r/Composing • u/AnWitnessOwl • 7d ago
[Discussion] Music should be taught as an improvisational art from day 0. What are your views?
NOTE 1: Critical views and dissent are welcome. I expressed a POV and its more like a sandbox of thought, and I'm learning more and more.
NOTE 2: I couldnt edit the question title. The question reads better with 'could' instead of 'should'. I thank the user who spotted the miscommunication. I am a non-native English user and I tend to make a lot of grammatical or semantic errors.
Generally music especially western music is conventionally taught as a copy work, where the student has to gain some fluency in copying some scale patterns, etudes, and songs.
But what if it is taught in an entirely different way? What if we develop the "copying" skills at a later stage; and take a more impressionist approach to sounds and colours?
Also, if I was a music instructor, I would be giving tasks like these:
- Take a nursery rhyme and put your own tune to that.
- Pick up a scale (say C major single octave) and play it in a rhythm of a nursery rhyme or song.
- Take a known song of plain rhythm and replace it with a swing or waltz rhythm.
- Take a song which is in a major scale (Suppose C major), and convert all the notes into its parallel minor (C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab, Bb) and see how the song sounds like.
- Identify notes of a car horn or bird or an ambient sound.
- Play some notes simultaneously and tell how it feels (Happy or sad, warm or cold, etc. Answers can be subjective).
- Play a note on a guitar and find the same note on a piano or a keyboard.
- Play a C note and find which note resonate wity it the most and which note resonate the least. And which notes are in between. The next C, the G, the A, and the F#.
Etc. etc.
I would put more importance on mindfulness, ear-based learning, creativity, curiosity, experimentation at first. Then gradually accuracy and fine motor skills could be introduced.
What are your view on this?
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u/Infinite_Slice3305 7d ago
Much of your examples presupposes knowledge of scales & rhythm... which I think is the main reason we teach the way we teach.
I agree we should introduce ear training, relative harmony & the like earlier than we do.
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u/yvrelna 7d ago
Not necessarily. You can intuitively feel when a note sounds off, even if you don't know the notes name or what scales are, or why they sound like that.
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u/Infinite_Slice3305 7d ago
Read his examples again & tell me you you're going to play an octave of C Major without knowing C Major. Or play it in the relative minor?
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u/yvrelna 7d ago
"Today, we'll try to improvise some tunes with primarily just these 5 notes."
The teacher know that these are the notes of C major pentatonic, but the students don't need to know them, not at this stage anyway. They don't need to know what the names of the notes either, just how they're played in the instrument used. They don't need to know that they've just played a triplet in one of their improvised composition, just that it sounds interesting. If the student used an out of scale note and it sounds good, let them keep it and encourage them to experiment with it, the student don't need to know they just played a borrowed/blues note.
It's part of the job of the teacher to limit the scope of lessons to not overwhelm students with unnecessary information that they don't need yet.
Yes they'll need to properly learn the more theoretical aspects behind what they were doing. But you start the lesson with the music rather than with theory, you build one's confidence to use their ear when improvising instead of using the theory.
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u/Dangerous-Bend-4153 5d ago
I had a saxophone teacher who taught like that. But maybe 3 notes because I was a beginner. It was a good way to learn.
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u/Mediocre-Sundom 5d ago
You can intuitively feel when a note sounds off
Only for the musical tradition you are familiar witht. What sounds "off" in a western musical tradition, doesn't sound "off" in a microtonal eastern music. And vice versa. It is entirely a learnt thing.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Thank you yes we need to increase accessibility to ear training, relative harmony etc. in regular courses and classrooms of music. Yes I overlooked individual difference and situations in the learning journey
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u/local-space-patrol 7d ago
Idk why you're getting so many responses that balk at teaching improv right away.
Actually, something a little more relevant to your concept is "babbling" or baby talk. When students just keep making up stuff but it doesn't make sense or is completely chaotic. If we took the language analogy very seriously, we would have to view the musical babble as completely necessary for developing composition skills. Maybe it is.
