… And How They are Applied: 3. College:

TLDR: In this article, the most useful things to do to cultivate creativity through teaching are to help students become conceptually acquainted with their musical environment and to help them acquire the technical skills they will need when they start to express their ideas.

Abstract: The third problem concerns creativity. Bruner's phrase "effective surprise" represents the focus of immediate interest. The phrase refers to an original idea or product that works. Both originality and workability are properties of concepts and of the things people make or do because of their concepts. We can make original things if we see things differently from others. If in our concept formation processes we have amassed familiarity with large quantities of environmental objects and events so that they are at our easy disposition and if we are relatively free of imposed ways of looking at them, we can organize them according to our own fancies. We can make things that work if our store of percepts is accurate, and if we have acquired the necessary technical competencies for putting our original ideas into workable physical form. The most useful things to do to cultivate creativity through teaching are to help students become conceptually acquainted with their musical environment without imposing any set of stereotypes on them and to help them acquire the technical skills they will need when they start to express their ideas. Although little has yet been said directly about specific instructional practices for the development of musical concepts, most of what would constitute effective instruc-