Overcoming Inhibitors of Creativity

Abstract

Restrictions on creativity are numerous and operate at ideological, psychological, educational, cultural, societal, and economic levels. This chapter examines approaches that musicians from different cultures found to be effective for overcoming inhibitors and enhancing creative agency. Key factors in formal courses, community music, and music therapy programs are safety, emotional support, compositional scaffolding, improvisation, experimentalism, multiple modes of expression, exposure, high expectations, validation, and the transgression of comfort zones. The personal journeys of several individual musicians are shared. Their transformative experiences involved switching to a new instrument, new idiom, new teacher, new institution, and/or new location; taking up other art forms; undergoing therapy and/or bodywork; and finding mentors and/or supportive collaborators. There is no single formula for increasing creativity; however, a better understanding of what creativity is and what its principal enablers and inhibitors are can help indicate which strategies might be most effective in individual circumstances.