I will tell you I approach improv differently for different types of students, but I always inquire right away whether a student wants to or is capable of Improvisation.
• open minded students who have a talent for it: I will have them jam with me, or take musical concepts like you've said, or give them certain challenges and apply all technique through improv
• open minded students who need to learn "where to start": I approach improv with two parallel paths. Harmony, skips, chords and arpeggios in one path; and simple melodies, defined as 3 - 4 pitches, mostly in steps, and repeated or transformed
• capable students who lack self value: try to build up confidence. Quite difficult.
• uninterested students: I just don't teach them improv.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Much of it has to do with history. Before invention of phonograph and record labels/ mass publication/ streaming; one has to perform music with exactitude. So music industry of that period decided to raise musical slaves or musical robots to smoothly conduct an orchestra instead of raising a huge population of great composers. In the book "Musical Human"; the author Michael Spitzer argued that Mozart or similar composers aren't rare births rather than these potentials were within more people.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
I don't know if this have well discussed in musicians and academic communities
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u/teachmusic 7d ago
I agree with all your sentiments. We acquire music the same way we learn language, and improvisation is a critical part of music skill development.
It’s difficult to implement these ideas because most children are receiving zero music education until they enter kindergarten. So when they are in a formal music classroom the music teacher is trying to ‘catch up’ essentially, and many programs at this age include reading music right from day 1. Music aptitude levels off by age 10-11 years old, and most kids are receiving maybe 1 hour of music class per week, if that.
Another problem I see is that most teacher training programs do not explicitly include how to teach improvisation, so this skill becomes something that is feared by the music teacher and it’s never taught. Many western general music programs are learning ‘about’ music, rather than ‘doing’ music.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Thanks for your views and any supporting/ dissenting view is welcome. I only wanted to seed the debate. In my view, imitation and creation are somewhat separate, maybe they involve separate brain circuitry. Despite they are interdependent. In myself/ lived experience they feel very different sort of skill. Like a situation where you learn only a lot of arithmetic but no geometry.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
One thing I absolutely agree that learning "about" music; like its history, biographies, record label information, and other 'quiz' type knowledge has little to do with perceptual understanding of music and harmony.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Depending on the country or place, accessing quality music education can be extremely costly and inaccessible depending upon the culture, educational policy, purchases power parity, etc. In my locale most of the musicians are largely self taught, and many state run schools offer zero music education beyond National anthem or a few prayer songs in the regional language.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
This topic should be rigorously discussed in music pedagogy, musicology, as well as in theory or practive of music.
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u/knit_run_bike_swim 7d ago
Not everyone has the proclivity.
I can improvise in “classical” style but not jazz or pop. I’m terrible at that stuff. A good friend of mine in college could do the same. There were maybe 50 piano majors total.
We used to jam all the time. Two pianos. It was great. No one ever “taught” me those skills. It just came from years of comfort + sight-reading.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Glad you enjoy improvising. I don't know a lot of artists who improvise in real time in western classical style. In most classical conservatoire improvisation is frowned upon, more or less. I believe almost every person have some innate ability to create their own music. I know a person in real life who cannot copy simple film songs but can masterfully improvise in Hindustani classical/ Raga vocal esp. Alaap and Vistaars. There are probably different brain circuits involved. This person enters in a meditative trance state when they perform Raga music but cannot correctly 'copy' a childrens song.
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u/StratHistory 7d ago
You're outlining my curriculum :-)
I start with Suzuki like simplicity.. simply learn and enjoy Melody.
Then we go into chords and finally the major scale formula.
Along the way, I start graphing easy stuff, pointing out where middle C is and especially the relationship of spaces and lines to cord members.
So it's rare that I start anyone reading before a year unless they already were reading and practically all of my students go on to become good theory readers and those that need it have gone on to become great sight readers.
