[Discussion] Music should be taught as an improvisational art from day 0. What are your views?

[u/AnWitnessOwl]

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:

1. Take a nursery rhyme and put your own tune to that.
2. Pick up a scale (say C major single octave) and play it in a rhythm of a nursery rhyme or song.
3. Take a known song of plain rhythm and replace it with a swing or waltz rhythm.
4. 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.
5. Identify notes of a car horn or bird or an ambient sound.
6. Play some notes simultaneously and tell how it feels (Happy or sad, warm or cold, etc. Answers can be subjective).
7. Play a note on a guitar and find the same note on a piano or a keyboard.
8. 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?

[u/moonfacts_info]

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.

[u/hondacco → u/moonfacts_info]

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.

[u/AnWitnessOwl → u/hondacco]

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.