Musical Improvisation

To create and perform with spontaneity, without any sort of preparation or specific instructions, to extemporize: that is improvisation. The sheer action of improvisation in music is deeply complex where the improvisator draws all of their knowledge and understanding immediately to the present, and show- cases it along with the spin of creativity, the sudden inspiration in the present, and the artistry of the indi- vidual. To have the ability of improvising easily and freely is a skill that speaks volumes of an individual in the process of mastering the relationships and structures of harmony, form, and the language of music. Improvisation should be imperative in a student’s learning of music regardless of the instrument, because not only does it play a significant role in helping the student deepen their grasp on music as a whole as well as advancing their skills on their instrument, but it also creates new neural pathways from neuroplas- ticity of the brain in other aspects of musical development of the student.

“Is improvisation a practice that is best understood as being ‘learned but not taught,’ or can it be facilitated by a teacher? And what happens when improvisation gets institutionalized in an academic set- ting? Does it run the risk of losing what many see as its critical and creative edge, its transformational ca- pacity, the very force of its out-of-tuneness?”1 While there are many benefits in taking up improvisation as part of the learning as a student, it has hung on the fringes of musical development due to past curricula that emphasized on learning accurately and precisely from reading music notation. However, despite the academic paradigm of pedagogy focusing on reading and writing music -- including music history classes categorizing music as only an evolving sequence of texts --, classical improvisation has come to the fore- front in the last two decades.2 I have experienced this movement firsthand, with one example being my work in the Benedetti Foundation in 2020: in a group setting of about twenty, one of the teachers played a simple chord progression of I-V-I, and we went around the room of each student getting a chance to im- provise a four bar phrase. One of the things I found fascinating was some of the responses from a number of students were similar in that they were so scared of what they deemed “being wrong and inaccurate”, and as a result three of the twenty students declined to improvise. Afterwards, we asked the students what they thought was “wrong and inaccurate” about their improvisation, and they responded that they were “out of tune” and “did not produce a good sound”.

As a student myself, I experienced the same concerns when I first was encouraged by my teacher, Alison Wells, to take a bit of time out of each practice session to improvise on my cello. I was so focused on producing an accurate left hand and a very colorful right hand bow from the pieces I was working on,

(1Patricia Shehan Campbell, Learning to Improvise Music, Improvising to Learn Music (Urbana: University of Illi- nois Press, 2009), 119. )

(2Ajay Heble and Mark Laver, Improvisation and Music Education: Beyond the Classroom (New York: Routledge, 2019), 1. )

and it was the obsession on technique that not only caused me to stunt my creative growth, but also dimin- ished my grasp on the “big picture” in the form, harmony, and structure of each piece. Music is a lan- guage: there is grammar, punctuation, and conversation in the structure and harmony. To speak it fluently is through improvisation -- that is what I learned from David Dolan’s classical improvisation classes. In his classes he would invite each of the students to pick any key and improvise in the classical form, where he would sometimes say where he would be going in terms of the harmony, and sometimes he would not in order to encourage the student. What I witnessed after a single round of improvisation was that each student, including myself, developed this creative spark where the volley of harmonic conversation with David Dolan gradually became more seamless, more artistic liberties woven in, and overall had a greater confidence on their respective instruments. What he emphasized for each of us to do was develop a habit of practicing improvising at least two or three times a week, and see how we feel overall. As I practiced improvisation, suddenly there was this whole creative and artistic part of me I never thought I had, finally having access to, and music in general began flowing more naturally.

One of the hidden benefits of improvisation is its critical role in the brain, where it can form new neural pathways connecting the learned knowledge of harmony, form, and structure with creativity, and strengthen them. The brain possesses a capability called neuroplasticity, where the brain can change through a process of growth and mapping; in this case, it also means cortical remapping in utilizing a skill like improvisation that draws from multiple areas simultaneously. Take the 2014 study that neuroscien- tists did on reading the brain scans of jazz musicians “trading fours”, where the musicians play brief solos of introducing melodies and new material in response to each other’s ideas. During the extemporized ex- changes, the musicians’ brains activated areas called the posterior superior temporal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus, directly linked to the syntactic processing of language; conversely, the deactivated areas of the brain in the same process were the supramarginal gyrus and the angular gyrus, which are involved in semantic processing. Charles Limb, associate professor otolaryngology at John Hopkins University and faculty of Peabody Conservatory, concluded,

“We’ve shown in this study that there is a fundamental difference between how meaning is pro- cessed by the brain for music and language. Specifically, it’s syntactic and not semantic processing that is key to this type of musical communication. Meanwhile, conventional notions of semantics may not apply to musical processing by the brain.”3

This scientific data agrees with the argument that the semantic approach towards music - the fo- cus on reading and writing - in that it directly inhibits the natural syntactic processing that occurs in im- provisation. The authors Ronald Berk and Rossalind Trieber delineate the six principles of improvisation:

(3Stephanie Desmon-JHU, Brain Scans Show Jazz Musicians ‘Speak’ Music (Unknown: Futurity, 2014). )

Trust, acceptance, attentive listening, spontaneity, storytelling, and nonverbal communication.4 Students are taught to “tell a story” through not only their improvisation, but with their semantic learning as well; however, how can one be a storyteller when there is little to nothing shared on what it means to share a narrative through the use of nonverbal codes?