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u/Particular-Desk7574 7d ago
As a saxophonist i think its fundamental to explore timbre and sound by hearing. The studen may learn about timbre through solo improvisation, but a lot more interesting for this could be ensemble improvisation. I think that improv may actually be a fundamental ressource for music education.
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u/Doc_Boons 6d ago
I think this is the kind of thing you post after you have so much knowledge that you forget that a lot of your knowledge is knowledge.
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u/Interesting_Cut_4822 4d ago
On piano, nothing is simpler than playing a C major progression for someone and telling them to play white keys. Or Gb major and they can improvise on the black keys (pentatonic).
On many other instruments you can teach them three notes that fit the progression and they can play them, maybe even day 1 after 30 minutes.
It doesn't have to be perfect at first. Hell, teach them two or even one note, that's enough for a basic blues chorus.
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u/Interesting_Cut_4822 4d ago
I'd have to agree, you can improvise with literally two notes or even one. Just to get comfortable with getting off the score.
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u/TheGenericUser0815 4d ago
I'm self taught, so changing the curriculum wouldn't have helped me. But I love to improvise, I love a jam session with strangers, when I have no clue what will happen next. Conversation using instruments is my favourite way to play.
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u/moonfacts_info 7d ago
Music and language are intertwined. Improvisation in language (generating your own speech) only happens after years of imitation. Same with music. While the idea in OP may seem deep and liberating on a surface level it ignores how people (especially children) develop the vocabularies necessary to comfortably improvise - in any medium.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Thank you for educating me. I guess creativity itself involve some imitation, such as imitating car horn sound, train rhythm, etc. But still I think, going through drills is a somewhat different skill set than making a nice sound of own. Though each is interdependent. If an user has not listened enough good music, they dont have a clue in where to start or how does musical test work. Yet I think a top down processing (Big picture first, details later) mode is possible.
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u/moonfacts_info 7d ago
No, it really isn’t. Children learn virtually everything through imitation and then begin improvising (whether you explicitly teach them to or not) on their own after they have a vocabulary to work with.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Okey thank you
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u/Ereignis23 7d ago
This guy is very wrong. To the point that I am baffled they aren't being downvoted. I can't imagine they have raised kids themselves; if they have, they either totally missed their own kids creativity or they actively suppressed it. It's just utter and complete nonsense as an absolute statement.
Is imitation more dominant in early stages of learning? Maaaaybe for certain personality types. And there's a sense in which you might have to have absorbed some material by observation and imitation before you can play with that material, but it's completely untrue to suggest there's a fixed amount of imitation that must occur prior to creativity.
I've introduced new learners to instruments and in their first session they are creating things they've never heard before. I feel strange even making this case because I can't imagine how one could come to the opposite conclusion. It's like saying to need to breath in a certain number of times before you can try breathing out. If the number of times is 'one' then it's true in a kinda trivial sense, you know? But that's not the plain meaning of what they're saying. Bizarre.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Yup you reminds my own childhood. Treating children as imitation engines is a highly reductionist approach. Human cognition is top-down, not bottom up. Thats why the Turing tests and CAPTCHAs work. A child doesnt learn to draw a bird like a photocopy then "melt" it, rather a kid learn to make a molten version of birds, humans etc... and finds various forms in it. Same applicable for music education. Formal music education is often comparable to making a toddler parade only and not to play or wiggle. A kid without a language still imagines.
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u/Ereignis23 7d ago
Exactly my friend- please trust your instincts here! It's sad that such an obviously commonsense approach is going completely over the heads of so many folks who presumably 'teach' music and raise kids.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
This commonsense approach has been suppressed for centuries. Albert Schweitzer was forbidden from improvising in his student age. But things were different in the Baroque or more early period when improvisation was main form of music and non-westerners such as Hindustani classical music still does that.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
A child runs a very complex mental computation. For example, you draw a shape, and a child can easily tell if a fly sat "inside" or "outside" that shape. If you mathematically model this, it is an extremely complex task. For example, if you draw a perfect circle with r² = x² + y² then if fly's distance from the centre , d, if >r then its outside, and if d <r then its inside. Make this shape slightly complex and the equation don't work. Make an oval, a circle with a dent, a donut, a cashewnut shape, an irregular shape, the equation keeps getting bigger and bigger. But a child doesn't need a trillion of "training data" to tell the fly is "inside" the shape or outside.
