Assessing Creativity in Composing Music: Product-Process-Person-Environment Approaches

How do teachers and researchers assess creativity in composing music? Four approaches can be used: assessing 1) Product, 2) Process, 3) Person, and 4) Environment. The purpose of the study was: 1) to give an overview of research studies in each of the four approaches, and 2) to suggest a Product-oriented method for assessing creativity in composing music and story-telling by children, which was successfully used with high interjudge reliabilties in Auh & Johnston (2000). The overview should give a clear picture of assessment methods for creativity in composing music. The overview shows that: 1) Product - A most commonly used method for assessing music compositions is expert judges' evaluations using criteria. Computerized content analysis has been used for Western classical masterpieces. 2) Process - Compositional strategies used by Expert vs. novice can be described as Gestaltistic vs. Atomistic. 3) Person - Visual imagery stimulated by use of graphic notations in composing music made a significant difference in musical creativity, producing more creative compositions. 4) Environment - Creativity in the East versus the West can be described as intuition vs. logic. Cross-cultural studies of musical creativity show that musicians of non-western countries emphasize aural skills, improvisation, and opportunity to exercise creative potentials.