The music genre of jazz is commonly associated with creativity. However, this association has hardly been formally tested. Therefore, this study aimed at examining whether jazz musicians actually differ in creativity and personality from musicians of other music genres. We compared students of classical music, jazz music, and folk music with respect to their musical activities, psychometric creativity and different aspects of personality. In line with expectations, jazz musicians are more frequently engaged in extracurricular musical activities, and also complete a higher number of creative musical achievements. Additionally, jazz musicians show higher ideational creativity as measured by divergent thinking tasks, and tend to be more open to new experiences than classical musicians. This study provides first empirical evidence that jazz musicians show particularly high creativity with respect to domain-specific musical accomplishments but also in terms of domain-general indicators of divergent thinking ability that may be relevant for musical improvisation. The findings are further discussed with respect to differences in formal and informal learning approaches between music genres.
Within the field of music, jazz is commonly considered as a particularly creative discipline (e.g., Barrett, 1998). This appraisal is related to the fact that jazz music involves a high degree of improvisational playing. Jazz improvisation can range from the simple embellishment of the melody of the theme to e.g. the continuous extemporization of entirely new melodies that fit to the sequence of chords (Johnson-Laird, 2002 and Pressing, 1988). Jazz musicians who are highly skilled in improvising hence may possess traits that are different from those of musicians in other disciplines such as classical music. So far, only little is known about the individual differences between musicians devoted to different music genres. Therefore, this study compared jazz musicians with musicians of classical and folk music with respect to their musical activities, creativity and personality.
Only few studies have investigated specific differences in attitudes, and learning approaches of musicians specialized in different music genres (e.g., Bézenak & Swindells, 2009, Creech et al., 2008, Papageorgi et al., 2013 and Welch et al., 2008). Classical musicians are reported to acquire musical skills mainly in formal educational settings involving one-to-one instruction and by practicing alone, whereas non-classical musicians devote more time to extra-curricular activities such as playing music for fun with others or having professional conversations (Bézenak & Swindells, 2009 and Welch et al., 2008). Additionally, classical musicians attach greater importance on technical proficiency involving sight-reading, notation, and quality of tone, whilst non-classical musicians appear to attach greater importance to skills such as memorization or improvisation (Bézenak & Swindells, 2009 and Creech et al., 2008). Bézenak and Swindells (2009) found that jazz musicians show higher intrinsic motivation and experience more pleasure in musical activities than classical musicians. In contrast, classical musicians report higher levels of performance anxiety than other non-classical musicians (Papageorgi et al., 2013). These findings already suggest important differences in the general approach towards learning and playing music between different genres such as jazz and classical music.
Research also addressed the question what factors lead to expert performance in music and more specifically in improvisational skills. It is now widely accepted that the cumulative amount of deliberate practice but also the quality of practice is highly predictive of mastery in the domain of music (Ericsson et al., 1993 and Williamon & Valentine, 2000). Additionally, there is evidence that individual differences in domain-general cognitive abilities also contribute to expert performance (Hambrick et al., in press). Beaty, Smeekens, Silvia, and Kane (in press) report a study where ten jazz students were video-taped during improvisation performances on a piece unknown to them, which then was rated for creativity by three professors of jazz studies. They found that creativity of improvisation was independently predicted by practice hours and divergent thinking ability (i.e., a common indicator of creative potential) of the jazz students. The findings suggests that divergent thinking, commonly defined as the ability to fluently generate original and appropriate ideas, may represent a relevant ability supporting improvisational creativity. This notion is in line with formal models of jazz improvisation stating that improvisation requires the continuous generation and evaluation of musical ideas (Pressing, 1988). Similarly, divergent thinking is considered as a central factor underlying creative thinking in music according to Webster’s model (2002), together with certain differences in personality and motivation. As a consequence, jazz musicians who are highly skilled in improvisation may differ in their creativity and personality from musicians of other genres. The aim of this study is to formally test this hypothesis by comparing Jazz musicians with musicians specialized in classical and folk music.
