Empowering the student voice may be the mantra of higher music education institutions today. Yet in a world driven by neoliberal ideologies, student empowerment is more often than not about achieving employability. Music performance students must acquire expertise that is tailored to fit their artistic niche(s) while steadily transitioning into a professional career. Indeed, it seems as though the value of their education is increasingly being measured by its ability to meet global challenges, often through a mercantile lens that typically opposes the artistic ideals found in higher music education (e.g., Moore, 2016; Allsup, 2015, Johansson, 2012). But even though music graduates must learn how to navigate an uncertain future and a(n ever)changing music industry, this has been the reality for the past twenty years (Schmidt, 2019). From the advocacy of the creative call (e.g., Burnard and Haddon, 2015; Burnard, 2014) to a consistent implementation of concepts such as entrepreneurship and portfolio careers (e.g., Bartleet et al., 2019; Schediwy, Loots and Bhansing, 2018), higher music education has long needed to adapt to the twenty-first century. In this short paper, I will argue that the increasing emphasis put on student autonomy by scholars and institutions may not be the ‘magic pill’ that it is portrayed to be. In fact, it may even be counterproductive in fostering student creativity. While there is a genuine need for music students to develop creatively and for institutions to develop frameworks that support their creative development, I argue that it is only by uncovering how creativity operates within institutions that we can begin to understand how music students can truly be empowered.

Higher music education has tended to perpetuate a romantic conception of individual creativity, commonly associated with the myth of the genius artist (Burnard and Haddon, 2015). But if one understands creativity to be a social construct, then creative expressions are created and negotiated by the social field and, over time, institutionalised in the social practices of education (e.g., Frith, 2011). As such, higher music education institutions can be seen as social hubs where expert communities develop musical expertise together (Hakkarainen, 2016). Through this constructivist lens, creative expression is not the result of a genial personality but rather an emergent of attainable knowledge in the collective (ibid.). While individual field experts of higher music education may certainly affect what constitutes musical quality (e.g., an audition committee), they must also adhere to the collective criteria for quality (e.g., the institutionalised audition criteria). In other words, even expert authorities must abide by the ‘rules of the game’ within an institution (though they may not always be aware of this institutional governance). According to institutional theory, the field (e.g., the music industry) evolves when the status quo is socially negotiated through various field-configuring events (Wooten and Hoffman, 2017). Masterclasses and exam concerts, for instance, serve as small field-configuring events that affect how we evaluate (musical) quality in higher music education. Over time, the collective rationality about what should be accepted into the field will be moulded and transformed as the field continuously negotiates its borders. Because of the changing job market, the field can now be observed to negotiate how music students can (and even should) be prepared for their future careers.

One of the institutionalised hierarchies that has been criticised for needing to change if students are to develop creatively is the student-teacher relationship. Higher music education has typically relied on a traditional master/apprentice teaching model, in which the master teacher passes on the torch to the promising student apprentice (e.g., Yau, 2019; Jørgensen, 2000). While this model is excellent for transferring certain types of field knowledge (e.g., institutionalised practices), it is now being condemned for its inability to support student creativity. Over the latter decades, music scholars have therefore become increasingly concerned with how one-to-one instrumental tuition affects the career aspirations of music students (e.g., Gaunt et al, 2012; Johansson, 2012) and notions of student autonomy (e.g., Reid, Rowley and Bennett, 2019; Moberg and Georgii-Hemming, 2019). In short, this landscape has been found to be nuanced. Students are individuals who, despite benefitting from partaking in the same dominant discourses (Nerland, 2007), display a variety of musical preferences and learning styles (Jørgensen, 2000). As such, student-centred teaching methods that are intended to help students become independent learners may not always be suitable. In fact, music students often willingly submit themselves to the dominant discourses of higher music education in order to develop musical expertise by engaging in expert communities (e.g., Yau, 2019; Nerland, 2007). Building on institutional theory, this quest for knowledge makes sense given that students must learn how to engage in social negotiation in field-configuring events in order to be(come) credible field members (Wooten and Hoffman, 2017). But what happens, then, when expert authorities (e.g., instrumental teachers) are decentred in favour of enhancing student creativity in higher music education institutions?

Though the social field is always in flux, institutional change tends to be destabilising to field members. As accounted for, even field experts operate within a narrowly defined set of legitimate options when they fulfil their institutional role (Wooten and Hoffman, 2017). Following this logic, some of the social learning practices that are intended to enhance student creativity (e.g., collaborative learning or co-peer mentoring) present some issues with regards to inclusivity (or, rather, exclusivity). For instance, if collaborative skills are favoured over the ability to distinguish oneself from the social group, then music students could become less likely to pursue creative expressions that are deemed more controversial (Christophersen, 2016). Paradoxically, this could result in a sense of normative creativity among students, where student creativity would be viewed as inhibited once again, only now by the students themselves. This is not to say that collaborative skills are undesirable (quite the opposite), but that they, too, carry implications for creative hierarchies that are important to discuss critically. Furthermore, it is not only the resulting creative hierarchies that become institutionalised when students are to develop creatively, but also what their creative expressions represent in our society. Music education at large has been criticised for perpetuating social inequalities and inequity through the ‘policing’ of music (e.g., Green, 2012), as well as for oppressing ‘performer agency’ (Leech-Wilkinson, 2016). Yet the institutionalisation of student creativity will unavoidably manifest through the very same mechanisms (albeit from a different generation’s point of view). This pattern is utterly unavoidable because institutions are built upon hierarchies. Thus, critical conversations about these mechanisms cannot be neglected if music students are to be empowered. Embracing student autonomy does not remove institutional power mechanisms—it magnifies them.

When institutionalised, student creativity is evaluated by complex social dynamics and institutional power mechanisms that will continue to function as music performance students take charge of their creative development in higher music education. Our teachers therefore face an enormous challenge, in so far as they must embrace student-centred teaching methods while at the same time providing the institutionalised field knowledge that our students aspire to learn. How will this decentring of expert authorities affect the expertise of higher music education in the future? What creative expressions will be institutionalised when students are to emancipate their creativity? If we are to comprehend where the future might lead us, then such questions are crucial to discuss because higher music education institutions are dependent on expert communities in order for musical expertise to be maintained and further developed. Rather than continuously adapting to the (mercantile) calls from the outer world, scholars claim that higher music education institutions must discover how to renew from within (e.g., Schmidt, 2019; Johansson, 2012). Should the power mechanisms addressed throughout this paper be left unattended, then the aforementioned creative call may slip into a ‘creative fall’. An increased awareness of the social dimension of creativity is therefore indispensable when attending to the institutional work ahead, as well as in the pursuit of empowering the student voice.