According to Trieber and Berk, one of the goals of improvisation in music is to facilitate deep learning. James Rhem categorizes deep learning into four necessary categories: learner activity, a well- structured knowledge base, motivational context, and interaction with others. Learner activity is the in- ductive and deductive discovery coinciding with others to synthesize knowledge and produce its applica- tion; a well-structured knowledge base is where the learned knowledge has been shaped and able to be de- monstrative in understanding and comprehension especially with the use of evaluative skills; motivational context is the desire to pursue more knowledge, and having the informed ability for making creative deci- sions quickly in context; and interaction with others is self-explanatory.5 In applying the art of improvisa- tion, it can communicate with a student’s knowledge base by introducing them to ways they can utilize what they have learned and begin their own unique process of synthesizing their information. This can also indirectly apply to motivational context, because it has to come directly from the student, rather than the student following an assignment of specific instructions that could potentially dilute and restrict crea- tive and artistic curiosity intrinsic to the student. The key here is forming and sustaining a creative space for the student when teaching improvisation that allows them to see past any “mistakes” and encourage the endless artistic possibilities that will directly help the student create their own unique musical voice. Following Rhem’s theory of deep learning, improvisation logically is the best facilitator of bringing the student learning music to a greater level of mastery, rather than compared to the traditional semantic pro- cess.

However, with the argument fully backed by data, how could improvisation be taught without it being but a decontextualized version of basic jazz competency? The solution lies within the problem: this particular genre must be known and taught from a variety of styles, from folk and world traditional sources to historically informed performance practice, to more modern takes pushing the boundaries of the limits of each instrument. In order to avoid the pitfall trap of whether any type of improvisation made by the student is “right or wrong” or “not accurate”, the pedagogical approach should be that involving multiplicative procedures as well as goals with no restrictions. The absolute goal of teaching and weav- ing improvisation into the critical stages of a student learning music and their instrument is to help encou- rage them to become a musician who is understands the genres they have learned in a metacritically, artis- tic, and self-reflective sense.

(4Berk and Trieber, Whose Classroom is it, Anyway? Improvisation as a Teaching Tool (Miami: Miami University, 2009), 31-32. )

(5Berk and Trieber, 38. )

Improvisation is seen in practically everywhere historically in worldly traditions, whether it was a part of music or within the enduring art of storytelling by passing knowledge in oral tradition dating back thousands of years. Yet for some reason the art of improvisation fell to the wayside in the world of classi- cal music, and the creative pathways of students were slowly being restricted through the ways of a gra- dual semantic process of learning. Music is indeed a language within itself through its own structure, grammar, and its multiplicative forms it can take, but without the syntax, students can only hope to make a checklist way of learning through reading written notation, and can slowly eat at mental health if not taught how to be able to make creative decisions and solutions to problems. As Gabriel Solis puts it, there are three pillars of improvisation possibilities: “’learning to improvise music’ (developing the skills that allow musicians to perform in styles that use improvisation); ‘improvising to learn music’ (acquiring basic musical skills, including musicianship, theoretical understanding, and so forth, through improvisa- tional musical activity); and ‘improvising music to learn’ (nurturing humane, humanistic values through the practices of musical improvisation).”6

(6Gabriel Solis, From Jazz Pedagogy to Improvisation Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2019), 97. )

List of Cited Works:

Ajay Heble and Laver, M. (2019). Improvisation and music education : beyond the classroom. London ; New York: Routledge.

Campbell, Patricia Shehan (2009). “Learning to Improvise Music, Improvising to Learn Music.” Musical Improvisation : Art, Education, and Society, edited by Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl, 119-142. Urbana : University of Illinois Press.

Donnay, G.F., Rankin, S.K., Lopez-Gonzalez, M., Jiradevjong, P. and Limb, C.J. (2014). Neural Sub- strates of Interactive Musical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of “Trading Fours” in Jazz. PLoS One, [on- line] 9(e88665). Available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088665 [Accessed 8 Feb. 2021].

Jemson-JHU, S. (2014). Brain scans show jazz musicians “speak” music. [online] Futurity. Available at: https://www.futurity.org/jazz-players-brains-see-music- language/#:~:text=When jazz musicians “trade fours,those tied to spoken meaning.&text=Based on fMRI brain scans,limited to analyzing spoken lan- guage. [Accessed 8 Feb. 2021].

Solis, Gabriel (2019). “From Jazz Pedagogy to Improvisation Pedagogy: Solving the Problem of Genre In Beginning Improvisation Training.” Improvisation and music education : beyond the classroom, edited by Ajay Heble and M. Laver. London ; New York: Routledge.

Stewart, Jesse (2019). “Improvisation Pedagogy in Theory and Practice.” Improvisation and music educa- tion : beyond the classroom, edited by Ajay Heble and M. Laver. London ; New York: Routledge.

Berk, Ronald A. and Rosalind H. Trieber (2009). “Whose Classroom is it, Anyway? Improvisation as a Teaching Tool.” Journal on Excellence in College Teaching 20, no. 3: 29-60.