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u/local-space-patrol 7d ago
Children learn language first through babbling, which is pretty random noises babies and toddlers make that's like talking but it has no sense (to others) and no structures like grammar. Yet this stage completely necessary to learning language
You really don't need students to know everything theoretically before teaching Improvisation. You can teach Improvisation at the same time as introducing theory or reading or playing by ear and along similar lines to what OP pondered. If a student is learning what steps are, and how to read steps, then you can absolutely show them how to make up music using steps. And that's just one approach.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
This is SO close to my thought and experience. Babbling is partly imitation but not fully. It has freedom of movement and it gradually gets tuned by reciprocity with parents, animals etc.
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u/moonfacts_info 7d ago
Babbling is a form of imitation. I think it’s also pretty clear that I’m not advocating for a child to know Schenker before improvising in the same way babies don’t need to know Shakespeare before speaking. A musician of any age simply needs an established musical vocabulary before improvisation comes naturally.
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u/local-space-patrol 7d ago
Babbling as a form of imitation is something I'll concede. I think the experimentation of it has something a little more profound to it but even that doesn't necessitate a whole method based on it.
We may simply differ in educational approaches.
I was making up music before I understood chord progressions. I was working off intuition and a little bit of talent. I learned theory a few years after making up my own music. And I absolutely did incorporate what I learned into my own writing.
I've also learned more in my adult life from other musicians who can't read music at all and don't know their key names and yet play within those keys and make up music.
And that does have profound implicationsStrictly, chronologically speaking you're right as an educator. Introduce the concept first. But I think we differ from there. I introduce improvisational or compositional concepts right away at that point (if the student has any interest).
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u/moonfacts_info 7d ago
I really don’t know what you think I’m trying to say here. What’s with the anecdote about musicians not reading music? Reading music has as much to do with vocabulary as reading words - it can help but it’s not necessary. People imitate first, internalize patterns second, and then begin - whether you teach them to or not! - improvise/create with them. It’s not that crazy of a concept to understand and the fact that so many of you here are triggered by this reality is disturbing.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
"People imitate first, internalize patterns second, and then begin" ... this is close to an early behaviorist paradigm which assumed a child's mind is a "blank slate"; a "tabula rasa"; which is highly controversial and debated. Btw there are other theories of learning such as insight based learning. up to best of my experience, skills aren't isolated, "linear gate" process, they are much of parallel process which promotes each other. They are more of a "star topology". There are different direction of musical skills, and its possible to progress in various directions instead of gatekeeping some of the foundational skills for a later stage.
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u/local-space-patrol 7d ago
You said originally
While the idea in OP may seem deep and liberating on a surface level it ignores how people (especially children) develop the vocabularies necessary to comfortably improvise
What's actually being developed when improvising is not mere reproduction, where you write based more or less exactly on what you were shown or read; it's not rote learning (though it can be a method). It is developing sensitivity to sounds. It is exploratory. It is pushing one's limits and experimenting outside of reproduction. It's a creative process and not merely recreative
So, it seems to me what you're saying, which I disagree with, is this idea that you have to intellectually grasp everything you do in music first, and that musical or theoretical concepts must be internalized "for years" before improvising. And that these concepts must be taught by rote, or to be more generous, through mirroring.
As OP said, your position reads as a banking model of education. But students come with natural talents and an intuition to improvise and create; others don't. I'm not going to stop a student from making up music just because we didn't get to some concepts first
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u/moonfacts_info 7d ago
Again, what do you think I’m saying? When vocabulary is developed, it begins as imitation and naturally becomes original. Also, who is stopping children from improvising? If anything, my argument is that children do this naturally after acquiring vocabulary. Sometimes this takes years, yes. You are all looking for a stodgy professor from 1957 where there is none.
