Seeking Refuge: An Intrinsic Case Study of Musical Creativity Around a Collegiate Band Room During COVID-19

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. instrumental music education faced unprecedented challenges and disruptions. Within this tumultuous context, music educators found themselves compelled to adapt and teach remotely. Despite the abrupt change in teaching environment, Hash’s (2021) survey of band directors during the Spring 2020 semester of the pandemic revealed that a trend that many teachers tried to adapt traditional performance pedagogies and practices to the online space, and only 4.7% of respondents did creative activities regularly. As a teacher-researcher who actively advocates for creative teaching practices in the instrumental music space, I found this observation troubling. In contrast to most respondents in Hash’s survey, in this dissertation I describe the intrinsic case of the band I conducted during the 2020-2021 school year, during which I taught a curriculum focused on developing students’ creative musical skills on their instruments. My guiding question in this dissertation was: How might we redesign the traditional band class model to better integrate creative music experiences into U.S. instrumental music education? Given the ethnographic nature of my research question, I sought to survey creativity from both a theoretical and practical lens. I trace the pluralistic history of the term creativity throughout Chapter Two to better understand its theoretical ambiguity. In Chapter Four, I explore the practicalities and outcomes of teaching a curriculum focused on cultivating musical creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020-June 2021). In the closing chapter, I synthesize my findings and address dispositional tensions found in the study by presenting a novel theoretical framework for teaching and researching creativity within music education.