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"How to teach improvisation to classical musicians" was presented by invite of the Colorado branch of the American String Teachers Association. It focuses on pedagogical approaches and philosophy related to improvisation for classical music students.
For free educational resources including instructional courses, podcast, the annual Creative Strings summer conference, and residencies in school orchestra programs, visit www.christianhowes.com/education

This session was presented live by Christian Howes at the Colorado Music Educators Association annual conference in January 2017.

Learn more about Christian at www.christianhowes.com
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So before I set up the specific pedagogy around the subject of free improvisation, non tonal improvisation, composition games, I want to lay out a premise for you. Um, this is my premise. My premise is that the conversation around the subject of alternative styles, maybe a little bit convoluted, uh, because of the fact that we haven't really delineated the components which should make up that conversation. So I'd like to propose what those components in my view are the three components, three areas that in my humble view, um, growing up as a classical musician, it was stuff that I didn't focus on. Um, number one is how do we nurture, how do we practice and how do we teach musical creativity? Number one, that's something that we find in the participatory culture of music making. And it's something that we find in the jazz education model.
We find different ways that people practice and express creatively, say with a small c, because obviously playing classical music is a very creative practice, but there's a different kind of creativity that we talk about when we mean that we're creating our own music from scratch, you know, whether through arranging improvisation and composition. So that's the first component that I would like to say we can look at the second component in my humble opinion has to do with a pulling back the curtain, opening the hood, uh, on the construction of music in a practical way. Everybody in this room studied theory in college, but I including me as a, you know, when I started out as a performance major, but the theory that I learned wasn't necessarily stuff that helped me in a practical way to be able to do the kinds of things I just talked about, like arranging composition, stuff like that.
So if I had to break down theory, I would say it's really looking at harmony. Um, and then to some degree looking at the construction of different types of music, different types of song form stands forms as well. We'll just call it practical theory. It's the second component. The third component I would say is the one that everybody's sort of on the same page about now, which is, you know, this idea that we can enrich ourselves by having a little bit of a broader exposure to different paradigms, whether that's in music or whether it's in literature. The idea of multiculturalism has been espoused since I think 1970 or even before then in academia. And I think that that's one of the basic reasons is because we accept now that we can enrich ourselves and our world views and our views of ourselves by understanding it through the lens of different cultures or different classes of people around the world.
Um, so one way we could do that through music education. He said looking at types of music outside of the western European Canon. So that's my premise from which everything that I do as a musician and as an educator stands, is that there's these sort of three pillars and that if we look at each one of these pillars, it's going to make each one of our desires to enrich ourselves as musicians and as pedagogues. It's gonna make it easier to have that conversation because we're going to be separating those different issues and it won't be so convoluted. Let me just give you a case study. You know, if, if a jazz educator where come into your orchestra classroom right now, one of the ways that they might go about trying to turn you onto jazz, we hit your kids hit to jazz, is they would say, okay, so let me tell you about the blues...