ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to model collaborative and creative behaviour. It explores a seventeenth-century opera project aimed at adopting period concerns in order to move the affections. Music research has explored some communities of practice, such as teenagers learning rock music and young children's musical play. The central premise of CHAT is that learning occurs through joint activity using shared cultural tools. In CHAT theory, information processing is regarded as a distributed process across and between participants and artefacts, rather than something that occurs within an individual. The contemporary analogy made was with a good jazz singer coming in and out of musical time, but still maintaining the beat as the foundation stone of the performance. The affections were moved, and a strong empathy with the historical context seemed to offer much to the experience. Engeström's activity system model offers a tool to identify interacting relationships.
