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Composing Their Thoughts: Empowering Creative Voices

There seems to be an unchallenged notion that by engaging in our school and collegiate music programs, students will be creative. Maud Hickey, music studies, challenges this notion that participation in music will produce creative beings, mostly because of the rather pedantic and uncreative way in which music in taught in most American schools. Hickey works with teachers in schools and at professional meetings to debunk the myth that only highly trained individuals can compose or improvise. Her research so far has proven that not only are the very youngest students capable of creating and thinking imaginatively in sound through composition and improvisation, but these activities can empower those youth in most need to empowerment.

Hickey began her research with the central question of how one measures musical creative thinking in children. She has since expanded her study to evolve around three focal areas: the measurement of creative musical thinking in children through improvisation and composition, application of this knowledge in curriculum development for music educators, and outreach to urban, at-risk, and disenfranchised youth.

Hickey's most recent work was with at-risk teenager men who were staying at a residential facility for troubled youth in Chicago. She used computer software and hardware not only as a tool for composition, but also as a means for collecting the teens' process data as they composed. The resultant "digital scraps" and musical compositions served as a field text for understanding the stories from the teens' lives. Composition gave the young men a chance to express their thoughts and emotions in a creative way and without risk of failure or censorship. The teens composed music around topics ranging from gang violence or getting expelled from school to girlfriends and family.

Hickey plans to continue her work with at-risk or disenfranchised youth in order to continue to learn how creative music making can serve as a tool for healthy communication and empowerment in their populations. Her findings have and will continue to inform the regular K-12 music education arena as well.

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