Abstract
Collective free music improvisation (CFMI) develops musicians’ relationships, identity, and communication skills and engages musicians from different cultures by tapping into their diversities in the music-making process. It also develops an open attitude toward working with children’s creative potential—by paving the way for open, egalitarian teaching approaches. However, teachers may not know how to incorporate it in their music classes due to the lack of teacher preparation in its practice and pedagogy. This interest article offers a theoretical basis for engaging preservice music teachers (PMTs) in CFMI learning in a teacher preparation course—by drawing on research and the author’s experiences facilitating CFMI classes. In combination with theory, pedagogical strategies that develop PMTs’ free improvisational skills based on a socio-communicative framework are described. These strategies offer practical pathways to introducing free improvisation to PMTs that could motivate and enable them to bring the practice into their future music classrooms.
Keywords
Freeing preservice music teachers (PMTs) to improvise and to teach free improvisation can be a daunting endeavor due to the musical practice’s volatile nature and open-ended learning goals. In this interest article, I describe the collective free music improvisation (CFMI) course I conducted in my institution. It was conceived to expand PMTs’ pedagogical competencies to engage school students who are culturally and musically diverse through collaborative free improvisation. CFMI was selected as the vehicle for this engagement due to its inherently inclusive and socio-communicative nature, which potentially develops musicians’ relationships, identities, and communication skills. Despite these educational benefits, teachers may not have the required competencies to incorporate it in their music classes. In the following sections, I will define CFMI, explore its educational value, and present pedagogical strategies to develop associated competencies.
Free Improvisation—Definitions
Music improvisation takes many forms, but is generally characterized by spontaneous musical expression, individualization, and interpersonal interactions (Azzara & Grunow, 2006). Engaging in music improvisation activities may lead to the development of musical creativity, skills, and understanding (Azzara, 2002; Delia-Pietra & Campbell, 1995). Among improvisational practices, free improvisation is arguably the most open and unbounded. Unlike idiomatic improvisation, which is “mainly concerned with the expression of an idiom—such as jazz, flamenco or baroque” (Bailey, 1992, p. xi), free improvisation is idiom-free, or perhaps more accurately, idiom-fluid. Its fluidity allows for a diverse hybrid of styles and idioms crafted with whatever tools, skills, and experiences the improviser has, who may vary styles and techniques at will in response to real-time performance situation (Ng, 2014). All rules of performance (e.g., grammars, sounds, styles) are possible and created collectively and spontaneously (Costa & Schaub, 2013). Compared with free improvisation, the latitude of freedom afforded players in musical traditions such as jazz is more limited due to obligations to the traditions’ appended technical and stylistic demands. In the absence of such obligations in free improvisation, the spectrum of permissiveness in terms of allowable styles (or lack of), amalgamation of styles, and construction of a personal style to express oneself from moment to moment is the most extensive (Ng, 2021).
Musicians who freely improvise together must grapple with ways to exercise their musical freedom while constantly making real-time attempts to communicate with each other and sustain group musical congruence. Through real-time interactions and the changing contexts of music-making, their musical material emerges and evolves. They enjoy a greater endeavor toward freedom through “collective discovery in a communal environment and a mode of personal liberation made possible through cooperation and mutual respect” (Borgo, 2002, p. 19). CFMI may therefore be defined as a socio-communicative endeavor, where improvisers express themselves freely in response to stimuli received from a collective sociocultural performance context (Ng, 2021).
Unlike solo free improvisation, collective free improvisers have to additionally contend with the social context, preferences, and identities of fellow improvisers (Wilson & MacDonald, 2016). As such, the improvisational freedom that they exercise is the liberty to invite others to respond to their musical stimuli, and decide when, how, or whether to respond to others’ musical stimuli. In this context, CFMI is a “natural human predisposition that can lead to immediate forms of musical communication” and develops social relationships and self-expression (Siljamäki & Kanellopoulos, 2020). This conceptualization puts forth the notion that the essence of free music improvisation lies not in the “chord progression, harmony, or the predefined syntax, but rather the interplay between sound and silence, the feel and texture of the sound, and the ways in which performers respond to one another’s musical stimuli” (Niknafs, 2013, p. 30). As a result, musicians from diverse musical traditions may come together and find their musical paths through spontaneous interactive decisions during group performance. They prioritize understanding each other and negotiating through their differences (e.g., various types of musical tunings, differing socio-cultural-musical contexts) to co-construct a communal soundscape in real time, making the experience an immediate, processual, and social one (Ng, 2021).
