Improvisation- The Most Neglected Facet of Music Education
- Music Room
- Feb 13
- 4 min read
You just read the word. Did it elicit a sense of fear, dread, the desire to ignore?
No? Are you a middle or high school band teacher that teaches jazz ensemble? That means you have a background in improvisation and know what to do already.
Ask Yourself These Questions:
What about all of you other music teachers out there? Have you reviewed the 2014 NAfME standards recently to make sure you are doing all of the things? Are you a string teacher, and is improvisation happening in your orchestra? Are you a band teacher that does not teach jazz ensemble, and is improvisation happening in your concert band? Let’s keep going. Are you a choral teacher and do your choir students improvise? These performing ensembles barely have enough time during rehearsals in between concerts to prepare adequately. I’m not saying that improvisation should be abolished from every performing ensemble’s curriculum or from the standards, but their presence does put music teachers in a bit of a pickle timewise.
How about in general music? Are general music students getting opportunities to improvise? Is it enough of an opportunity so that they are used to it, it’s part of their routine in class at least from time to time? Are they feeling comfortable and confident enough to be able to see their progress and be able to progress onward to improvise cohesive rhythms and melodies? The content standards state that students should be able to… better and better as the grade levels go by.
Here is one of the big issues. For today’s music teachers, opportunities to improvise were limited to jazz ensembles when we were children. I was in jazz ensemble for five years and barely felt competent enough to improvise eight measures, much less describe what to do to make it sound good. It wasn’t taught to me prior to college. I absolutely recall coming home from school one day as a ninth grader feeling like a total failure because I didn’t know what to do to improvise when the situation called for it in jazz ensemble that day. I cried that afternoon, even though it was one of my favorite classes, and I quit for two years afterward. It wasn’t taught to me. I didn’t know how to get the right answer. I didn’t know what would make me sound like the other students that seemed to magically have that skill. I needed a system.
How many of you out there have also been stressed out by improvisation? How many of you do not recall learning how to improvise in general music classes between Kindergarten and Grade 8? THAT’S where improvisation should have been starting, even on something as simple as a wood block.
What About Your College Prep?
So now you all are in college, priming your skills to become an amazing and influential music teacher. Doesn’t matter what you plan to teach. In many states your certification area is “Music: K-12”, and you are expected to know all and teach all. Half of you out there were voice majors. What kind of improvisation experience did you have in your choirs, both in grade school and at the collegiate level? Here’s a great one million dollar question: what coursework did you take in college to help you prime up your improvisation skills (whether existing or not) to teach students? Were those courses required? Were they electives? Was something else more important to take than the elective that was probably for the Jazz Studies majors anyway? Did an Improv 101 course exist at all? If so, was it just focused on how to improvise or was there a pedagogy element? No? Was there an improvisation component in your Elementary Music Methods course?
Then how are you supposed to know how to include improvisation in your curriculum if you don’t know how to teach it, much less be confident in the skill yourself?
I know I’ve asked a ton of questions in this post, but as you can see, it exposes a real shortcoming in the preparation of music teachers that are expected to teach this skill to all grade levels, and in all classes. Don’t get me wrong- improvisation skills are important for students for a slew of reasons that are not even music-related, like communication skills, quick, flexible thinking, empathy, emotional reactivity, and others. Take a quick look at this study that focuses on the soft skills that improvisation influences. Improvisation does not need to be removed from anything, but rather, some effort needs to be made to include it in curricula across the board of performing arts courses, definitely starting in general music. In general music, there is the wiggle room to include it, and without performance deadlines, ten minutes every few classes, multiplied over years of instruction should help do the trick. It should not be a foreign concept by the time students are in ensembles in the middle and high school years. Students should have a system in their minds about how to progress themselves in whatever performance medium they have, if they are in a situation that requires improvisation, like jazz ensemble, theater, that random song in orchestra that needs an improv solo (I’ve seen one- they exist!).
Finally, A Solution for The Improvisation Being So Neglected in Music Education
Uplevel U: Music is a project that focuses on filling the knowledge gaps that music and other performing arts teachers have in their preparation, for the expectations needed of them each day. Performing arts education is vast, and four to six years of teacher prep is an impossible amount of time to get everything you need. Let Uplevel U: Music do the rest, on-demand, whenever you need it. There is now a course titled “Improvisation in the Performing Arts- General Music” that solves this problem of the lack of improvisation instruction in Grades K-8. It includes preknowledge, dozens of activities, proper progression of pacing and delivery methods for various performance mediums for Kindergarten (even Pre-K) through Grade 8 and beyond. If you are a general music teacher, this is your solution to help improvisation be more prominent in your program.
This article was written by Music Room/Uplevel U: Music's owner and creator, Karen (Kay) Janiszewski. This article was written by Music Room/Uplevel U: Music's owner and creator, Karen (Kay) Janiszewski.
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