A Dialogical View on R. Murray Schafer's Theories and Creative Approaches in 21st Century Music Education

Introduction

These were the words of Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer as he was interviewed in 1992 about music making and lifelong learning. While the World Economic forum has identified creativity as being one of the top skills required in the workforce by 2020, those involved in the arts have long been advocating that art should play a more integral part in educational curricula to develop creativity as a transferable skill.

In this article, we will situate creativity as a major utterance and an important voice within the dialogism paradigm. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Jung, 1999, p. 70) attributes dialogism, a philosophy of language, to Mikhail Bakhtin (1885-1975) and presents it as “[…] infinitely polyphonic, open-ended, and indeterminate,” that is, ‘unfinalizable’ in Bakhtin’s own term. “Dialogue means that there are neither first nor last words. The past and the future are interlocked and revolve around the axis of the present.” In this vein, we will argue that creativity is the concept that connects the music education of the twentieth century to that of the twenty-first century and, indeed, to the needs of future generations. According to Bakhtin, an utterance happens when we “appropriate the words of others and populate them with [our] own intentions” (Wertsch, 1998, p. 78, as cited in Bakhtin, 1986). To support this position, therefore, we will first explore the concept of creativity from the perspective of different theorists. Links will then be established between dialogical pedagogy and other theories of education with the aim of weaving a theoretical backdrop to support our outlook. We will then introduce the work of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, a pioneer in teaching creativity through music education. Subsequently, modern technologies and their impact on creativity will be explored. Finally, we will propose that Schafer’s ideas, through creativity, can be in dialogue with the twenty-first century educational and technological environment.

Literature Review

Creativity is a term which is difficult to define and measure. Morgan (2011) sees creativity as “a mystery, a paradox and something that is unpredictable” (p. 12). It has generally been investigated through four focal points, comprising person, process, product and environment (p. 23). In an article published over 60 years ago, Morris I. Stein defined a “creative work” as “a novel work that is accepted as tenable or useful or satisfying by a group at some point in time” (Stein, 1953, p. 311). In contrast, Weisberg (2015) wrote that “any novel product, produced intentionally, is creative, regardless of whether it is ever of value to anyone” (p. 111). Meanwhile, Shalley, Zhou and Oldham (2004) perceived creativity as being connected “to the development of novel, potentially useful ideas” (p. 934), while Boden (2004) categorized it as integrative, exploratory or transformative, and perceived creativity as “something that pervades all aspects of human endeavour, and is an aspect of human intelligence that is grounded in everyday abilities such as conceptual thinking, perception, memory and self-reflection”. Plucker, Beghetto, and Dow (2004) hold a more constructivist view, according to which creativity is defined as “the interaction among aptitude, process and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context” (p. 90). Rather differently, De Bono (2008) believed that, “Creativity is a skill that everyone can learn, practice and use” (p. 4).