Creativity in the Music Classroom: An Alternative Code of Composition
Creativity in the music classroom
The new degree in Music Education (Primary Education) now being introduced at the university level should be defined by its commitment to helping students, who will become primary school teachers specialising in music, develop educational processes that enable them to design and create alternative teaching resources and tools. These processes should also help future teachers supervise their students, offer guidance in learning situations, advise children as they make decisions, coordinate educational activities, and stimulate the personal growth of each student they teach. The core aim is to guarantee that these undergraduates receive a well-rounded, high-quality education that aligns with the university vision advocated by a growing number of authors.
In higher education, music holds a crucial place, especially in teacher training. More and more students want a professional education that uses realistic methods adaptable to the needs of an increasingly demanding and fast-changing society. Future educators expect university programmes to revamp their teaching approaches so that they can later implement new ways of creating knowledge in their own classrooms, allowing children to discover things independently and become genuine protagonists of their learning. Innovation, research, experimentation, emotions, experiences, analysis, and reflection become the primary routes for developing the full range of human potential.
Because of its multidimensional nature, music can advance an educational model based on exploration, discovery, and the use of students' creativity, originality, and improvisation without requiring any prior knowledge. Reading and writing music play a fundamental part in cognitive development, since — like all advanced linguistic systems — music learning involves mastering multiple forms and systems of mental processing. Knowing the musical code is essential not only for creating musical messages but also for understanding and analysing the realities of our social situation. The evolution of humanity has been intimately tied to the development of both verbal language and music.
During prehistoric times, sounds served as a means of expression and communication in various rituals — for socialization, rain-making, hunting, and more. These practices combined intellectual ideas that people wanted to express with the acoustic materials available to them: sounds from nature, body percussion, onomatopoeia, and verbalization. Over time, the need to transmit different messages through sound led to a sign system for fast, simple communication. However, this system grew more complex over centuries, eventually developing ways to represent increasingly elaborate sound forms. This particular linguistic system — musical language — has made it possible not only to convey personal and collective experiences, emotions, and feelings but also to immerse ourselves in the cultural and aesthetic legacies of other historical periods.
Yet there are other ways of graphically representing the sounds we perceive, and each one provides information about a particular sound and its interpretation. These non-conventional musical representations involve their own investigation based on discriminating and recognising acoustic elements in our environment, analysing sound, experimenting, discovering, becoming familiar with the mechanisms of musical creation, and above all understanding that all creative forms — whether musical or not — demand imaginative effort and reflection.
Many musical works composed with this alternative language can be performed without any previous musical training, increasing the performer's confidence, self-fulfilment, and personal satisfaction. Such compositions encourage integration, creativity, spontaneity, and freedom, and they make it easier to use music to represent the world around us — our worries, problems, and daily reality.
Recognising the possibilities that music offers for transforming educational institutions, and the methodological boost it can provide, we developed a teaching experience during the 2012–2013 academic year. We encouraged third-year Music Education degree students to create and develop their own code of musical composition, promoting imagination, experimentation, and self-learning within a context of active and meaningful learning that encourages critical reflection on the learning–teaching processes they themselves drive.
The idea of inventing an alternative code to conventional musical language is not new. Since the early twentieth century, various methods have aimed to replace the passive approach to learning to read music. These systems were created mainly by musicians and theorists such as Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, Edgar Willems, Zoltan Kodaly, and Carl Orff, with lesser-known but equally interesting proposals from Justine Ward, Suzuki, John Paynter, Murray Schafer, Jos Wuytack, Joan Llongueres, and Jaques Chapuis. Other techniques are now being developed by specialist teachers, though these are adaptations of earlier work rather than truly new inventions.
In our case, this constitutes an innovative educational experience that uses musical language as a tool to perceive, analyse, and better understand the world around us — learning through music. While aware of its potential, we also recognise its limitations and do not see it as a rigid prescription for other educational fields. We simply believe it is worthwhile to inform fellow educators about the possibilities of this approach so they can adapt it to their own contexts, since they are ultimately responsible for their own teaching. That responsibility can allow them to supply students with background information that creates a foundation for participation, creation, and experience and, subsequently, for intellectualising the process — all within a framework of meaningful learning.
Methodology
Through an innovative methodological approach, we helped students in the third-year subject Music in Primary Education to create and develop their own code of musical composition. The dual goal was to acquire both the musical education skills inherent to the subject and the professional competencies they will need as primary school teachers.
The subject was designed around an active approach where students participate in the teaching process. The methodology is grounded in collaborative work, reflection, and interaction with classmates and the environment. The teacher acts as a facilitator or guide while students design their own knowledge, using reasoning and creativity to develop their own activities. These activities aimed to hone skills in searching, selecting, analysing, and assessing information, as well as sharing experiences and opinions.
Lessons took place in unusual locations that sparked curiosity about what might happen there. Lively debates involving opinion exchange encouraged oral expression and interaction. Fun games and varied music videos grabbed attention, while concepts were always explained using tangible, visual examples to prevent boredom. These key elements made music the perfect vehicle for creating a climate of cooperative work among all class members.
