Before we introduce the Expansive Creativity approach, there are a few important Mindset principles to cover. Without these, any approach or method would be doomed before it began. With them, you’re set up for creative success.
1. Improvising Is Natural
One of the most important points I would love to see you take away from this chapter is that improvising is natural. If you’ve struggled learning to improvise before using the methods mentioned earlier, or if you’ve been too intimidated or overwhelmed by the idea to even try, I realise that “natural” might be far from the word you’d choose for it!
But let’s step back from “pressing buttons on an instrument” for a moment, and think about improvising and creativity more broadly.
We are all improvising, all day every day, in our spoken language. In every conversation, we are hearing something, formulating our own thoughts and ideas about it, and conjuring up words and sentences to express those thoughts and ideas out loud by speaking. We don’t need to carefully prepare in advance for a conversation, and we aren’t reciting lines from a script somebody else gave us beforehand.
As humans we are, inherently, creative beings. The long history of human art demonstrates that clearly—but unfortunately culture has developed so heavily in the direction of hero-worship and idolising the very best artists, it’s led to a false dichotomy of the “creative” people versus everyone else.
This is perhaps at its most extreme in the art of music.
Consider other creative arts:
- Painting, and other visual arts,
- The writing of poetry, novels, and plays,
- Modern forms of art like creating online videos,
- More down-to-earth creative pursuits such as cookery or gardening.
In all these cases it’s true that we do showcase and admire those who reach the very pinnacle of artistic expression (as measured by career success or critical acclaim). And yet, in all those cases, the amateur or hobbyist is still expected and encouraged to express their own creative ideas, constantly making their own aesthetic judgements and creative choices along the way.
Meanwhile, the amateur or hobbyist musician, nine times out of ten, is doing the equivalent of “painting by numbers”. They are handed “an artwork” to reproduce themselves.
That’s not in itself a bad thing. There’s enormous potential artistry in reciting poetry or performing a play, and we’ll explore this art of interpretation in Chapter 17: Expression.
Still, can you imagine the amateur painter being told they didn’t have enough “talent” to ever start from a blank canvas? Or the aspiring poet being told that unless they have a “gift” they are wasting their time? Or if those who cooked or did the gardening were taught that only professionals could make decisions about what to add or remove, or which ingredients or seeds were appropriate?
Music is a unique form of art, but hopefully these comparisons help demonstrate both how natural we see creativity as being in other contexts, and frankly how odd it is that we’ve ended up with a musical culture that sees improvisation as either a matter of “vocab” and “rules”, or something restricted to the gifted few.
The good news is that it’s never too late, and it does not need to take years or decades of “woodshedding” to start improvising compelling, satisfying music that is in your own unique voice.
When we ran our Foundations of a Musical Mind course for the first time, one of my absolute favourite parts was seeing how in Module 1, week 1—literally within a few days of starting—musicians were able to start improvising. You may have met the simple “Garden Gate” rhythmic improvisation exercise they used in Chapter 13: Rhythm.
Even though they weren’t yet playing mind-blowing solos at lightning speed on their instrument, this simple experience of making their own musically-satisfying creative choices produced a kind of “Oh my gosh, I’m actually improvising!” reaction that was an utter joy to see. And from there, not only was adding note pitches just a small additional step, that initial identity shift of “I can be musically creative” changed everything for them, forever.
In the next section we’ll talk more about adopting that identity of “being creative”. In Chapter 2: Mindset we introduced the three Musical Cores, and the idea that you may relate strongly to the desire to express your own creative ideas in music—or it may just be one small part of your own Musical Core. Either way, Improvisation is an unmatched skill and activity to develop your creativity, and allow the creative musical ideas you have inside to start flowing out for yourself and others to enjoy.
2. Expanding Your Natural Creativity
Since creativity is a natural part of our humanity, in this chapter our goal is not to “make you creative”, but rather to:
A. Show you how to express your musical creativity
B. Empower you to gradually increase how creative you are
That second part is hard to define or measure, but with a view of “creative freedom”, we’re really talking about how freely you can express your creativity and how free those creative ideas can be. Just like in Chapter 14: Playing By Ear, talking about the “play-by-ear spectrum”, we can think of creativity as a spectrum. At one end you are only able to express a limited range of creative musical ideas. At the other you feel utterly free to imagine and express anything you dream of.
