In this guest blog post, pianist, composer, educator and founder of PianoCreativity.com, Garreth Brooke, shares his tips on how to get started with improvisation.
What’s great about improvisation in piano lessons?
Most importantly, it’s fun, which is essential if we want to help our students to fall in love with the piano!
It especially appeals to younger students, who generally really want to play the piano (i.e. have fun!) and don’t necessarily want to follow “the rules” of what’s written on the score.
It’s also a great way to check that a student has really understood a new concept. If for example you ask your student to create a melody or chord sequence that uses only notes from the G major scale, it really puts their knowledge to the test, much more so than filling in a worksheet.
Improvisation also has a strong appeal for adults who are returning to piano lessons after a long break. Many of them grew up believing they were only allowed to play from the score. The experience of making up their own music is so liberating that it helps them fall even deeper in love with the piano.
A brief history of improvisation in piano lessons
A couple of hundred years ago, improvisation would have been an important part of most piano lessons. Back in those days, musicians who could improvise had a much better chance of making a living. Travel was slow so most musicians had to take all the opportunities they could find in their local area, which in practise meant that they had to be able to quickly create music that fit their audience’s needs. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Listz were all famously good improvisers and Czerny, who was taught by Beethoven and went on to teach Liszt, even wrote a couple of books on the topic (published as Op. 200 and 300).
Over the course of the 20th century, two simultaneous developments impacted the use of improvisation in piano lessons. Firstly, classical piano lessons tended to focus on the goal of training a virtuoso performer who would brilliantly recreate the intention of the composer. Meanwhile, improvisation became ever more closely associated with jazz. By the time I went to school, if you wanted to learn to improvise, you were told to go to a jazz teacher.
Nowadays, many teachers are reintegrating improvisation into their lessons, but sometimes it’s tricky to know where to start, especially if you’ve never improvised before.
If you’ve never improvised before
- It’s best to start small: try a short activity with a couple of students.
- It’s also best to start with the teacher playing an accompaniment while the student improvises. Rosa Conrad’s Lazy Wagon Blues is a great place to start.
- Don’t expect your students to be instantly brilliant. Like any skill, it takes many students a while to get a feel for it. If your student struggles, try repeating the same activity every week for a few weeks until they feel comfortable.
Taking it further
When I first started teaching creatively I struggled to find useful resources, but over the years I’ve realised that there’s actually a wealth of improvisation and composition resources out there.
Nowadays I review the very best resources over on PianoCreativity.com. Come check it out!
Improvisation resources on My Music Resource
Rosa Conrad‘s Lazy Wagon Blues is a a great little duet where beginner students improvise using two pentatonic scales against an accompanying 12 bar blues structure.
Alison Mathews has a couple of engaging resources for beginner students. The first, a set of Halloween-themed duets, includes a doodle time checklist to help pre-readers become piano explorers. The second, Easter Bunny Hop, has a duet part, activity sheet and ideas on how to extend the duet creatively using improvisation and composition.
Alison’s Doodles books, published by Editions Musica Ferrum, are another fantastic resource for getting started with creativity at the piano.
Karen Langtree has two wonderful Christmas Sound Stories, Angel Small and Santa’s Dreams. These are is a fun and Christmassy way to engage beginners in composing, playing by ear, exploring sounds and more.
Sally Cathcart has an Easter-themed activity set that includes improvisation.
Last but certainly not least, Kate Thompson has an excellent bundle of improvisation and composition resources that you can use around the year.
About Garreth Brooke
Garreth Brooke is a pianist, composer, educator and writer based in Frankfurt, Germany.
He studied music at Oxford University and piano teaching with the Royal Conservatory of Music, and now runs a busy international teaching studio in Frankfurt, Germany. Garreth’s compositions have been streamed tens of millions of times and published by Editions Musica Ferrum and Breitkopf & Härtel. You can find out more about his music at garrethbrooke.com.
For further tips, resource reviews and blogs posts relating to improvisation & composition, go to Piano Creativity.com