Students were given the autonomy to work in groups of five or six people and create an original musical code. This gave them the chance to form part of a group that allowed interaction with other members — providing ideas, making decisions, or mediating any disagreements that arose — and at the same time led them to embrace personal involvement, commitment, effort, participation, and responsibility, all essential for their future teaching roles. This approach rejected the traditional concept of education as mere transmission of information to be collected and stored, where the teacher spoon-feeds students and the only valued outcomes are the ability to take notes, read textbooks, and memorise material for exam day.
The innovative quality of our methodology lies precisely in the curiosity and surprise that all groups experienced while preparing their alternative codes for reading and writing music, as well as the ingenuity, sense of fun, and originality shown when these ideas were presented in the final classes. Sharing information, respecting diversity, and positively considering all contributions created an atmosphere where ideas could be compared, and where students could participate actively and express themselves freely without fear of ridicule or making mistakes.
The methodology helped create a fun, reflective, motivating, and creative classroom atmosphere. This allowed students to look forward to learning and enjoying themselves while also developing self-criticism that can help them see education as a tool for building a better society — one that respects diversity and innovation, values personal effort and social reality, develops a spirit of collaboration and teamwork, and views objectives, content, competences, and assessment as flexible, modifiable elements that serve the creativity and feelings of students rather than the other way around.
Conclusions
It is intriguing to see how simply asking students to create a musical code different from the one we know transformed a traditional music class into a space for experimenting with the new and unknown, breaking with established ideas, and overcoming the monotony of typical lessons where the teacher explains while students listen and take notes. Instead, classes became places where students not only acquired music and teaching knowledge but also learned to become better people.
Even today, it remains common to hear students complain about traditional methodology used in many subjects, where they must remain silent while the teacher explains and learning consists of repeating memorised content. This is a methodology that encourages individualism and a cut‑and‑paste approach, where students choose a topic, search for information, incorporate it into a document, and present it. Since this method does not help students participate actively in the teaching–learning process, classes quickly become monotonous. The presentation of information does not even convince those presenting it, let alone those listening.
Can educators afford to miss the opportunity to help students learn more and more fully? If we do nothing about it, who will? Educational institutions need to encourage innovative teaching strategies based on ingenuity, creativity, and originality — because our future depends on this approach. It depends on the education of those who will one day make decisions that change our society. Abandoning the traditional concept of teaching and adopting new, less theoretical, more practical methodologies will foster greater autonomy and personal initiative in future leaders, along with creativity, freedom of expression, and stronger involvement in societal issues. Changing how we teach will also automatically turn us into teachers of the future: creative, committed educators who provide more personalised treatment and freedom in learning styles, because if students fail in the future, we fail in the present.
In music education, abandoning traditional concepts means confronting the unknown for the first time. The conventional view of the subject is limited to images of musical scales, singing, learning note names, playing the recorder, and reading a little music history. This is a highly technical view far removed from the subject's daily reality, and it is conditioned by prejudices acquired during many people's early education.
As a result of this mistaken and biased vision, students often regard music education with feelings of mistrust, fear, and general lack of motivation, seeing it as something embarrassing and fairly useless. They must overcome the same prejudice when they realise they need to break the rules and free themselves from stereotypes that prevent them from seeing music education — and education generally — in a completely different light. Discovering new methodologies to use in the classroom helps them mature and improve their view of the educational process.
Students have long been treated as robotic learning recipients who must repeat all the information they receive. It is time to change this and introduce methods that boost creativity and motivation by increasing tasks that promote positive values, tasks that allow students to participate and reflect on what they are learning. Diversity in the classroom should be seen as a source of enrichment and fun, giving students the chance to see and learn interesting things from their classmates.
It is also necessary to understand that many places in our environment may be ideal for learning. Changes in context and the uncertainty they bring are extremely important if we want our message to be genuinely accepted by students in their lives beyond the classroom.
Adopting alternative assessment models — where personal progress and collective effort allow students to achieve better results — is also key to transforming educational institutions. We should work toward a model that evaluates creativity, motivation, or participation, among the most important criteria for assessing students' personal development. Such a model could finally replace the old method where students showed "their knowledge" in a test.
The right methodology would encourage students to attend class, participate, collaborate, and make them wonder: What will the lesson be about today? What will we do?
Thanks to the innovative experience carried out in Music in Primary Education, we have seen first-hand.
…and to communicate emotions that words alone cannot capture. Our goal has always been to make students discover why they truly wish to dedicate their lives to teaching. We aim to develop their sense of vocation and help them feel personal fulfilment in this career. We teach them to relish the joy that arises when their students enjoy learning; to take pride in decorating their classroom so that students will also care for and enjoy that shared space; to establish rules and schedules in a friendly, playful, and collective way; to cherish special moments; to express their feelings; to relax; to share experiences with colleagues; and, above all, to instil in them the need to both learn and teach, to have fun, to view the world through hopeful eyes, and to believe that everything can change.
This shift toward a better educational model rests in our hands. There is no question that to achieve it we need teachers who are better prepared, both responsible and bold—ready to break rules and traditional routines—so they can introduce new ideas into the classroom that free students, develop the competences people truly need, and raise the quality of education. After all, nothing is better than a student who eagerly awaits the next class.