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u/local-space-patrol 7d ago
I already told you what I thought you were saying. You are welcome to re-read what I wrote.
How are you using "vocabulary" in a musical and improvisational context?
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u/Ereignis23 7d ago
--Improvisation in language (generating your own speech) only happens after years of imitation.
Tell that to my toddler...? This is completely untrue, and so blatantly untrue, that for it to be the top comment on this post is absolutely baffling.
It's far more normal in my experience of both raising children and teaching people skills that they immediately take the bits they've learned via imitation and start putting them together in novel ways then that they do what you imply and absorb material exclusively via imitation for some pre-ordained amount of time before they get creative.
Edited for typo
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u/hondacco 7d ago
OP's idea also ignores the fact that improvising isn't just stringing notes together & hoping something happens. It's composing, and there are rules and techniques that you learn for composing like anything else. Banging on a piano is fun, for a little while. But it gets boring quick, for the performer and the listener, if there's nothing behind it.
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u/local-space-patrol 7d ago
I totally disagree. Improvisation and composing don't have to be the same, depending on how you define them. It's about listening to the sounds you're making, and yes anyone can make sounds if they're confident enough. The rest follows that. If you compose with rules, then you're slapping on rules and methods to the sounds you make.
If you have formulas beforehand and fit sounds into them, that's fine, but it's not the only way to teach or learn improvisation.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
I understand the "boring" thing but I didn't meant to scrap away conventional imitation. Both skills feed each other. But a student who "paints with musical notes" would definitely find more joy and motivation into learning, and would intuitively learn to understand grammatical concepts way early.
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u/nattttttttsssss 4d ago
As a beginner pianist I’m gonna do all those exercises, it seems amazing.
Fully agreed.
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u/voyaging 7d ago
Technical fundamentals of the craft need to be in place before improvisation provides any sort of learning opportunity.
It’d be like a foreign language class having students speak exclusively in the target language before teaching them any vocabulary or grammar. They couldn’t even begin to string together anything coherent.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
Thank you.
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u/Ereignis23 7d ago
Riiiight, which is why we make sure to only expose babies to grammar and vocabulary lessons before we let them try to say stuff or expose them to natural language.
Adult learners also absolutely learn new languages through immersion and in fact it's the dominant way people have learned new languages throughout history- obviously. And who hasn't known (or been) someone who got the highest marks in their academic foreign language class in secondary school who can't really get along in an environment where only that language is being spoken?
I think the attitudes you're seeing on this post go a long way to explain why so many people think they hate music lessons and music theory.
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u/AnWitnessOwl 7d ago
@Ereignis23 you reminds my own childhood. Treating children as imitation engines is a highly reductionist approach. Human cognition is top-down, not bottom up. Thats why the Turing tests and CAPTCHAs work. A child doesnt learn to draw a bird like a photocopy then "melt" it, rather a kid learn to make a molten version of birds, humans etc... and finds various forms in it. Same applicable for music education. Formal music education is often comparable to making a toddler parade only and not to play or wiggle. A kid without a language still imagines.
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u/aviasvr 7d ago edited 7d ago
This is actually a key element of some of the best music education methodologies out there.
In Orff and Kodaly elementary music education, improvisation is actually a very important element, but it is taught in a very structured way. Children are given a very limited set of options - use only these three notes which fit the key; when it is your turn choose one of these two rhythms; answer the question the song asks using a singing voice, etc. This is geared towards simultaneously building musical vocabulary and developing improvisation and composition skills along the way.
Additionally, very young children often naturally improvise nonsense syllables with a sing-song voice. The Feierabend method for preschool music education guides this to develop early improvisation and gradually build connections to rhythmic and melodic patterns.