Creativity and music education: The impact of social variables

Recent publications within the psychology of music and music education have begun to highlight the importance that social factors have for a child’s developing musicality, but there is still much to understand about this influ-ence. This paper highlights two projects that investigated aspects of the intrin-sically social nature of musical participation. One study investigated the communication (both verbal and musical) taking place during compositions created by friends and non-friends. The second study investigated the musical and communication gains made by individuals with special needs who attended Gamelan workshops. The educational implications of these studies are considered, as are directions for future research. The social context of creativity. Whilst there is a strong commitment to developing creative musical skills within the current UK National Curriculum for music, there is evidence that in practice there are challenges and difficulties with this aspect of music teaching. Creative tasks are under-used in classroom situations, and this might be at leas