Children invent and play with musical ideas in the same ways they invent and play with all the ideas and processes they experience in life. Music educators can draw on children’s natural generative capacities to foster deep musical engagement and understanding in classroom settings. In this article, I offer some reflections on what music learners and music education scholars have taught me, throughout my 50-year career, about music learners’ creative musical understandings and processes. To arrive at the thematic threads that underlie and frame the article, I engaged in recursive reflection on connections between and among numerous instances that occurred in different times and contexts. I hope these themes might be useful to other practitioners and researchers. Broad themes that emerged reflect the nature of children’s processes of inventing and initiating musical ideas, and that their creative process (a) is holistic, contextual, and intellectual; (b) reflects their musical experience, knowledge, and understanding; (c) is a form of meaning-making and personal expression; (d) is embedded in and influenced by their sociocultural understanding and values; and (e) is rooted in their personal and musical agency. Each theme is explained in relation to the others, supported by salient examples from data collected in a wide range of settings, and connected to the findings of others as reported in the literature.
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