Value of CFMI
Conceptualizing CFMI as a socio-communicative endeavor has profound implications in music classes where the ethnic, class, and musical background spectrum is broad. As CFMI demands communication, social interactions, and inclusivity, it enables musicians to deploy varied musical assets for dialogical exchanges. Through these dialogues, they may negotiate and reconcile their differences by developing new musical and personal behaviors, as illustrated in the following research.
In a case study of the Multicultural Education and Counseling for the Arts (MECA) Improvisation Ensemble, Lange (2011) discovered that musicians diverse in ethnicity, class, and musical styles became more confident and reassessed their positions in other musical activities through social interactions experienced in CFMI. They became more open to embracing music outside their own and fellow musicians of different ethnicities and classes. They were also better able to follow unconventional paths and perform “to the full capacity of their beings” (Lange, 2011, p. 8) which they found were difficult to achieve in other musical settings.
Schyff’s (2013) examination of his experiences in a large free improvisation ensemble revealed that the rich myriad perspectives and responses generated through the communicative dynamics of the free improvisation ensemble drew upon differences in the members’ cultures, styles, personalities, and improvisational approaches. In the ensemble performances, the medium for musical exchanges was nonidiomatic to allow the American and Canadian musicians from different musical backgrounds to meet on neutral grounds and strive for some level of shared understanding. In so doing, they were propelled to develop new musical ways of expression to interact with each other. For instance, a metal guitarist may discover a new set of dynamic interplay through struggles to improvise with a vocalist trained in the South Indian Carnatic tradition.
In a study of a musical quartet called Electric Cowboy Cacophony (Edwards, 2010) comprising musicians coming from Country, Bluegrass, Rock, Western Classical backgrounds and a performer using laptop with MIDI Wind Controller and saxophones, their musical encounter was made possible only through CFMI. Each individual’s cross-genre, cultural, and transnational elements became a resource for musical interactions and defined their sound world.
Findings from these studies revealed how communication, social interactions, and inclusivity foregrounded in CFMI potentially encourage the incorporation of wide-ranging musical assets for reflexive exchanges between performers who are musically and culturally diverse. These interactive exchanges via CFMI potentially transform oneself and others by equaling the unequal conversations among diverse musicians. These findings align with research that revealed CFMI’s potential to develop communication skills (Kanellopoulos, 2007; Sutton, 2001; Thomson, 2008), social relationships (Sansom, 2007), and mutual understanding (Canonne & Aucouturier, 2016; Pras et al., 2017), and to propel self-transformation and discovery (Burnard, 2002; Burrows, 2004; Kanellopoulos, 1999). These learnings are foregrounded as a result of CFMI’s socio-communicative nature. Unlike other musical practices, CFMI requires immersive real-time communication and interactions to co-construct music and sustain musical congruence due to its instability in the absence of any fixed musical conventions.
As CFMI taps into musical assets that may reference multiple extant musical traditions, it could be perceived as a practice without musical authenticity. However, all musical traditions are evolving, nonstatic, and subject to cross-pollination in our increasingly globalized world. Hence, rather than artificial, CFMI propels the natural evolution and amalgamation of extant musical traditions through real-time socio-musical exchanges (Ng, 2021).
CFMI in Music Teacher Education
The profound implications of CFMI in music classes where learners are musically and ethnically diverse warrant its incorporation in teacher education. By acquiring the skills to collaboratively construct music through real-time communications and negotiations, PMTs may develop an approach to creative music-making that complements more formal methods of instruction, such as traditional large ensembles, music theory, or formal composition instruction. Free improvisation provides an alternative to a “one-way” and “autocratic” teaching approach representative of traditional conservatory models due to its inclusive and democratic processes (Hickey, 2015), where everyone can make music with anyone using any musical assets at their disposal. For instance, a tabla player may freely improvise by hitting the drums randomly to generate random, agitated rhythms to communicate a sense of urgency. A violin player who understands that urgency may then respond with restless pizzicatos. The music evolves through these dialogical exchanges as players focus on the conversation rather than adherence to musical traditions. This process is possible due to the predominantly socio-communicative nature of CFMI—the absence of fixed musical rules necessitates players to rely on real-time communication to sustain musical congruence. PMTs’ repertoire of skills to engage musically diverse students may hence be broadened through the practice.
