The bright future of research on creativity in music education

Over the last decades, theories of creativity have developed from frameworks where creativity is understood as mainly an individual, internal cognitive process, to theories viewing creativity as socially constructed, materially and culturally embedded and embodied, and emergent over time. In this article, I will review these developments and connect them to empirical research on music education. We will come to conclude that musical creativity is not something music students are born with, but rather an acquired skill that emerges out of an interaction between the student, their teacher(s), peers, and musical ‘material’ such as musical instruments or composition software. Detailed analyses of these processes, both qualitative as well as quantitative, are necessary to better understand the diverse ways in which musical creativity develops.