ABSTRACT
This chapter considers creativity studies across contemporary fields and disciplines including cognitive science, neuroscience and composer studies. Brain neuroimaging of musicians at work has provided evidence of a number of brain areas being relevant for particular musical tasks. Learning to develop musical creativity, in composing, improvising or performing, requires not just the neurological structures but, crucially, appropriate tasks and a supportive environment. The prefrontal cortex is proposed as a pivotal neural structure mediating creative behaviour, for instance in deliberately instigated creative insights that 'juggle' a number of items in working memory, and in insights generated spontaneously that need to be made relevant by the accumulated expertise. Bearing in mind the risks of an overtly strong emphasis on brain localization, neuroscience can offer us some useful insights into the cognitive processes of musical creativity perception and production, at least at the level of the individual.
