Peter Webster - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Peter Webster
Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2013
The Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, 2000
What is it about myth? Back in the days when Richard Dorson and others were busy codifying what c... more What is it about myth? Back in the days when Richard Dorson and others were busy codifying what counts as folklore and what doesn't, the study of myth was relegated to the anthropologists, the classicists, the religionists, and others whose research and conclusions did not (and could not) depend upon the efforts of fieldworkers among living traditional-narrative bearers. (Native America's societies, the only ones in the Western Hemisphere felt by Dorson to have myths at all, represented anomalies within this view.) This exclusionary strategy was, in large part, dictated by an understanding of myth as something like: a narrative genre encompassing the sacred stories of prerational, preliterate, prescientific, and/or preindustrial peoples, concerned with events believed to have taken place in the remote past, in some way allied with performances of religious rituals, and interpretable only within the contexts of their production, in turn accomplishable only by close reliance upon surviving (decoded) documentary evidence. But politely interrogate any sampling of scholars who work with myth in today's postmodern academic environment and it becomes immediately obvious that among the problematic terms in such a characterization are "narrative," "genre," "sacred," all of the pre-you-and-me terms, "events," "belief," "remote," "performance," "ritual," "interpretation," "context," "production," "document," "coding," and "evidence." Even taking the definition wars of the past century or so into consideration, whose arguments centered largely on descriptions of folklore's long-acknowledged genres of legend, saga, epic, ballad, and folktale, it must be admitted that such a state of semantic disarray andlor ambiguity is truly extraordinary. This theme issue of Folklore Forum in no way seeks to resolve the debate over the proper meaning of the word "myth." Rather, in aid of that debate, it seeks to display the variety inherent in our understanding of myth as we near the end of the twentieth century. In preparation for this issue, I cast a wide, interdisciplinary net to solicit thoughtful writing about myth as a term in current scholarship. From among the many fine essays I received for this issue, I selected the three articles presented here, which together suggest a representative cross-section of the ways in which we currently employ many of the concepts associated with myth. The first article, contributed by Jody Malcolm, a rogue scholar currently working in Florida, is a beautifully realized exploration of western Europe's oldest story-the Irish epic known as the Tain Bo Cuailgne, with its marvelous characters Cuchulain, Maeve, and Fergus-appropriated by Irish
International Handbook of Research in Arts Education
What is needed is a scientific investigation project and a music-specific technology assessment o... more What is needed is a scientific investigation project and a music-specific technology assessment of the degree of change caused by computer technology in all forms of musical production, behavior, and views about music and music production. (Enders, 2000, p.235.) Writing as part of a seminar on technology and music in Budapest some 15 years ago, German scholar Bernd Enders articulates a wish that, at least on the surface, seems natural enough. Unfortunately, such a project is not likely because of both the vastness of music technology and its many applications across the music enterprise and because stakeholders never seem to agree on what constitutes acceptable degrees of change.
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012
The study of creative thinking in music involves a complex combination of cognitive and affective... more The study of creative thinking in music involves a complex combination of cognitive and affective variables, often executed at the highest levels of human thinking and feeling. This is such a complicated set of long-term engagements (composition, repeated music listening, or decisions about previously composed music in performance) or ‘in the moment’ engagements (improvisation and one-time listening), that it becomes quickly apparent why this field has not attracted more music researchers and why many feel the topic is hopelessly impregnable. However, the changes in education and the role of music in formal learning demands that we address creative thinking as best we can. This article takes a decidedly ‘teaching and learning’ approach in summarizing the many studies on creative thinking in music. While it is generally acknowledged that children's creative thinking in music occurs as part of many music experiences such as listening, performance, conducting, and improvising, the ...
I would like to begin by thanking ESCOM and especially Professors Deliege and Melen for this wond... more I would like to begin by thanking ESCOM and especially Professors Deliege and Melen for this wonderful opportunity and for the decision to devote this meeting to the subject of musical creativity. In addition to the many studies of music perception, memory, and other basic aspects of music cognition that have served us so well in the past, today we see additional and complementary interests in more holistic topics of musical development, affect, expressivity, and interpretation. Chief among these higher-order sets of mental operations is the topic of musical creativity—or what I believe is better termed, “creative thinking in music. ” (Webster, 1990) As scholars in music cognition study this topic and ones like it, they mirror similar interests in other fields such as music theory, performance study, and music education. This interdisciplinary trend that I note at my own university and at others around the world is perhaps the most exciting development in music scholarship today. Im...
