The impact of explicit instructions, expertise, and personality on creative improvisation amongst jazz pianists

David S. Rosen

doi:10.17918/etd-6555

Past studies have reported that explicit instructions to "be creative" facilitate creativity in many domains. This study examines the impact of such instructions on jazz pianists' improvisations and how expertise, personality, and affect contribute to the creativity of their performances. Pianists improvised to a novel chord sequence with bass and drum accompaniment, and jazz experts rated their performances on 3 scales: creativity, technical proficiency, and aesthetic appeal. Multilevel regression showed two interactions that significantly predicted musicians' improvisation ratings, Scale-Type x Instructions and Expertise x Instructions. Under explicit instructions, pianists received higher creativity ratings, aesthetic appeal decreased, and technical proficiency did not change; however, this effect was highly dependent on expertise such that explicit instructions had beneficial effects on creativity only for less experienced improvisers but had no effect or a small negative effect on expert jazz musicians. Furthermore, there was a positive relationship between the personality trait "concern over mistakes" and improvisation ratings that was independent of instructions, experience, or scale-type. Lastly, post-hoc analyses revealed an interaction between negative affect and experience, indicating that less-experienced musicians' moods fluctuated more in a way that was dependent on their success at improvising more creatively. These findings indicate that training and experience afford jazz pianists the ability to develop efficient creative processes, relying more on implicit, unconscious cognitive systems than novices. Since explicit "be creative" instructions are a challenging goal that occupies the conscious mind, they interfere with the optimal creative processes of expert jazz musicians; however, for less experienced musicians, consciously attending to a creative goal can shift focus away from low-level music features, allowing musicians to deviate their performance strategies in ways that facilitate more creativity. We discuss this further in relation to models of creative cognition, specifically, with regard to the controlledattention theory of creativity.

The impact of explicit instructions, expertise, and personality on creative improvisation amongst jazz pianists

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