The third research question in this study concerns the 'meanings' that children attribute to their experience of creating music as a group. The focus is in this case on the learners themselves and how they live, feel, understand, and conceptualise their creative experience with others, and what is significant to them and why. Based on a vision of creative learning as implying relevance, control, ownership and innovation, Jeffrey's (2008) study about primary school children's experiences of creative pedagogies reported that the meaningfulness or value that children assigned to their engagement in creative activities was intimately connected with their developing identities as persons and learners. Thanks to the high quality of their relationship to creative learning situations (involving music, theatre, dance and other curricular subjects), they could experience learning as meaningful in terms of a redefinition of one's own self, i.e. stretching the boundaries of their identity, emotionally, physically or intellectually. They had a feeling of achievement in inventing novel objects and actions which defined in new ways their personal and social identities. Through collaborative work they experienced a sense of belonging and togetherness, and could appropriate new identities through a process of interaction, cooperation, and mutual recognition with others. Their identity as creative
learners was strengthened by their increased awareness of their status as autonomous reflective agents who built up knowledge about how they were learning, what strategies and techniques they were using, and how they could analyse and evaluate their own learning processes. Thus, 'meaning' is strongly to do with 'identity' and with an experience of becoming. Meaningful is something which is to do with 'me'.
With regard to children's music making the question is how to let this identity and voice emerge (Stauffer, 2003), both as characteristic musical gestures or structures and as expression, meaning and intentionality conveyed through the music. Basically,
"individuals create what is meaningful to them on their own terms" (p.95), drawing from the multidimensional web of cultural, social and experiential influences which contribute to build their identity. Children's creative music making reflects the circumstances of their lives, their interests, motivations, ideas, and affective states. Their works are "significant and signifying to them" (p.106) so that, beyond just listening to the music itself, it is essential to try and understand what they mean through it, or else we may get to misguided conclusions or wrong interpretations. This leads back to the necessity of an attitude as anthropologist or ethnomusicologist in the examination of children's creations, rather than as musicologist – music broadly as culture (and as meaningful lived-
experience) rather than just as object (Campbell, 2010; Merriam, 1964; Small, 1998 – see 2.4.1).
This kind of perspective calls for a phenomenological framework and an ethnographic approach to inquiry (more about this in the methodology chapter). In music education research on children's creativity, studies adopting such a theoretical stance are scarce. In a seminal study on 12-year-olds' creative music making, Burnard (1999, 2000a, 2000b) used image-based interview strategies, such as talk-and-draw techniques and critical incident charts combined with naturalistic observation and examination of artefacts, in order to elicit the meanings that children ascribed to their subjective experience of improvisation and composition in terms of the phenomenological categories of time, space, body, and relations. Faulkner's (2003) phenomenological study looked at 11-15- year-old pupils' perceptions of processes, products, meaning and value of group composing in the classroom. Particularly relevant with regard to this study, he also considered the significance that social context and social agency had for pupils'
experience of group composition. In the pupils' views, making up music with others was more pleasurable and more effective than composing individually, thanks to the greater availability of a flow of musical ideas and the sense of joint ownership and shared social identity which working as a group can provide. Even where compositional ideas were
started by single individuals either in the classroom or also at home, the function of the group was to develop them in a more productive way, sharing, refining and validating them in the collective process. This, in turn, fed back into individual members' knowledge and understanding of musical composition. Most importantly, the findings of the study show that
the value and meaning of their compositions resides not just in the work itself and in the interplay of its component parts, but at least equally as much, in the social context in which the music is formed, experienced and celebrated. (p.110)
Thus, beyond valuing the aesthetic qualities of the musical objects they produced, it was the very social experience of the group compositional process and the collective act of musical agency – who they made it with, how they made it together, who they played it for – which was 'meaningful' to these children. With a similar methodological approach, Kanellopoulos' (1999) study examined 8-year-olds' musical improvisations and the ensuing reflective dialogues, attempting to identify abstract principles that underpin children's understanding of spontaneous music making. Themes that emerged out of the interpretation of the data were, firstly, the 'objectification' of the process of creation of an 'improvised piece' as a distinct musical entity and at the same time as a social
experience; secondly, the 'thoughtfulness' implied in children's deliberate involvement in improvisational music making, which was never felt as random or arbitrary, though open to aspects of chance, but was always imbued with a sense of conscious organisation of the musical action; and thirdly, the 'shared intentionality' which characterised children's musical interactions within their joint playing and the relationship of mutual attention and listening between player(s) and audience in the production and reception of the
improvisations.
Listening to children's voices may yield fundamental information about the meanings they attribute to the music they produce as well as about their personal and social experience in the process. To this regard, relevant questions for this study are: What does the created music – the 'piece', if there is one – mean for them? What thoughts, images, musical or extramusical ideas are guiding their process of impro-composing music as a group? How do they conceptualise what they are doing? How do they experience it? How do they make sense of the overall activity? And, last but not least, how do they share these meanings with one another? Such aspects are still relatively unexplored in the literature on musical group creativity, especially in relation to young children.
A further way of interpreting 'meaning' is in terms of wellbeing (Burnard & Dragovic, 2014) and empathy (Rabinowitch, Cross, & Burnard, 2013) that are enhanced through
rests on the positive socio-emotional state that it generates in learners. The significance of the activity for children is also manifested through the sense of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996) that young children may experience in creative music activities (Custodero, 2002, 2005), particularly in collaborative settings where the context of the group scaffolds the emergent undestanding of all children and heightens their musical and social experience (St. John, 2006).