This paper suggests that there are ways to organize the literature, both within music and in rela... more This paper suggests that there are ways to organize the literature, both within music and in related fields of study, so that the interested professional can engage in an active organized study of creative thinking in music. There are also ways of defining musical behaviors that are indicative of creative thinking in children as well as adults. Additionally, it might be possible to suggest a model of creative thinking in music that might serve as a basis of discussion and pe-haps further research, and finally actually to measure creative behavior in music: This paper reviews studies from the general literature on creative thinking and music literature specifically. This is not a comprehensive review, but rather is aimed at those writings that hold particular importance for content and construct validity in assessment design. Attempts to construct a measure of creative thinking based on these constructs are identified. Measure of Creative Thinking in Music (MCTM) was developed with the belief that creative thinking ability in music might be measured early in a child's musical development, between the ages of 6 and 10. MCTM is a set of structured activities that must be given on an individual basis. It evaluates expressive and productive levels of creative products by engaging children in improvisatory and quasi-improvisatory musical activities with simple but expressive musical instruments. A definition of creative thinking in music, linked to a conceptual model representing the thinking process conclude the paper. Contains 51 references. (DK)
Music Educators Journal, 1990
rickwebbmusic http://tinyurl.com/webbrs Course Description The purpose of this course is to intro... more rickwebbmusic http://tinyurl.com/webbrs Course Description The purpose of this course is to introduce the topic of creative thinking in music to graduate music education students with the hope that they will apply such thinking and doing in their own professional work as creators, scholars, and practitioners. A sampling of the recent scholarly literature on creative thinking in general terms will be considered as a platform for more specific work in the field of music teaching and learning. Students will complete a number of reading assignments, short papers, personal creative explorations, discussion posts, and a final paper. Office Hours/Course Communication There are no specific office hours for this online course as the instructor may be contacted at any time via email. Emails will be responded to within 24 hours during the week and 48 hours on the weekend. If a phone or video chat consultation is desired, those may be arranged directly with the instructor. For personal or grade questions, students should email the instructor or make an appointment to speak via video chat or telephone. Required Text Sawyer, K. (2012). Explaining creativity (2nd ed). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Text is available for purchase or rental via Amazon.com and other vendors. A Kindle edition is also available.) Online course materials will be available to you from the course portal that uses CANVAS as the course management software. Soon after you are securely registered, you will see availability of your materials in your section. Additional Resources Additional readings and resources may be accessed through the Canvas system as pdf downloads. Also, a special arrangement with MusicFirst, a cloud-based software distributor, will allow free access to a number of software programs for music-a great bonus for us. Look for this referenced in many places including a Module page called Special Resources.
Music Educators Journal, 1990
rickwebbmusic http://tinyurl.com/webbrs Course Description The purpose of this course is to intro... more rickwebbmusic http://tinyurl.com/webbrs Course Description The purpose of this course is to introduce the topic of creative thinking in music to graduate music education students with the hope that they will apply such thinking and doing in their own professional work as creators, scholars, and practitioners. A sampling of the recent scholarly literature on creative thinking in general terms will be considered as a platform for more specific work in the field of music teaching and learning. Students will complete a number of reading assignments, short papers, personal creative explorations, discussion posts, and a final paper. Office Hours/Course Communication There are no specific office hours for this online course as the instructor may be contacted at any time via email. Emails will be responded to within 24 hours during the week and 48 hours on the weekend. If a phone or video chat consultation is desired, those may be arranged directly with the instructor. For personal or grade questions, students should email the instructor or make an appointment to speak via video chat or telephone. Required Text Sawyer, K. (2012). Explaining creativity (2nd ed). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Text is available for purchase or rental via Amazon.com and other vendors. A Kindle edition is also available.) Online course materials will be available to you from the course portal that uses CANVAS as the course management software. Soon after you are securely registered, you will see availability of your materials in your section. Additional Resources Additional readings and resources may be accessed through the Canvas system as pdf downloads. Also, a special arrangement with MusicFirst, a cloud-based software distributor, will allow free access to a number of software programs for music-a great bonus for us. Look for this referenced in many places including a Module page called Special Resources.
Design for Arts in Education, 1990
... We are challenged to seek answers about how the mind works with musical ma-terial to produce ... more ... We are challenged to seek answers about how the mind works with musical ma-terial to produce creative results.* This ap-proach ... Our best science and mathematics teach-ers often find imaginative ways to make their content come alive in class by encouraging creative ...
Music Educators Journal, 1990
Creativity—its definition, evaluation, and place in the curriculum—is often misunderstood. Peter ... more Creativity—its definition, evaluation, and place in the curriculum—is often misunderstood. Peter R. Webster clarifies the issue with a model for musical creativity that holds exciting implications for music educators.
Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2013
The Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, 2000
What is it about myth? Back in the days when Richard Dorson and others were busy codifying what c... more What is it about myth? Back in the days when Richard Dorson and others were busy codifying what counts as folklore and what doesn't, the study of myth was relegated to the anthropologists, the classicists, the religionists, and others whose research and conclusions did not (and could not) depend upon the efforts of fieldworkers among living traditional-narrative bearers. (Native America's societies, the only ones in the Western Hemisphere felt by Dorson to have myths at all, represented anomalies within this view.) This exclusionary strategy was, in large part, dictated by an understanding of myth as something like: a narrative genre encompassing the sacred stories of prerational, preliterate, prescientific, and/or preindustrial peoples, concerned with events believed to have taken place in the remote past, in some way allied with performances of religious rituals, and interpretable only within the contexts of their production, in turn accomplishable only by close reliance upon surviving (decoded) documentary evidence. But politely interrogate any sampling of scholars who work with myth in today's postmodern academic environment and it becomes immediately obvious that among the problematic terms in such a characterization are "narrative," "genre," "sacred," all of the pre-you-and-me terms, "events," "belief," "remote," "performance," "ritual," "interpretation," "context," "production," "document," "coding," and "evidence." Even taking the definition wars of the past century or so into consideration, whose arguments centered largely on descriptions of folklore's long-acknowledged genres of legend, saga, epic, ballad, and folktale, it must be admitted that such a state of semantic disarray andlor ambiguity is truly extraordinary. This theme issue of Folklore Forum in no way seeks to resolve the debate over the proper meaning of the word "myth." Rather, in aid of that debate, it seeks to display the variety inherent in our understanding of myth as we near the end of the twentieth century. In preparation for this issue, I cast a wide, interdisciplinary net to solicit thoughtful writing about myth as a term in current scholarship. From among the many fine essays I received for this issue, I selected the three articles presented here, which together suggest a representative cross-section of the ways in which we currently employ many of the concepts associated with myth. The first article, contributed by Jody Malcolm, a rogue scholar currently working in Florida, is a beautifully realized exploration of western Europe's oldest story-the Irish epic known as the Tain Bo Cuailgne, with its marvelous characters Cuchulain, Maeve, and Fergus-appropriated by Irish
International Handbook of Research in Arts Education
What is needed is a scientific investigation project and a music-specific technology assessment o... more What is needed is a scientific investigation project and a music-specific technology assessment of the degree of change caused by computer technology in all forms of musical production, behavior, and views about music and music production. (Enders, 2000, p.235.) Writing as part of a seminar on technology and music in Budapest some 15 years ago, German scholar Bernd Enders articulates a wish that, at least on the surface, seems natural enough. Unfortunately, such a project is not likely because of both the vastness of music technology and its many applications across the music enterprise and because stakeholders never seem to agree on what constitutes acceptable degrees of change.
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012
The study of creative thinking in music involves a complex combination of cognitive and affective... more The study of creative thinking in music involves a complex combination of cognitive and affective variables, often executed at the highest levels of human thinking and feeling. This is such a complicated set of long-term engagements (composition, repeated music listening, or decisions about previously composed music in performance) or ‘in the moment’ engagements (improvisation and one-time listening), that it becomes quickly apparent why this field has not attracted more music researchers and why many feel the topic is hopelessly impregnable. However, the changes in education and the role of music in formal learning demands that we address creative thinking as best we can. This article takes a decidedly ‘teaching and learning’ approach in summarizing the many studies on creative thinking in music. While it is generally acknowledged that children's creative thinking in music occurs as part of many music experiences such as listening, performance, conducting, and improvising, the ...
I would like to begin by thanking ESCOM and especially Professors Deliege and Melen for this wond... more I would like to begin by thanking ESCOM and especially Professors Deliege and Melen for this wonderful opportunity and for the decision to devote this meeting to the subject of musical creativity. In addition to the many studies of music perception, memory, and other basic aspects of music cognition that have served us so well in the past, today we see additional and complementary interests in more holistic topics of musical development, affect, expressivity, and interpretation. Chief among these higher-order sets of mental operations is the topic of musical creativity—or what I believe is better termed, “creative thinking in music. ” (Webster, 1990) As scholars in music cognition study this topic and ones like it, they mirror similar interests in other fields such as music theory, performance study, and music education. This interdisciplinary trend that I note at my own university and at others around the world is perhaps the most exciting development in music scholarship today. Im...
