Creation and re-creation in university music performance teaching

In the final chapter of a book on the Teaching and Evaluating Music Performance at University (2020), Canadian music educator, Glen Carruthers, discussing "provocations for change in higher education" (p. 239) introduced the idea of the democratization of music teaching and learning through consideration of "a shift in emphasis from re-creation to creation"¦" (p. 244), and here he was talking about teaching music performance. Carruthers notes that in the teaching of visual arts, "a student learns to create visual artworks; to become a musician, a student learns to create musical artworks, not only, and certainly not exclusively, to interpret artworks created by others" (2020, p. 243). This paper investigates the different approaches discussed by music educators from several Australian universities in the volume's chapters and asks: what performing skills are being addressed through these new approaches, and how these performing skills are about recreation and creation. Teaching music performance at university has broadened beyond the one-to-one studio model with performing skills arising from use of group teaching, improvisation, reflection, the integration of theatricality, visual media, and sound technology, and play as a medium in vocal teaching, among others. In the context of music performance teaching, the term creation can apply to repertoire choice, a spectrum of scored to non-scored transmission of musical ideas, the teacher-student relationship, student reflection, the 38 embedding of career-thinking, and the philosophies underpinning each approach. There are also issues of teaching the teachers to be creative rather than re-creative in their performance teaching. It was found that the line between creation and re-creation is often blurred, scorebased learning can be creative and non-score-based learning can be re-creative, each at times valuable and less valuable, and with the teacher, the student, repertoire choice and the performing environment all playing key roles in the outcome.