Improvisation, Creativity, and the role of Technology

This week I've been considering creativity in music with a specific focus on improvisation. I've also taken time to use two notation programs and weigh their benefits and drawbacks.

Improvisation, the 7-level model, and technology integration
    I've long been fond of improvisation; I tend to take free time to "noodle" on guitar, bass, and other instruments while also being familiar with more formal methods of improvisation. I also had an opportunity of the past few years to play saxophone in a soul band. I'm not a very good saxophonist, but my previous experience with improvisation came in handy and made the group even more enjoyable.

I enjoy the freedom of creating your own melodies in the moment. It can be an especially good way to develop "inner hearing" and is certainly worthwhile for students.
   However, I still struggle with including improvisation in my teaching. I think the biggest concern, and one voiced by colleagues this week, is the lack of time. My rehearsal time is precious so I have to be able to incorporate improvisation in a way that is natural and meets my curricular goals. The best ideas I've considered this week include:
  1. call and response
  2. improvising over an ostinato taken from a difficult rhythm in the literature
  3. improvising over scales used in the warm-up

Providing teacher modeling for all the options and others might prove to be crucial as students build their improvisation skills.

  One colleague made a good point that taking time to improvise will improve student performance generally. This is true, and I think simply trying to incorporate improvisation will show the benefits and make me a "believer." However, you have to take that first risk and I tend to worry about that point. Improvisation does require students to develop better audiation skills (Bauer, 2014). These skills are certainly needed if my goal is to have a skillful, and IN-TUNE orchestra.
 
  As a side note, the continuous worry about time taken away from concert prep makes me see an interesting correlation between our concerts and standardized testing. They both are high takes for teacher, they both take up a large amount of instruction time, and they both might not be the best focus for study. Perhaps more time should be taken aside from concert prep to help students become well-rounded and musically literate.

The  text mentioned a 7-level model described by Kratus (cited by Bauer, 2014). Each step builds towards greater levels of improvisation starting with exploration and ending with personal style. While I would really enjoy having jazz band students who can improvise stylistically, my biggest worry is removing student reticence towards improvising. I believe we don't give students enough time for the exploration phase. As they are beginning instruction, students should be encouraged to "babble" in their instruments; this is especially important if we espouse the belief that improvisation is like speaking a language.
   After giving students the freedom to explore, it is important to lead them through the process of improvisation with useful constraints. Limiting the number of choices (notes, rhythms, etc.) can reduce the cognitive load and help students focus on the act of improvising (Bauer, 2014). This is important as students need a certain level of automaticity at later stages to create musical improvisations.
Also, I think most of my students have been afraid to improvise because they don't know the "right" answer. Providing constraints can help them feel "right" and worry less about failure or peer judgement.

Technology can be useful in a number of ways. GarageBand offers easy ways to eliminate "wrong notes" while also not requiring basic physical skill necessary for playing real guitars, basses, or drums. Teachers can also create interesting loops that can act like "backing tracks" for improvisation.

Jamey Aebersold was a huge help to me as I developed my jazz improvisation skills. I use some of the easy tunes from "Maiden Voyage" as warm-ups during the jazz band season. I have students play the melody and then play the scale or a pattern over the rhythm section. After they play through the "changes" they play the melody again much like a jazz combo would do.


Noteflight and MuseScore

This week I also explored Noteflight and MuseScore 2. Both offered good ways to get students to engage with notation.
  Noteflight is simple and free. Students don't even need to download anything which is a big plus when you need administrator approval to even plug in a printer. The uses are quite limited, but that may actually provide useful constraints. Computer-based composition does not require students be able to write clean notation or even know all of the symbols used in music notation.The measures are automatically fixed for students who may not grasp how many beats are in a measure. Both programs also offer decent playback features which give students instant feedback on their compositions.

  I was most impressed with MuseScore 2. I had previously used the older version of MuseScore and had to work around buggy and awkward parts of the software. To this point, everything makes sense, and there are ways to make a variety of specific edits to the score. The hotkeys are also very useful including simply pressing "r" to copy entire measures rather that cutting and pasting. If you don;t have the money for Finale or Sibelius, I highly suggest MuseScore. I might even do so anyhow, and you can import files from both of those programs.

This week gave a good glimpse into some useful technology for creating music. I hope to continue thinking about applications for technology and find ways to authentically integrate improvisation into my classroom.

References:

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music Learning Today. New York, NY: Oxford University Press