As someone who studied classical music, I didn’t get much formal training in improvisation. But since I’ve started teaching, I’ve found that it’s an incredibly useful and fun way to help students learn. Other teachers have told me that they’d like to incorporate more improvisation in their lessons, but they aren’t sure where to begin. In this blog, I’ll talk about one way that you can use improvisation: as a stress-free way to assess students' abilities and help them engage during the intake meeting. I’ll start by sharing a story of how I learned my first improvisation game, which I now use regularly when I meet new students.
When I was an undergrad student, I was working at an instrument petting zoo, where local kids had the chance to try out different instruments. I was charged with overseeing the collection of percussion instruments, which the kids would happily come by and bang away at. Through the cacophony, I could hear the piano station on the other side of the room. My colleague was sitting at the piano, and throughout the day, one child after another would join her on the bench and happily jam out a duet with her. This even included smaller kids, who probably had little or no playing experience. When I asked her about it, she said, “Yeah, if you play the four chords in C Major (C-G-Am-F), they sound pretty good with any of the white key notes. If you want them to play on the black keys, you can just play the chords in Db Major (Db-Ab-Bbm-Gb).”* At the time I thought it was a cool trick, but didn’t think much of it otherwise.
Many years later, I started teaching students with exceptionalities, and I found myself meeting lots of new piano students for intake meetings. I hadn’t done this sort of thing very much up to that point, but I knew I needed to find some ways to help students feel comfortable with me as a new person, while also assessing their basic abilities so I could start building lesson plans. At some point, I remembered the trick that my colleague had shown me years earlier with the four chords, and I decided to start incorporating it into my intake meetings. After the other activities I had planned, I would invite the student to sit at the piano with me. I would play the chords in the middle and lower registers and ask the student to play on the white keys. Then, I would ask them to play the black keys only and switch to playing the chords in Db major. I can’t say I do this activity with every new student, but for many of them, it gives me a quick but practical window into their abilities and engagement style.
It turns out you can do very similar activities with other instruments. For example, if you’re teaching a string instrument, you have the student pluck the open strings, while you play along in a key that sounds good with those notes (like C major for viola and cello, or G major for violin). If you’re teaching the flute, you can take off the mouthpiece and have the student blow into it, while you improvise along in C major. In all of these cases, you can accompany them on the same instrument, or you can play chords on the piano to make a richer sound. The key thing is for the student to get to make music in a way that does not require very much instruction, while you support them in a way that makes it feel like you are making “real music” together.
Engagement:
- How do they react to hearing your playing and participating in making music? Some students immediately light up! Some students may like to just sit and listen for a while. This doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t paying attention, but it can tell you more about how they engage with music.
- How do they approach the instrument through this activity? Some students may carefully plunk out one note at a time, while others might mash (or the equivalent on another instrument) many notes as quickly as they can.
Assessing student abilities:
- Another thing I love about these activities is that they allow me to observe and consider many different aspects of the students’ abilities that are relevant to music learning. These include (among other things):
- Do they understand verbal instructions? If needed, you can experiment with shorter phrases, hand over hand, or other communication techniques
- Can they recognize the visual layout of the instrument (black/white keys, different strings, etc.)?
- What are their basic fine motor skills? For example, do they play with individual fingers or with their whole hand on multiple keys, strings etc.?
- How long do they focus on one activity? Do they get bored of the task quickly and start doing something else, or do they stay with it for a while? Do they seem to repeat a musical pattern (rhythmic or melodic) or are they playing more freely?
- Are they listening to what you’re playing as well? For example, if you abruptly change the dynamics or the articulation, do they respond to that, or do they continue as they were before?
As the teacher, you can see all of this in a way that feels just like a game to them, rather than a formal assessment. With higher functioning students, you can include additional elements as you go along, like asking them to change dynamics or register. You could also give them a basic pattern to work with.
It’s important to know that free improvisation games like this don’t work for every student though. For example, on piano, some students may not be able to distinguish between the black in white keys, or they may not understand colour concepts. Even if you think it might not work, you can always try it. Whatever happens will give you some information about how to engage with this student in their first few lessons.
Happy Teaching!
*PS - You can play the chords using any pattern that you like. You can also change the order of the chords and it still works :)