Learning CFMI also contributes positively to the pedagogic preparation of PMTs in three areas: autonomy, developing the self, and developing an open attitude toward children and their music (Wright & Kanellopoulos, 2010). In free improvisation, players have the autonomy to create individual responses based on their personal musical styles, technical repertoire, and preferences that nevertheless sustain group musical congruence. The process cultivates their individual and group musical identity without the fear experienced in skill-based competitive contexts. As PMTs develop their personal voices by experimenting and interacting with each other without adhering to musical norms, they may learn that, opposed to preconceptions acquired in conservatory education, even an untrained and curious child may create meaningful music without first acquiring musical rules. This discovery may encourage PMTs to develop an open attitude toward working with children’s creative potential, paving the way for more open teaching approaches, such as developing their musical voices through socio-musical interactions, rather than by learning musical norms.
Despite the importance of free improvisation, its faint presence in schools is notable. Improvisation occupies a relatively small space in most school music curricula, which, among other factors, is attributed to teachers’ lack of pedagogical competence and practical experience in improvisation (Larsson & Georgii-Hemming, 2019). Free improvisation, as a type of music improvisation, is even less evident in schools, attributed to a lack of practitioner texts and research that delineate practical ways to conduct free improvisation lessons (Hickey, 2015). Compounding the issue is its open and loose nature, which challenges teachers’ musical and pedagogical abilities to incorporate it in their classes to achieve meaningful outcomes. As Hickey (2009) suggested, free improvisation cannot be taught in the traditional sense—it is a practice that is enabled through coaching, facilitation, stimulation, and experiential immersion. Practical texts that describe how this may actually be done will inform educators keen to bring the practice into their classrooms.
In this interest article, I seek to fill this gap by addressing the following question: How can PMTs be coached to acquire free improvisational competencies so that they may bring the practice into their future music classes? Hickey (2015) noted that each free improvisation pedagogue possesses a personal repertoire of teaching tools and musical vocabulary to guide free improvisational performances. These tools, if documented, provide useful pedagogical references for facilitating free improvisation classes. It is in this context that I describe the pedagogical strategies adopted in a CFMI course I conduct for PMTs in National Institute of Education, Singapore. These strategies first germinated from an autoethnographic study of myself as a self-taught free improviser seeking my personal musical voice away from music for competitions, exams, and showcasing (Ng, 2014). The strategies developed over my eight years of experience conducting free improvisation courses in the teacher college and were further expanded through my PhD study, which examined the learning experiences of PMTs in my free improvisation course (Ng, 2021). I acknowledge that there is no single, fixed method to implementing free improvisation in a curriculum. The practical strategies, supported by teaching experience and theories, simply open pathways for teacher educators keen to incorporate free improvisation in their courses, recognizing that these are framed within a unique set of personal, social, and curricula contexts.
The Free Improvisation Program
The CFMI course in Singapore National Institute of Education is a compulsory program for PMTs in their fourth and final year. They acquire CFMI competencies by experiencing collective free improvisation and developing improvisational skills through socio-communicative strategies introduced to them in the course. With the help of these strategies, they also attempt to reconcile their different musical backgrounds by exploring ways to tap into their differences as assets (rather than impediments) to improvise collaboratively. These differences arise from elective courses they attend in college such as Band, Choir, Chinese, Malay, Gamelan, and Indian music ensembles, personal music experiences such as pop band, and community and religious music-cultural groups. For instance, they explore and experience how a Western musician with a propensity for Jazz interacts and improvises with a percussion instrumentalist with both pop and Indian musical background. Based on these learning experiences, they submit improvisation lesson plans for their future music students that adopt socio-communicative strategies acquired in the course. These future students will be musically diverse too, as they are exposed to different musical cultures and practices outside the general music classroom. Such exposure includes school music co-curricular options such as Choir, Lion Dance, and Dikir Barat, private instruction in various instruments, community music-cultural groups, and informal pop band groups.
