Engagement and Creativity in Music Education

Abstract

The wider benefits of active engagement with music throughout life have been well documented. There is evidence that playing a musical instrument and integrating music in the curriculum can have a range of positive effects on children's self-esteem, their social behavior and cognitive skills, such as creativity, spatial-temporal ability, reading, language and IQ score. Music is a vital part of children's everyday lives and schools have a major role to play in helping children develop a positive musical identity by encouraging active participation in musical activities. When children are actively involved in creative work in music, they are affectively, behaviorally and cognitively engaged with the creative task. This chapter concludes that there is a problem with lack of engagement in formal music education and that we need to do more to understand why many students are disengaged with music at school and put music to its proper place of being an integral part of students' lives.