PIANO
PEDAGOGY
FORUM
v. 1, no. 3/September 1, 1998


EDITOR'S FORUM

Scott Price is Assistant Professor of Piano, Piano Pedagogy, and Coordinator of Group Piano at the University of South Carolina. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Bowling Green State University, he has studied with Jane Magrath, Thomas Hecht and Virginia Marks. He has performed at the national conventions of the Music Teachers National Conference, Music Teachers National Association, the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy, and has given performances and seminars at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas TX, the University of Oklahoma Seminar for Piano Teachers, the North Dakota State Music Teachers Convention, the South Carolina State Music Teachers Convention, and the Bowling Green State University Summer Music Institute. He has served as repetiteur with Lyric Opera Cleveland, and as music director for Lyric Opera Cleveland's Educational Outreach program. He has been a faculty member of the Cleveland Music School Settlement and the Bowling Green State University Creative Arts program. Dr. Price is Co-Editor of Piano Pedagogy Forum.

Scott Price
School of Music
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
sprice@mozart.sc.edu
803.777.1870


Playing the Improvisation Game

by Scott Price

The National Association of Schools of Music has mandated that instruction in improvisation become part of the undergraduate curriculum. Most music faculty applaud this decision and then wonder when, where, and how this is going to happen in an undergraduate curriculum that is already overloaded with course work and professional training

Before attempting to make room in the undergraduate degree for training in improvisation skills, it may be useful to reexamine some of the reasons why training in improvisation is so crucial to the technical, musical and artistic development of young people. The historical musical figures that we revere had one skill in common: improvisation. J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and others were all known and documented to have been brilliant improvisers of original music and clever embellishers of existing themes and popular tunes. In the cases of Mozart, Chopin and Liszt, it is known that these persons were creating highly individual and sophisticated improvisations before they fully learned to read music notation. They were also known to have been excellent sightreaders.

Being able to improvise sophisticated and stylized music at the piano at a young age is a marvelous accomplishment; but what does it really accomplish for the pianist at the foundational level? I think it means several things:

  1. These pianists were free from the intellectual pursuit of deciphering a score. They were actually involved in truly experiencing and hearing individual tones, hearing the vibration and sound of intervals, experiencing the overtones in harmony, exploring the aural twists and turns of melody. As the eyes and mind were free from the constraints of the score, the ears were free to fully explore the realm of sound.
  2. The fingers were relating directly to the sounds that the ears were experiencing. The pianist learned that a particular expressive sound was the direct result of a certain kind of movement or combination of movements of the finger.
  3. The eye was free to take the sound combinations of the ear and equate them with the geographical, or geometric, patterns of the keyboard. The hand learned an infinite variety of patterns and explored the relationship of the two different planes of the keyboard.
  4. The pianist learned to be vitally aware of the physical activity and sensual nature of touching the keyboard in a wide variety of ways. Attention was given to the way a finger must move from white key to black key in the production of a melodic phrase. Awareness was also given to the way the hand must stretch, contract and shape itself to a particular melodic pattern. In this fashion, the body learned how to measure musical time in a tangible way thereby creating an exact correlation between aural thought and physical response and measurement.
  5. Music was not taught, but experienced. Problems were encountered and solved in an individual and creative way. The pianist was free to fully explore the individual musical/creative personality and to develop it fully instead of having to reconcile stylistic constructs with an immature self-understanding.
  6. Because these pianists had experienced such a rich and remarkable variety of sounds and patterns and had equated the aural experience with the physical in all of the skills needed to learn music from notation, the learning of music from notation was achieved at an accelerated rate. The teacher had only to point out patterns and musical constructs that the pianist already had experienced. Labels were assigned to those things that the pianist already knew. The notation of the method book or complex notated score became easier to decipher because the student had already aurally and physically experienced types of things found on the page. The teacher had only to put labels on what the students already knew in their ears and in their hearts.
Improvisation at any level of accomplishment gives free reign to the creative spirit and, most importantly, validates the emotional and expressive world of the student in a manner that provides them with a lifetime of personal musical joy and success.