Facilitating Free Improvisation as a Socio-Communicative Endeavor
The course comprises six weekly sessions of three hours each. The course content draws on the core of free improvisation—socio-musical communications, by immersing PMTs in real-time human engagement and interaction. Immersion is achieved through a series of facilitative socio-communicative strategies described in subsequent sections. It might seem paradoxical to provide concrete approaches to free improvisation if it is an art of ephemeral encounters. As Lewis advised, “throw them in the deep end and work with what naturally happens” as there is no right way to do it (Borgo, 2005, p. 9). However, PMTs’ feedback for the CFMI course over the years has suggested that besides throwing them in the deep end for self-discovery, explicit presentation of ways to communicate and interact with fellow players is also helpful. The strategies served as hooks they could latch onto when they were at a loss about how to proceed with their musical conversation (Ng, 2021). They could also adopt, adapt, or discard the strategies at will based on their learning needs and preferences. Accordingly, I have adopted a more balanced view by introducing the methods of communication in free improvisation while also providing unstructured, self-directed learning spaces for PMTs to explore free improvisation in their own groups, where they may experiment with these strategies freely. The strategies, skills that facilitate the socio-communicative experience embedded in CFMI, can be categorized into three socio-communicative aspects—personal musical language, socio-musical interactions, and shared understanding (Ng, 2021). These aspects serve as the pedagogical framework for the free improvisation course.
The six weekly sessions are split into three pairs of two sessions. Each pair is spent on exploring each of the three aspects. Following the introduction of an aspect, for example, socio-musical interactions, PMTs form groups and explore free improvisation on their own for an hour or more while focusing on developing the aspect. While one enabling aspect is explored in a session, it is with the understanding that all three aspects are interconnected and occur simultaneously in real time; improvisers need to tap into their musical vocabulary to interact with fellow improvisers, and they also need shared understanding of fellow improvisers’ musical codes of performance to interact successfully. The theoretical separation is intended as a pedagogical strategy to allow PMTs to focus on a basket of related concepts, for example, those pertaining to shared understanding, to develop their improvisation. In other words, it is a method of foregrounding a particular aspect of free improvisation for development, while acknowledging that other aspects continue to function at an intuitive level in the background. In the following sections, I elaborate on each of the three aspects of CFMI and the accompanying strategies.
Develop Personal Musical Language
To converse musically, improvisers need to tap into a wide repertoire of personalized musical vocabulary (e.g., musical motifs, rhythmic patterns, harmonic progressions) to express themselves freely and respond appropriately to fellow players’ musical stimuli. They need to learn to use the repertoire fluently in different contexts and acquire new language once the current language has achieved a level of congruence (Bailey, 1992). To help PMTs discover and develop their personal language, they are thrown in the deep end at the start of the course with an activity called, “Search for Your Personal Voice” (Table 1, Activity 1). In this activity, PMTs explore free improvisation through deep listening and reacting to themselves and the environment. They do this individually in separate spaces, where they can be comfortable exploring and finding their musical voice away from scrutiny. This being their first encounter with free improvisation, they are reminded to just play and feel, to spontaneously narrate their thoughts and ideas through sounds, and not be critical about the outcome.
Activities for Developing Personal Musical Language.
Among the suggestions to aid their self-discovery, the stepping-stone concept is notable. It requires PMTs to treat any sound they make, even a random sound, simply as a note that leads to the next, without judging its qualities with reference to existing musical conventions. Rather, they are to simply let the sounds find their way as they immerse in their thoughts and emotions, which releases inhibitions and propels PMTs to create and invent with forward-looking imagination and momentum. This conceptualization embraces music-making as a trail of no mistakes, and a celebration of the many varied musical pathways that both teacher and student can take (Higgins & Campbell, 2010). After the self-explorations, PMTs take turns performing for each other to elicit feedback on the qualities of their individual voices, paying attention to the thoughts, emotions, and images evoked through sounds and techniques used. This sharing has made the PMTs realize the direct relationship between their thoughts, emotions, and the sounds they create, which made their improvisation all the more meaningful and relevant to themselves. In addition, they note a certain coherence in their music despite being free, as the musical structures emerge as direct reflections of their real time thinking processes.
