1 Musical creativity, biography, genre and learning 1 Graham F Welch Institute of Education, London g.welch@ioe.ac.uk Introduction A Taiwanese piano graduate from a London conservatoire estimated that she had spent between 16 and 56 hours a week in piano practice from the age of four. By the time that she was twenty-three, this amounted to approximately 27,000 hours practising the piano. By any normal definition of the term, she was an expert pianist. ‘Therefore, one could understand the level of frustration that I experienced when I found out that I could not obtain a job in London after graduating from [named London conservatoire] because I had limited transferable improvisatory keyboard skills, such as improvising for a dance company, or becoming a music therapist, improvising for a musical theatre or even jamming in a traditional English pub.’ (Hsieh, 2009:25) The musical expertise that she had gained embraced the knowledge, skills and understanding required for a professional standard performance of classical piano music within the Western canon. Yet she was unable to use this knowledge to create music at the piano without recourse to a musical score. Indeed, when she subsequently began a personal research study of how she might develop piano improvisatory skills, she found that she had to learn the piece from musical notation first in order to commit this to memory and then to attempt improvisation. Within this sequence, memorisation strategies had to be worked out consciously, drawing on her previous experience of memorising for concert performance, and included slow practice, ‘chunking’ (learning small sections), playing through, repeating, separate hand practice and spreading chords practice. When she then sought to apply these strategies to her initial attempts to engage with improvisation of a jazz piece for the first time, she noted that her learning strategies 1. Published as: Welch, G.F. (2012). Musical creativity, biography, genre and learning. In D.J. Hargreaves., D.E. Miell., & R.A.R. MacDonald (Eds.), Musical Imaginations. Multidisciplinary perspectives on creativity, performance and perception. (pp. 385-398). Oxford: Oxford University Press.