This paper suggests that there are ways to organize the literature, both within music and in rela... more This paper suggests that there are ways to organize the literature, both within music and in related fields of study, so that the interested professional can engage in an active organized study of creative thinking in music. There are also ways of defining musical behaviors that are indicative of creative thinking in children as well as adults. Additionally, it might be possible to suggest a model of creative thinking in music that might serve as a basis of discussion and pe-haps further research, and finally actually to measure creative behavior in music: This paper reviews studies from the general literature on creative thinking and music literature specifically. This is not a comprehensive review, but rather is aimed at those writings that hold particular importance for content and construct validity in assessment design. Attempts to construct a measure of creative thinking based on these constructs are identified. Measure of Creative Thinking in Music (MCTM) was developed with the belief that creative thinking ability in music might be measured early in a child's musical development, between the ages of 6 and 10. MCTM is a set of structured activities that must be given on an individual basis. It evaluates expressive and productive levels of creative products by engaging children in improvisatory and quasi-improvisatory musical activities with simple but expressive musical instruments. A definition of creative thinking in music, linked to a conceptual model representing the thinking process conclude the paper. Contains 51 references. (DK)
Music Educators Journal, 1990
rickwebbmusic http://tinyurl.com/webbrs Course Description The purpose of this course is to intro... more rickwebbmusic http://tinyurl.com/webbrs Course Description The purpose of this course is to introduce the topic of creative thinking in music to graduate music education students with the hope that they will apply such thinking and doing in their own professional work as creators, scholars, and practitioners. A sampling of the recent scholarly literature on creative thinking in general terms will be considered as a platform for more specific work in the field of music teaching and learning. Students will complete a number of reading assignments, short papers, personal creative explorations, discussion posts, and a final paper. Office Hours/Course Communication There are no specific office hours for this online course as the instructor may be contacted at any time via email. Emails will be responded to within 24 hours during the week and 48 hours on the weekend. If a phone or video chat consultation is desired, those may be arranged directly with the instructor. For personal or grade questions, students should email the instructor or make an appointment to speak via video chat or telephone. Required Text Sawyer, K. (2012). Explaining creativity (2nd ed). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Text is available for purchase or rental via Amazon.com and other vendors. A Kindle edition is also available.) Online course materials will be available to you from the course portal that uses CANVAS as the course management software. Soon after you are securely registered, you will see availability of your materials in your section. Additional Resources Additional readings and resources may be accessed through the Canvas system as pdf downloads. Also, a special arrangement with MusicFirst, a cloud-based software distributor, will allow free access to a number of software programs for music-a great bonus for us. Look for this referenced in many places including a Module page called Special Resources.
Music Educators Journal, 1990
rickwebbmusic http://tinyurl.com/webbrs Course Description The purpose of this course is to intro... more rickwebbmusic http://tinyurl.com/webbrs Course Description The purpose of this course is to introduce the topic of creative thinking in music to graduate music education students with the hope that they will apply such thinking and doing in their own professional work as creators, scholars, and practitioners. A sampling of the recent scholarly literature on creative thinking in general terms will be considered as a platform for more specific work in the field of music teaching and learning. Students will complete a number of reading assignments, short papers, personal creative explorations, discussion posts, and a final paper. Office Hours/Course Communication There are no specific office hours for this online course as the instructor may be contacted at any time via email. Emails will be responded to within 24 hours during the week and 48 hours on the weekend. If a phone or video chat consultation is desired, those may be arranged directly with the instructor. For personal or grade questions, students should email the instructor or make an appointment to speak via video chat or telephone. Required Text Sawyer, K. (2012). Explaining creativity (2nd ed). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Text is available for purchase or rental via Amazon.com and other vendors. A Kindle edition is also available.) Online course materials will be available to you from the course portal that uses CANVAS as the course management software. Soon after you are securely registered, you will see availability of your materials in your section. Additional Resources Additional readings and resources may be accessed through the Canvas system as pdf downloads. Also, a special arrangement with MusicFirst, a cloud-based software distributor, will allow free access to a number of software programs for music-a great bonus for us. Look for this referenced in many places including a Module page called Special Resources.
Design for Arts in Education, 1990
... We are challenged to seek answers about how the mind works with musical ma-terial to produce ... more ... We are challenged to seek answers about how the mind works with musical ma-terial to produce creative results.* This ap-proach ... Our best science and mathematics teach-ers often find imaginative ways to make their content come alive in class by encouraging creative ...
Music Educators Journal, 1990
Creativity—its definition, evaluation, and place in the curriculum—is often misunderstood. Peter ... more Creativity—its definition, evaluation, and place in the curriculum—is often misunderstood. Peter R. Webster clarifies the issue with a model for musical creativity that holds exciting implications for music educators.