Music Composition for Creative Thinking

Abstract

Music composition may be used as a tool for the development of creative thinking; it can be considered an “exercise of imagination,” and it can offer new operative ways to develop interdisciplinary processes and to promote communicative, cognitive, cultural, aesthetic, and emotional functions. The author of this chapter introduces a report of educational experiences of music composition with pupils in Primary School where, through socio-constructivist learning, the students acquire new ways of reading and writing music and begin to elaborate a different score for new and original musical compositions, written, composed, and performed directly by children. This musical experience has the goal of using a “creative” teaching/learning process that contributes to the individual’s global education. This musical work on music composition is considered an appealing open project because of its formative nature and various applications: it develops a creative pedagogy which doesn’t transmit a static culture, but rather provides new thinking processes and new interaction modalities.