Creativity and Community Music

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Creative music-making is considered a key process in community music practice. One of the underlying assumptions of community music as an intervention is that everyone has the ability to make music – all sections of the community have creative potential. Group improvisation (Higgins & Campbell, 2010) and composition (McKay & Moser, 2005) are examples of community music approaches that are based on creative, collaborative group work. However, creativity in community music is not often explicitly ex-amined or defined in the literatures. This chapter reviews current community music literatures on creativity and specifically examines the conceptualisation of creativity in relation to ten rhetorics of creativity (Banaji et al., 2010; Chappell et al., 2016). My literature analysis shows that in the community music literatures there are references to several creativity rhetorics (democratic and political; ubiquitous; wise humanising creativity) and various areas of usage (musical processes, leadership processes and personal qualities). I conclude by recommending further research to refine and deepen the understanding of creativity in community music and explore the implications for practitioners and researchers.