Musical Creativities in Practice

Musical Creativities in Practice, by Pamela Burnard. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2012, 336 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-958394-2.In Musical Creativities in Practice, author Pamela Burnard challenges the relevance of the "great composer" archetype as a model for contemporary musical practices with a set of carefully composed examples. She covers musicians at various stages of their professional careers, achieving various amounts of commercial success, and using different technologies and outlets to reach listeners. She investigates bands, singer-songwriters, DJ culture, and new media. These practices reveal musical creativities that rarely belong to one genre or culture. They strive for originality and reject entrenched notions of authorship. Her analyses yield a framework through which creativities may be viewed through a sociological context and a set of prescriptive measures for introducing current musical practices into traditional music curricula.When Joseph Beuys declared everyone is an artist (Mesch & Michely, 2007, p. xiv), it was understood that he did not mean everyone possessed the skills of the great masters. Rather, Beuys was championing the notion that everyone has capacities for creative thinking, and that creative thinking could be applied in multifarious domains. Similarly, in Musical Creativities in Practice, author Pamela Burnard questions the relevance of the "great composer" archetype as a model for contemporary musical practices. To overturn numerous fallacies about the practice of music, she paints a picture of creativity with broad strokes, cutting through swaths of musical territory. Before reading the book, it is important to note that Burnard is a member of the University of Cambridge faculty of education because her bone of contention about creativity is in essence a pedagogical one. "This book offers a powerful corrective to the mythological and historical conceptions focused exclusively on notions of creation as a singular activity." (p. 2). Along the way, she challenges the "cult of Romantic stereotypes of the creator as individual genius," the "fetishization of composition," and the "canonization of highstatus genres (or high-art orthodoxies)" (pp. 2-3).Burnard's assertions are framed in powerful and passionate language, and the conceptions she attacks are certainly vaguely familiar to anyone who has received formal music training at the university level. Nevertheless, the exact problem she is addressing remains largely implied rather than deconstructed-primarily because Chapter 1 dives straight into debunking the "myths" of creativity, foregoing an introductory analysis and reproach of pedagogy at the contemporary conservatory. The omission unfortunately narrows the book's audience somewhat by presuming a common knowledge of or experience with music curricula that many music researchers will not share. For readers without the prerequisite grounding in education discourse and/or sociological research, the book lacks the scaffolding necessary for analyzing her results along with her. Appendix A details the methodological approach. Readers are strongly encouraged to read this appendix, to provide the necessary background, before tackling the rest of the book.Musical Creativities in Practice de-canonizes the great composers with a myriad of excellent examples. "De-canonizing refers to artistic crossover and cross-border encounters with the dominant knowledge forms of classical, jazz, and rock music that are central to the subordination of contemporary and subcultural genres." (p. 25). Accordingly, like the author herself, her subjects are voracious musical and cultural "omnivores." Their musical practices yield creativities as distinct from each other as from the classical template Burnard endeavors to render passe. Most examples exemplify the interstitial nature of modern composition, freely crossing genres, popular as well as fringe, and traditions. Burnard's collection covers enormous breadth, musicians at various stages of their professional careers, achieving various amounts of commercial success, and using different technologies and outlets to reach listeners. …