So, when and where can basic training in improvisation be accomplished at the undergraduate level. In institutions where an undergraduate course in keyboard skills is available, a portion of each class can be set aside for work in basic improvisation. Part of the group piano classes for music majors can also be utilized for improvisational training. In the applied piano studio, where the students may not always be ready to perform in the studio class setting after a summer away from school or a break after the holidays, the first two or three studio classes can be an optimal time to introduce students to the basic skills of improvisation.

Lastly, how is someone who does not have much experience with improvisation or with teaching the skill to begin the exploratory experience? I have found the following steps to be wildly successful in aiding students to explore themselves and music through improvisation at the keyboard. Of course, the time in which success may be achieved varies with the age and ability of the student.

  1. Begin with modal scales. They are easier to visualize at first because they occur on the white keys of the piano. Modal scales are also less intimidating as students don't perceive them as being tied to complex and advanced harmonic and form constructs. Modal scales are also very close to the sound constructs that younger students hear on the radio and are therefore part of their life experience. The ear hears something slightly different from major or minor and it is forced to listen more carefully instead of relying on commonly experienced musical formulas.
  2. Begin with Dorian Mode (D-D on the white keys of the piano.) Set up a rhythmic construct such as 3/4 or 4/4 and have the students begin improvising step-wise melodies that begin and end on D. As they begin to sense the tonic pitch, have them split the melody into two parts with the consequence ending on the dominant and the antecedent ending on the tonic pitch.
  3. As the execution of the right hand melody becomes more comfortable, experiment with adding more passing and other non-harmonic tones to the melody.
  4. As the students begin performing their own melodies, experiment with adding the left hand. The left hand can add a D-A perfect fifth that is played with the left hand on the first beat of each measure or rhythmic group. The instructor can then ask the students to begin improvising two-handed pieces that are four, eight or any number of measures long.
  5. Now that the students have a sense of how to create the contours of a melody that utilizes tonic and dominant function, and know how to add a simple left hand harmonic base, they are ready to take their hand position and transfer it into Lydian mode (F-F on the white keys of the piano.) The same process is repeated on this new scale. (It always amazes me how the melodic and rhythmic character of the student improvisations changes dramatically with the introduction of this mode from Dorian.)
  6. Once the students are comfortable with Lydian mode, it is time to start building more complex forms in their improvisations. Experiment with the students improvising an eight measure melody (complete with tonic and dominant functions) in Dorian for the A-section of their piece. For the B-section, have them switch to Lydian mode and improvise another eight measure creation for the B-section. They then move back to Dorian mode for the ending A-section of the piece. Once they have a sense of how to unfold the form of the music, see if they can keep a rhythmic or melodic fragment going throughout the improvisation that will create some cohesiveness in the musical design.
  7. Once the students are comfortable with this process, the limits are infinite. They can introduce left hand accompaniment patterns, hand crossings, canonic and contrapuntal voices, and they can even experiment with different cadence patterns.
  8. To teach more complex musical constructs, it is often beneficial for the instructor to perform the improvisation and have the students perform a counter melody. They almost intuitively respond to the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic creations of the teacher. The teacher can guide the next step of the student's develop through sound and experience as opposed to the sometimes empty and tedious spoken word.
The joy in teaching basic improvisation in this manner is that the students are inspired to go off on their own and create music without constant external motivation from the teacher. I have found that the very young student through the adult student responds very well to this type of creativity. Of course, younger students must go through a more comprehensive and longer period of development before they can construct basic improvisations. However, they experience new sounds in a wonderfully exciting way and always come to the lesson eager to show me the new and neat sound they discovered at the keyboard. This always leads to new discoveries that allow the students to teach themselves with the teacher acting as friend and guide.

Improvisation is certainly a rewarding and creative musical activity. When taught in a carefully planned manner, it can facilitate the comprehension of the entire music curriculum in a way that is not only intellectual, but physical, aural and emotional. After all, isn't the inspired and improvised phrase or musical idea the way all great musical works of art begin their existence? Perhaps we may discover that our students are not only pianists, but composers as well and maybe, they are capable of exploring themselves fully as musicians, as people of worth, and as true and vital individuals who have a contribution to make and a meaningful place in the world.

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© 1998 University of South Carolina School of Music