Analysis of the seminar of creative music exercises

Abstract

During the research entitled Teaching Creative Music, the focus is on getting to know creative music, which is becoming more and more widespread in Hungary, however using it, but still takes up little space in our music education, and its impact in high school and university environments is limited. The Kodály Concept contains a number of well-established practices also László Sáry’s collection of Creative Music Exercises (Sáry, 1999), mainly evoking Christian Wolff and John Cage, evoking the work of Stockhausen, also works well, but there is no teaching aid for the secondary school classes (9-12) based on different combinations of systematic vocal and rhythmic tasks – although in the 2017 NAT [“National Curriculum”], creative music activity as a reproduction is included as a requirement among the development tasks. There is also less experience among those pursuing higher music studies in terms of methodological preparation at the national level. We believe that much more student-based assignments should be used in high school singing and music education so that their classroom motivation and musical creativity can develop further, and their subject-related knowledge deepen. We are interested in the “rehabilitation” of this field, as there are a lot of opportunities in the creative music exercises, during which repetitive activity and musical creativity are essential, and Odena and Welch have already studied the latter (Odena–Welch, 2007). Music pedagogical research supports the need to study the field, as high school students are undermotivated in their lessons and their musical creativity is not sufficiently exploited (Deliège–Wiggins, 2006). In this article, we would like to explore an analysis of some of the practices of a creative music course over a semester in terms of how student activity and creativity changed during the 9 hours of the practice (measured with 3 groups per week). For all of this, we also use elements of Teachout and McKoy’s model, who examined music teacher attributes in terms of teacher success and failure.