Leaping in to Teaching Improvisation

As I was growing up and learning to play the saxophone, I got taught very little about improvisation until a little bit in high school and then some in college. For me I was always so afraid of playing wrong notes that it was always a terrifying experience for me, especially when reading music was so easy for me. Whenever I asked for help, I got an overload of theory of which I amazingly could process but never fast enough on the fly to be able to feel comfortable to improvise.

Since improvising was never an easy, fun, or successful activity for me, trying to teach kids to improvise is even more intimidating than doing it because it brings up all the scars from my past plus the anxiety of actually having to do it with kids listening. Never the less; knowing that teaching kids to allow themselves to be creative is an integral part of music education, I have taken the leap.

I started with a project with one of my students who sent me a YouTube video of a pop tune from an Indian movie. It was a pretty simple tune, right at his level, and it used only I and V chords for harmony. After the student had learned the tune itself that I had written out for him, I had the student just practice making up rhythms and then create melodies with those rhythms using a pentatonic scale. He was able to do this but he said it wasn’t the most fun. Using Garage Band software, I created a backing track for the tune that he could practice with as well as some call and response melodies for him to practice with at home. When I brought in the Garage Band tracks for him to use, he said “Oh now this is fun.” Here is what I have figured out so far that is really important to teaching young kids improvisation.

• Keep it simple: using very simple parameters such as only using a pentatonic scale or certain notes of  a scale or chord  is very important so that the task does not seem overwhelming and too scary or complex. This also means that using helpers like pre-determined rhythms is helpful for students to focus on one element of the music at a time.
• Always be a model: This is the hardest part for me as it terrifies me because of the experiences in my past. The call and response melodies seem to be key for home practice. They allow the student to practice with you while at home even when your not there. I don’t even worry about the student playing the exact melody that I recorded although he is very aware that skill can and should be developed. Having the student create his own melodies using your rhythms not only allows him to gain the confidence of creating melodies but also eventually sparks his own creativity to create his own rhythms. There is something about having the presence of the teacher (even if it be on CD) that gives a student comfort in what he/she is doing.
• Always relate exercises back to the musical product: Students may not find improvising all that fun in and of itself  but if they can see how it works in a song in performance they will see it differently. For example, when introducing the tracks I started with playing through the whole tune, improvising and all, for my student at the beginning and then moved to the call and response tracks. The students need to see the product to continue the process of learning to improvise.

I can't express my terror enough in doing this project. It brings back every improvisation horror from my childhood. The reality is that I want to be able to improvise and so by forcing myself to teach it, there is no better way to get over these fears. I imagine using more of the same techniques down the road with this student, and am also looking to expand to a few other students already.