Following this, PMTs form groups to explore and expand their personal musical languages in different group performance contexts through Activities 2 and 3 (Table 1). In Activity 3, musicians experiment with musical responses within constraints without concern for results. Canonne’s (2018) study of CFMI ensembles at work revealed improvisers using this approach to force themselves to take more risks and play in ways that they would not have in more comfortable situations, which could potentially expand their music vocabulary. With the guidelines and video examples in Table 1 that illustrate the unlimited forms free improvisation may take, the PMTs were generally able to draw on their existing musical competencies and preferences to improvise alone and in groups, with little inhibitions.
Develop Socio-Musical Interactions
When PMTs have established a certain comfort level with their musical voices, they are introduced to socio-musical interactions as the next enabling aspect of CFMI. In the absence of any established rules, collective free improvisation is mostly guided by an ethic of collaboration and interaction (Costa & Schaub, 2013). Each player decides how, what, and when to play in response to fellow players’ socio-musical stimuli. The process resembles a musical dialogue, as the sounds are an accumulation of communicative interactions between players (Ford, 1995). To enable fluent conversations, free improvisers need to learn to understand and respond appropriately to each other’s socio-musical codes of interaction. To illustrate, if Player A imitates Player B’s idea to signal agreement, or plays something contrasting to indicate disagreement, Player B will need to pick up on Player A’s intention and decide how best to respond. Besides allowing interactions to develop naturally and intuitively during free improvisation, strategies are provided to help PMTs develop them in a more concerted manner. The following section consolidates these strategies, presented to the PMTs as invitations to explore interactions during group practice sessions.
Work With Smaller Relationships First
In the beginning, PMTs may be uncomfortable working with large-group interactions. In this case, they may work in smaller groups. They could perform in pairs to manage smaller, less complex interactions, before transitioning into bigger groups with larger working relationships.
Explore Monk’s Eight Interactive Strategies
To give PMTs concrete examples of ways to interact, Augusto Monk’s (2013) eight interactional strategies for collaborative improvisation may be introduced. He delineated strategies that conceptualize collective improvisation as a form of interactionism, where socio-musical meanings are determined by group interactions. They comprise Copying, Adapting, Contrasting, Punctuating, Highlighting, Supporting, Signposting, and Allowing, which are different ways of interacting and responding to each other when improvising. PMTs in the CFMI course have found these strategies useful in making their musical conversations more varied and interesting. In a class of diverse learners, these interactional strategies can be deployed regardless of the musical languages used, and can hence serve as the means to negotiate musical differences.
Encourage a Democratic System of Passing Authority
A key aspect of interactive transactions are constant shifts in power and authority as players negotiate between being leaders driving performances and supporters complementing the leader (Thomson, 2008). Pedagogically, supporters will need to learn to acknowledge and appropriately respond to the leader’s musical idiom, and the latter will need to learn how and when to relinquish the leadership role. Accordingly, PMTs could be encouraged to take turns to lead and support to allow for democratic musical conversations, where everyone’s thoughts and ideas are given due. Turn-taking will allow shy and passive players room to lead conversations, and domineering players to take the backseat.
Allow Fellow Players Time to Respond to Musical Cues
To evoke a comfortable conversational environment, PMTs could be encouraged to provide sufficient time for fellow players to respond to their musical ideas. This could help players who require time to respond, or who tend to listen more and play rarely, to contribute more. Performances may be framed as open invitations to contribute, where no one is pressured to play until they are ready. PMTs may practice giving each other time to respond by establishing orderly turn-taking through a call-and-response system, so that they learn to allocate time to listen and respond to each other.
Use Simple Musical Ideas to Encourage Interactions
To reduce technical hurdles to responding to each other when interacting, PMTs may improvise with simple musical motifs, ostinatos, and pedals. As such musical ideas are easy to perform, remember, and understand, deploying them in performances can be helpful to players who lack technical competence or opt to use instruments they are unfamiliar with, allowing them to contribute to their groups regardless of differences in technical skills. Since technical demands are low, they may also better focus on ways to interact and respond to fellow improvisers’ musical cues.
Play With Experimental Techniques
Another strategy that lowers technical hurdles is to perform with experimental techniques, such as cluster notes, glissandos, pitch-bending, and multiphonics on the tuba. Other possibilities include using found sounds and body percussion. Such techniques can help PMTs focus more on interacting with all the sound possibilities they can conjure spontaneously without the baggage of stylistic, technical, and tonal requirements. These experimental sounds will not sound out of place, and will instead meld into a field of atonality and dissonance when used by all players.