Earlier we called out the two traditional methods of teaching Improvisation: Rule- or pattern-based approaches, and vocabulary-based approaches. Although these traditions have a lot to answer for in terms of how limited and robotic the aspiring improviser has tended to end up feeling, it is important to make clear that neither is “bad” or to be avoided. If our goal is to improvise freely, creatively, and have it feel like you, we do need to go beyond those “handed down from on high” approaches. However, any time and energy you’ve already invested in either will actually pay off much more when combined with the Expansive Creativity approach you’ll learn in this chapter.
Similarly, you don’t need the “building blocks” introduced in Part II of the book. If you haven’t yet gone through those chapters you can certainly dive straight into this one. However, since the Expansive Creativity approach is very focused on using your own ears to make creative choices, those Ear Training building blocks will enrich your experience and help liberate you creatively much faster.
3. Creative Contexts
Before we dive further into creativity and Improvisation, let’s set the scene a little. Part of what limits the traditional approaches to Improvisation is that they are overly-focused on a particular musical context.
For example, rather than teaching the aspiring jazz improviser how to get in touch with their creative instinct and then channel that through their instrument, they are taught the music theory details of a particular jazz standard and the “rules” for which notes are appropriate, or the specific revered solos of the past from which they should memorise licks, riffs and runs.
Since the Expansive Creativity approach is focused primarily on you as a musical creator, you’ll find that the techniques and exercises in this chapter can actually be applied across a wide range of creative contexts, including:
- Interpretation of written music, for example in Classical music. Although “improvising” may seem anathema or verboten in the Classical world, in fact all the great composers of the past were expected to be accomplished improvisers too, and there is great creative opportunity when playing music “as written”—something we’ll explore more specifically in Chapter 17: Expression.
- Song-based improvisation. For example, playing a guitar solo in a rock song, taking a solo in a jazz trio playing a standard, playing along at a local blues jam session, etc.
- Idiomatic, i.e. matching a certain style or genre. This brings advantages by hinting at what’s likely to be appealing to the listener and what creative choices you can make to fit those expectations (or defy them!) but can also be taken too far, as with the rule- and vocab-based approaches already mentioned.
- Non-idiomatic or “free” improvisation. For example sitting down at the end of a long work day with your instrument, and just seeing what flows out.
- Improvise-to-learn. This is an activity, habit, or really a wide-reaching mindset, which redefines improvisation from “a thing you learn to do, and then do” to being a tool you can use to help you learn whatever musical material or skill you’re focused on.
- Songwriting and composing. Although often seen as a distinct skill or activity, as you’ll discover in this chapter, it’s more accurate to see “writing music” as something like “improvising on paper” and “improvising” as “composing music on-the-fly”.
All of these different musical contexts bring their own conventions, expectations, and implications, but the same Expansive Creativity approach we’ll be learning can set you free to create in any and all of them.
4. Agency and Authority
“There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.”
Thelonius Monk
“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
Miles Davis
“There’s no such thing as a wrong note.”
Art Tatum
Why is it that Improvisation can seem so intimidating and overwhelming to the average musician?
We know that it’s partly the Talent Myth at work, making it seem like a magical out-of-reach skill because it’s simply not taught in an effective, empowering way.
But it’s also something much more fundamental. If all your experience in learning music has been based on playing from notation or step-by-step tutorials, the chances are you have become firmly entrenched in a mindset of “right and wrong notes”. Your goal is typically to “avoid mistakes” and “get the notes right when you play”.
That is a very good thing, and Chapter 6: Superlearning will set you up for greater success in pursuing that goal.
But it comes at a price: it massively inhibits your creativity, to the point where most musicians feel terrified by the idea of choosing the notes themselves. What if you play something and it (shock, horror!) sounds bad?!
