Generative Constraint: How Baroque Musical Structures Scaffold Creativity in Neurodiverse Learners

Creativity is a central educational aim, yet learners in special education are too often left out of discussions of how to cultivate it. Music is frequently proposed to support them, and Baroque music especially, but the usual rationale, that such music directly improves cognition, rests on the discredited Mozart-effect literature. This paper offers a different foundation. It advances the thesis of generative constraint: structured musical environments do not enhance cognition but establish the affective and attentional conditions, principally through regulation, under which everyday (mini-c) creativity can emerge in neurodiverse learners. Baroque architecture, including the ground bass, theme and variation, and the historical pedagogy of partimento, is a paradigmatic instance. What sets it apart from a mere repeating background is its functional-harmonic directionality: unlike a static ostinato, a Baroque ground carries an implied motion of tension and resolution, and it is this directional pull, not repetition as such, that a learner’s choices engage, and that offers a controlled means of working against rigidity rather than reinforcing sameness. Because neurodiverse learners differ, the model treats sensory and arousal profiles as moderators, specifies when the approach may fail or do harm, and measures creative variation to separate it from stereotyped behaviour. The contribution is conceptual: a testable model and a single-case research agenda.