I’ve always liked the saying that “creativity is a muscle”, and I have definitely found it to be true that the more you practice creativity, the more creative you become. As we ran through the Expansive Creativity framework, I hope you could see how much it’s geared towards practicing creativity as an activity in its own right, as well as encouraging a mindset of creative choices throughout your music-making.
You can incorporate Play-Listen/Listen-Play into everything you do musically. It goes hand-in-hand with Plan-Play-Reflect from Superlearning and Listen-Engage-Express from Playing By Ear, and you’ll find it feeds into the approaches we’ll cover for Songwriting, playing with Expression, and Performance too. Just like with Active Listening, you can get into the habit of making sure your ears are really “switched on” each time you play, and allow that to feed back into your own creativity.
Constraints and Dimensions, and the Playgrounds which are built with them, are a great practice activity in themselves. Practicing Improvisation can be as simple as setting aside time during your music practice to have fun in a Playground or two—or being on the lookout for opportunities which arise during your other practice activities to take things in a creative direction, applying whatever Constraints make sense.
So everything we’ve covered so far has set you up well to practice Improvisation, and continually develop, refine and extend your skills. However, there’s one additional idea which can have a profound impact on your Improvisation, creativity, and musicality.
Improvise To Learn
Up to this point we’ve been discussing “learning to improvise”, and that’s probably what made you want to read this chapter: a desire to learn the skill of Improvisation (or more broadly, creativity in music). All well and good.
But along the way at Musical U, as we developed the H4 model and the methodology to match, and especially when we created materials for Integrated Ear Training and incorporated more “Apply” activities close together with the corresponding “Learn” material and “Practice” exercises, something became very clear. The more we included creative activities, often specifically Improvisation, the faster progress our students had—and the more ease and joy they experienced along the way.
What emerged was a principle of Improvise To Learn.
Remember at the start of this chapter when I said that “creativity is the vehicle, not the destination”? This is how to make that happen.
Rather than thinking of Improvisation as a distinct, separate skill from everything else you do, and instead of seeing it as an aspirational goal you’re working towards, we flip both of those on their head. We treat Improvisation as a method through which we can learn whatever we want to.
For example:
- If we’re working on Ear Training for Solfa, we don’t try to master Solfa in isolation, so that one day we can hopefully use it to improvise. Instead, we use creative improvisational exercises from the very beginning of our Solfa journey (just as we did in Chapter 9: Solfa).
- If we want to improve our sense of Rhythm, we use creative rhythmic exercises (just like in Chapter 13: Rhythm), not just pre-written patterns.
- If we want to truly maximise our learning speed with new pieces, songs, or technique, then even if our goal is to play everything “as written”, we explore the creative opportunities and our own creative ideas along the way (as per the Creative Superlearning idea introduced in Chapter 6: Superlearning).
- If we’re practicing Active Listening then even this seemingly “all input” activity can become a creative one, through the Creative Listening ideas introduced in Chapter 5: Active Listening.
- If we’re focused on Songwriting, composing or arranging, we don’t purely work with “writing” activities, seeing Improvisation as something we might do in a live performance or some separate musical activity. Instead we use improvising to inspire and explore new musical ideas which we can then refine and develop through our writing.
Here’s what’s really exciting about Improvise To Learn: Not only does it level up your Improvisation abilities along the way and bring out your creative instinct, it actually turns out to be one of the fastest and most enjoyable ways to learn! When we bring a playful spirit to our practice, we tend to perform at our best. When we engage the right-side creative brain, our attention is more fully engaged. When we explore and experiment, we find new possibilities and keep interest and motivation high. And when we feel like we’re truly bringing our own creativity to our music-making, everything we play comes to life in a more exciting and rewarding way.
If all that sounds a bit too good to be true, you don’t need to take my word for it. You may have already experienced it a bit for yourself going through previous chapters, or you can start experimenting with it now. It all comes back to the point I mentioned when talking about our Enjoying the Journey Pillar Belief in Chapter 2: Mindset: “Fun is not the opposite of learning”.
I know this can be hard to embrace for many adult music learners, after a lifetime of being told “learning is serious”. Anything fun, playful, or creative can seem like a distraction from “the real thing we’re trying to do”. So like I said, don’t take my word for it. As the spiritual teacher Lester Levenson was fond of saying, “Don’t believe me—but take it for checking.”
I encourage you to find out for yourself how rewarding, enjoyable, and effective the Improvise To Learn approach can be. Let yourself take a week, or two, or three, with the intention of “improv everywhere, improv everything”. Discover for yourself exactly where and how Improvisation fits in best to your musical life and your journey towards your Big Picture Vision.