Discovering and shaping the music within: Exploring musical concepts through improvisational frameworks

Abstract

"Improvisation can mean anything you want - teaching, sharing and joining" (Robert Dick). The positive experience of improvisation is a mandate for a creativity of infinite possibilities; it includes respect, generosity and a powerful way to communicate musical ideas. This paper is an account of the development of a new course in improvisation titled 'Foundations of Improvisation' currently being developed at the Australian Institute of Music (AIM), Sydney Australia by Dr Margery Smith and Jenny Game-Lopata. Within the Bachelor of Music course at AIM, 'Foundations of Improvisation' is a mandatory subject for all contemporary popular and classical music students. Foundations of Improvisation commenced in Semester 1, 2009 at AIM. For this paper we outline the rationale and teaching strategies that we adopted for this unit of study. These are placed in a wider context of musical learning and our own contexts for teaching improvisation. Our approach to teaching improvisation uses two improvisational frameworks, a non-idiomatic and an intercultural approach.