-composition, improvisation, performance, and ideation-and argued for the "best theoretical perspectives" in written essays. The results showed that students' theory appraisals were significantly affected by the target activities, but also by the participants' prior musical experiences. Students' argumentative strategies also differed between theories, especially regarding justifications by personal experiences and values. Moreover, theories were most typically problematized when discussing improvisation. The students most often chose to defend the Four-Stage Model, Divergent Thinking, and Systems Theory, while theories emphasizing strategic choices or Darwinian selection mechanisms were rarely found appealing. Overall, students tended toward moderate theory eclecticism, and their theory appraisals were seen to be pragmatic and example-based, instead of aiming for such virtues as broad scope or consistency. The theories were often used as definitions for identifying some phenomena of interest rather than for making stronger explanatory claims about such phenomena. Students' theory appraisals point to some challenges for creativity research, especially regarding the problems of accounting for improvisation, and concerning the significance of theories that find no support in these musically well-informed adults' reasoning.
大多数关于人们对创造力概念的研究关注的是非正式信念，而非创造力学术理论中所代表的更复杂的信念体系。由于音乐研究者对这些创造力一般理论的反应不一，创造力一般理论与音乐创作领域的相关性也可能不明确。本研究的目的是通过让学生从音乐角度评估创造力理论，更好地比较理解这些理论如何解释音乐创造力。在该研究中，高等教育音乐专业学生将10种著名的创造力理论作为对作曲、即兴创作、表演和构思这四项音乐目标活动的解释进行评分，并在书面论文中论证“最佳理论视角”。结果表明，学生的理论评估不仅受到目标活动的显著影响，还受到参与者先前音乐经历的影响。不同理论之间，学生的论证策略也有所不同，尤其是在基于个人经历和价值观的论证方面。此外，在讨论即兴创作时，理论最常受到质疑。学生最常选择捍卫四阶段模型、发散性思维和系统理论，而强调战略选择或达尔文选择机制的理论很少被认为有吸引力。总体而言，学生倾向于适度的理论折衷主义，他们的理论评估被认为是务实的且基于实例的，而非追求诸如广泛适用性或一致性等优点。这些理论常被用作识别某些感兴趣现象的定义，而非对这些现象进行更强有力的解释。学生的理论评估指出了创造力研究面临的一些挑战，尤其是在解释即兴创作方面的问题，以及那些在这些精通音乐的成年人推理中未得到支持的理论的重要性问题。
