Everyone Can Make Music Creatively

Abstract

Abstract The chapter focuses on Japanese music education in schools and partly in kindergarten, exploring how creative music-making was implemented in the Japanese music education curriculum. First, the chapter overviews the Asian concept of creativity as a foundation to implement creative music-making in Japan. Next, the study also investigates the process of implementing creative music-making by interviewing Professor Yukiko Tsubonou, one of the leading scholars in the realm of creativity in music education, who contributed to the design of the Japanese curriculum with ongakudukuri. Finally, the chapter draws an explicit connection between Japanese creative music-making and composition pedagogy in a practical manner. The elements of the structured musical play, imitation, call and response, and the connections between music listening and creative music-making were illustrated by introducing actual cases of the lessons as examples of ongakudukuri in Japan.