If we are to have any success in learning to improvise, we need to—at least temporarily—ditch the mindset of “right vs. wrong”.
Instead, we need to start focusing on our personal judgement. Our aesthetic preference. Whether we have played something which sounded good and pleased us, or not. For example, starting to consider that “interesting” is better than “right”. “Joyful” is more important than “precise”. “Adventure” is more desirable than “perfection”.
To put it bluntly, when it comes to creativity and Improvisation, there are no mistakes. Only choices.
Easy to say—but if you’ve spent a lifetime focused on “not getting it wrong”, it’s not necessarily so easy to make that mindset shift!
The key is for us to restore to you two essential powers: agency and authority.
Agency simply means “you get to choose what to do”. This is perhaps what makes the greatest difference, and lets you escape from that feeling of being a musical robot.
If you think about your musical life right now, how much agency would you say you have? No doubt you choose some things, like when to practice and how much to practice. You might (or might not!) be the one who decides what pieces or songs you’ll work on. When working on one of those pieces of music, how much decision-making are you doing? If you’re like most music-learners, the answer is “not much”. You’re trying your hardest to “get it right”, and so the only decision-making is bundled up in “how can I make this more right?”
Contrast that with the musician who can just “pick up and play”. Who can improvise something entirely by scratch, or glance at a chord chart or lead sheet and play their own arrangement or interpretation. The musician who clearly has an ownership of the music and seems able to do anything they want to. What they’re demonstrating isn’t just a set of skills—it’s also that agency, that they have given themselves permission to choose and make decisions for themselves.
This goes hand-in-hand with the second power: inner authority. Because once you’re allowing yourself to make more choices, you immediately hit up against a question of “how do I know what choices to make?”
Authority means saying “That’s up to me”.
Instead of looking to sheet music, or a teacher, or “the way things have always been done” to tell you what’s right and what you “should” do, when you take on inner authority you’re choosing to believe that what matters most is what you like. What you think sounds good, or right. What pleases you, and perhaps an audience you want to perform for.
These two things together—agency, meaning always giving yourself the choice, and inner authority, meaning you decide for yourself which choice is right or best—these two are what will liberate you and give you the opportunity to get in touch with your creative instinct.
Just remember: it’s not “I will develop my creative instinct and then one day I’ll feel agency and authority”. It is a bit chicken-and-egg, and there is a feedback loop. The more you practice creativity, the more agency and authority will become second nature to you, and the more agency and authority you gain, the more creative you will feel and be.
But you need to first open yourself up with an initial willingness to step into agency and authority. And that is simply a choice.
These two together ultimately produce the dramatic mindset shift we’re going for: moving away from the idea of “right” and “wrong” notes.
In the sheet music world, your highest potential is to perfectly reproduce what’s written on the page, and perhaps add a bit of interpretation or flair to the way you reproduce it. If you play a different note pitch, or don’t play a note at exactly the right moment to match the written rhythm—that note is “wrong” and we’re taught we should feel bad and guilty because we’ve made a mistake.
When you step into agency and authority, that whole idea becomes nonsense. There is, absolutely, still a notion of “better or worse”, but that is 100% up to your judgement.
This is exciting—because it’s what lets you use your own musical taste as a feedback loop to hone your creative instinct.
| Almut Says… I was at a vocal improvisation workshop and I was improvising with notes from the minor pentatonic scale over a drone [a continuously-sustained note]. The facilitator then asked me to start using notes from outside the scale. To slide some note up or down a semitone. At first, this sounded very strange and irritating. I kept repeating the “wrong” note in this context and it was less irritating each time I sang it, up to the point where it seemed to fit in nicely with my improvisation. It can feel scary to be creative and to explore—but don’t all new things feel strange at first yet can quickly become a normal part of your life? |
One final remark before we move on to the Expansive Creativity framework itself: your musical taste is just as good and important as anybody else’s. Arguably much more so. And the most exciting thing about taking an Expansive Creativity approach is that your taste is all you need! The whole framework simply helps you level up your ability to express what your taste tells you is “good” music.