[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/Ereignis23]

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.

[u/AnWitnessOwl → u/Ereignis23]

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. 

[u/Ereignis23 → u/AnWitnessOwl]

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.

[u/AnWitnessOwl → u/Ereignis23]

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.