Listen and Respond to Different Players at Different Times
As PMTs become more attuned to group interactions, they may be encouraged to listen and respond to different players at different points in time. When this happens, there will be no clear leader during performances as everyone will be listening and responding to different players at different time points. Besides helping them achieve group cohesiveness through complex, intertwined interactions, this interactive strategy allows for democratic contributions where no one dominates the conversation, and where all players are given a fair chance to be heard and responded to.
Consciously Challenge Each Other Through Interactions
As PMTs become more experienced and comfortable improvising with their group members, stagnation may set in. In this case, they may be encouraged to disrupt existing, rooted interactive patterns by consciously challenging each other during performance to make new accidental discoveries. For example, they could spontaneously play a series of random chords to challenge group members to respond differently to each chord, or disrupt existing performance patterns with a sound that is totally out of place to see what happens next. By being challenged to respond to disruptive sounds and situations, PMTs may discover new ways of interacting, and in this way rejuvenate their musical conversations.
Develop Shared Understanding
To interact effectively and resolve issues that may arise from their differences, improvisers need to familiarize themselves with the characteristics of their improvisation group including their personalities, instruments, and musical languages (Canonne, 2018). Over time, familiarization develops shared cultural knowledge and practices between players, which enable their musical exchanges to be fluid and understood by everyone (Sawyer, 2006). The established common understandings help to coordinate their musical actions into a congruent performance. The following section presents strategies that facilitate the development of shared understanding.
Establish Shared Socio-Musical Codes of Interaction
PMTs may establish a shared repertoire of socio-musical codes of interaction with shared meanings to sustain congruent musical conversations and avoid misunderstandings. Examples of such codes include the leader nodding at another player to indicate the passing of leadership, playing a repetitive motif to rally fellow players around the motif, or combining a crescendo with accelerando to indicate the transition to a faster section. These codes signal certain intentions and predict possible responses to improve group communications. The coherence of a performance will depend on the level of shared understanding of the codes used. After presenting this concept to the PMTs, I will suggest that they incorporate it in their performances more consciously. Following this, I discuss how some of these codes facilitate their conversations in their subsequent performances.
Set General Context
PMTs may form shared intentionality by creating a shared performance context that is mutually meaningful (Kanellopoulos, 1999). During practice sessions, they are encouraged to discuss establishing a common mood, narrative, motif, tonality, harmonic structure, or musical form before a performance, such that it provides the shared intention and framework within which they can freely improvise. The context should not be overly specific, such as performing strictly to a detailed storyline, which can constrain musical freedom and expression. Also, preset contexts are only starting points; they should be allowed to evolve over time based on the developing musical dialogues and interactions.
Physical Positioning
PMTs may explore different physical positionings and establish a common understanding of how these positions impact their interactions. During practice sessions, they are encouraged to move around with their instruments (if portable) and observe how their movements and positions affect their performance relationships. For example, they may form a circle to create a common transactional space in the center, and anyone who wishes to lead the conversation will walk into the central space. Constructing shared interactional spaces for performance may provide opportunities for equal collaborations and contributions.
However, too much shared understanding should be avoided as it could prevent dynamic exchanges between players and result in predictable and mundane music-making (Canonne & Aucouturier, 2016). Interactive differences are necessary to generate interesting conversations, which occur when players contribute diverse perspectives through dialogical musical exchanges in unpredictable performance situations. Accordingly, PMTs could be reminded to avoid excessive pre-established understandings and working solutions, and move toward actively contributing to a shared but evolving context of music-making to attain new understandings and relationships.
Post-Performance Review
At the end of every session, each group puts up one final performance as a consolidation of their accumulated learnings. Other groups serve as audience and share their observations post-performance, focusing on the performance’s salient qualities, in particular, the socio-musical interactions and personal vocabularies adopted to facilitate communications and self-expression. These observations then prompt performers’ sharing of the processes that lead to the qualities described. Based on these peer and self-assessments, they discuss future ways to develop their CFMI skills.
