Why Choose Music Improvisation as a Research Topic?
In this series, I will present parts of my dissertation, ‘What strategies, activities and methods would help develop the teaching of music improvisation in UK secondary school education?’. I aim to give you insight into my improvisation research by informally presenting my findings, opinions and thoughts. It may start a discussion into the justifications, merits and advocations for music improvisation or completely put you off and double down on why improvisation should be left out of music education. Either way, I believe its a meaningful conversation to have.
When I started my PGCE, most lecturers would always suggest that I should teach something I enjoy and am knowledgeable about; great unless you like Norwegian Black Metal mixed with Yoko Ono.
The same advice went for my Master’s research. Fortunately for Trinity Laban, I’m not knowledgeable on Black Metal (I am on Yoko) but I do know about music (and drama) improvisation! Since I was at school, music improvisation came easily to me. As I went through music colleges and conservatoire, I found myself drawn to its limitless possibilities for creating music, connections forged with musicians and benefits of solving musical problems. I was never the best at sight reading. Still, I could always improvise my way out of any situation and impress musicians with my speed of thought, divergent thinking and knowing what to play in any given performance. I surrounded myself with other musicians and performers who improvised for a living, but only when I became a teacher did I encounter a problem; music improvisation was seldom used. In fact, only 5% of music teachers entering mainstream UK music education comes from an improvisation background.
At first I thought I could work with this, and I understood that my musical training and background differed from the 95% entering the profession. But as the years rolled on, I developed a mini existential conundrum about my worth as a teacher. Is my skillset valued in secondary teaching? Does education believe in improvised music? Am I a poor teacher because I don’t come from a Western classical background? What is it that’s stopping me from teaching improvisation?
This conundrum took shape in an assignment where I worked with Taichi Imanishi on a ‘Learning Mentor’ project, designed to help my confidence in pursuing my vision of how to be a music educator. It also made me reflect on my tiny idea about developing my music improvisation pedagogy and, most importantly, having the confidence to teach it to my students.
Although I laid out my plans for developing my improvisation research in a pre-enrollment phone call with my programme leader (which I will say was utterly spontaneous, surprising myself when I spouted my plans!) I was still determining how I would research secondary improvisation, let alone whether it was a worthy enough topic in the first place. As fortune would have it, I was invited to attend the Dordogne Jazz Summer School before starting the MA Teaching Musician programme. Having worked as a ‘mini-professor’ at the summer school a few times before, I was excited to go back and catch up with old friends, but I also sensed an opportunity to carry out an informal bit of research to document students experiences learning music improvisation at secondary school, to test if researching music improvisation had any merit. You can view my Vlog research ‘ Improvising VLOG at Dordogne Jazz Summer School’ part 1 & part 2 here.
The findings were fascinating from those I interviewed both on and off-camera. I concluded the following:
- Experiences of learning improvisation in secondary came from a ‘self-taught’ background. No one was taught how to improvise by their teachers or music departments.
- Improvisation in secondary school has been less prominent in my experience, with limited opportunities to learn and develop as improvisers and teachers.
- When learning improvisation, developing an extensive musical vocabulary is crucial to improvise. This vocabulary can be linked with stylistic attributes regarding genre (more applicable to advanced improvisers)
- The benefits of learning improvisation at secondary school would have enabled interviewees a better chance to develop as improvisers in their careers.
My observations, hypotheticals and interview contributors were a revelation and provided enough confirmation to make music improvisation in secondary schools my dissertation topic. The pilot project’s findings gave me a path in how I go about my quest for developing music improvisation in secondary by filling in a knowledge gap between improvising pedagogy and secondary music education.
Suppose the experiences shared by students at Dordogne Summer School were anything to go by; in that case, secondary education needs to take advantage of the chance to cultivate current students’ improvisational skills to benefit early career development and advocate improvisation as a valuable skill in secondary education.
I set out to create the research project with a few ground rules:
- Don’t reduce improvisation as an autotelic exercise.
- Refrain from creating competition in secondary music curricular and co/extracurricular teaching.
- Help play a role in standardising improvisation and pedagogy for teachers, departments and educators to teach improvisation.
- Give teachers and educators tools to help devise schemes of work.
- Be a spokesperson for music improvisation in the teaching community.
- Help inspire others to have the confidence to use music improvisation in their teaching.
Researching this topic would be difficult as I may encounter apathy, challenges to established practice/identity, lack of improvisational knowledge and definitions of improvisation. But I was up for the challenge and as you will read in later instalments in this series, discover the many intricate layers I encountered researching music improvisation in secondary schools.
Mike Wright Music Education 