To enhance this ongoing learning process, I provide them guiding questions based on the three enabling aspects of CFMI to frame their learning within the socio-communicative framework (Table 2). Where possible, their performances will also be video recorded for self-assessments. PMTs’ feedback indicated that this is useful because they were able to detect and analyze performance nuances as observers, which they were unable to while fully immersed as performers (Ng, 2021). These observations helped them create future pathways to develop their improvisation through progress-tracking.
Facilitative Questions for Developing CFMI.
Note. CFMI = collective free music improvisation.
Implications and Final Word
In this interest article, practical suggestions with theoretical foundations are provided for facilitating CFMI courses in music teacher preparation programs for music teacher educators interested to consider the why and how of developing free improvisation curriculum. By conceptualizing the practice as a socio-communicative endeavor, PMTs explore an authentic way to acquire free improvisation competencies—by developing personal musical language, socio-musical interactions, and shared understanding as enabling aspects of CFMI. These competencies may contribute positively to the pedagogic preparation of PMTs by developing autonomy to express oneself in personal ways, nurturing musical identity, and inculcating an open attitude toward children’s unfettered musical imagination (Wright & Kanellopoulos, 2010).
Through the free improvisation course, I hope to instill in PMTs confidence and a positive disposition toward CFMI so that they may be motivated to incorporate it in their future classes, with the understanding that the course is not an endpoint. Armed with some skills and ideas to facilitate CFMI based on their learning experiences in the course, it is hoped that the PMTs will have the confidence and means to explore and develop ways to engage students in free improvisation within their various teaching contexts. The strategies for acquiring free improvisation competencies in the course are not intended to be directly translatable to music classes in schools. Rather, PMTs are encouraged to consider how these strategies may be transformed for their future classes based on the varied teaching circumstances they find themselves in.
A challenge the PMTs sometimes grapple with is the tension between maintaining shared understanding to sustain group musical congruence, and moving toward improvising freely through real-time interactions. Shared parameters enacted potentially limit their improvisational freedom. To overcome this issue, I encourage them to set increasingly loose parameters to allow sufficient uncertainties during performance to stimulate dynamic, real-time musical exchanges. Reduced shared parameters may help them focus more on deploying socio-musical interactions to evolve their music collaboratively and spontaneously.
While the suggested strategies for developing personal musical language, socio-musical interactions, and shared understanding are specific to the social and curricula context of the teacher preparation program in my university, they are offered with the intent that teacher educators adapt them for their own teaching circumstances. As teaching contexts, student profile, and teacher educator identities may vary greatly, the strategies cannot be universalized. They serve instead to propel ongoing discussion on effective CFMI pedagogy. If introducing an independent CFMI course in teacher college proves challenging due to a packed curriculum, these pedagogical strategies may be embedded within existing methods courses, such as jazz performance, to enhance players’ facility to improvise in communal settings. Beyond jazz, the strategies may also potentially help any musician further develop their existing instrumental or vocal skills through acute listening and responding, ensemble congeniality, and heightened sensitivity to their real-time musical playing. For instance, to draw on the conversational aspects of CFMI to develop musical expression and phrasing, a pair of musicians may take turns improvising short musical phrases in call-and-response fashion. They shape and nuance musical lines in different ways based on real-time thoughts and emotions, and pay heed to how the lines communicate different ideas and elicit different responses from their partner. Besides developing their ability to synergize their playing with actual musical intentions, the activity may also develop ensemble skills.
The CFMI course learning framework inculcates inclusivity by embracing musical diversities in the music-making process—by emphasizing the development of socio-interactive skills that can negotiate and reconcile socio-musical differences between players. The framework serves to counter a more autocratic curriculum that emphasizes the acquisition of Western musical skills and knowledge by opening doorways to open, egalitarian approaches to engage diverse musicians, which is relevant given the rising diversity and cross-pollination of musical cultures and practices teacher educators have to contend with. The framework also provides PMTs with a useful reference when developing free improvisation programs for their future classes comprising students who are equally diverse. By nurturing communications and interactions throughout the learning process, this pedagogical approach paves the way for an improvisational culture where improvisation is not a technical skill, but a way of living through sounds as one makes discoveries about oneself and others through the journey of conversing and negotiating their socio-musical identities. Rather than developing conventional musical knowledge and skills, the greatest value this approach has to students’ learning may be the equal dialogues and discoveries they collaboratively create and experience with their peers.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
