Resources for Fostering Musical Creativity
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A PAGE FOR MUSIC TEACHERS
OF ALL KINDS: Numerous sites on the World Wide Web offer music instruction. Unfortunately, the nature of the Web is such that there's no Head Librarian to make sure that everything important gets said somewhere. For instance: I have been unable to find a very basic, down-to-earth set of instructions on how to do the one thing that has most characterized my explorations as a musician from the beginning: to take a rhythm chart or lead sheet, with its pop chord symbols arranged in measures and slashes . . . D / / / | / / / / | A7 / / / | / / / /| etc. . . . and flesh it out with a simple keyboard accompaniment pattern . . . or improvise melodies (such as variations or descants) against the chord progression on the instrument of choice . . . or find some colorful chords and/or chord-cycles to substitute for the most basic ones (D-Bm-Em7-A7 instead of D-A7) . . . or lay in an interesting bass line . . . or "genre-surf" by converting one kind of piece into another (playing a square dance tune such as "Skip to My Lou," above, as a hornpipe). In my experience, people with years of piano lessons (including teachers) have never been taught themselves to use chord progressions, lead sheets, or rhythm charts. What's more, after years of learning only technique and performance skills in the traditional method-book fashion, they become hard-wired into standard musical notation, and they often find out, too late, that their creative impulses have been, albeit unconsciously and unintentionally, trained out of them. If, after years of concentrating on performance alone, they discover that something's missing--the joy of creating new music or playing old music in new ways. There is no one, really, to help them figure out the chord changes to a tune, or what to do with a rhythm chart that contains only the pop chord symbols, or how to jam around the chords; they're on their own, graduates of schools that were never set up to teach them what they now want to know. Being in such a situation can be especially painful to teachers who may have reconciled themselves to this dearth of creative instruction but who find themselves confronted with students who yearn to go to places where the teachers themselves were never taught to go. The scenario may sound bleak, but there is good news: while some people seem to have a natural flair for these things and seem to have acquired them early on with little effort, these skills can be learned at any time. Happily, no matter how or when we learned them, once we get it, we can also teach it . . . as all teachers know. It is axiomatic that the most effective teachers are continual learners themselves, and they have usually found their own ways of perpetuating a high level of enthusiasm. This site emphasizes long-term development of creative musicianship-and will, I hope, light a fire under you . . . Think of me as a guide: I don't know everything, and there are surely many things about music that you are much better at than I am (for instance, I've been a professional musician for more than 25 years, and I still can't sit down at a piano and play a piece of sheet music with two hands)--but I've logged many, many hours over the last 25 years honing these practical, day-to-day, real-world music-making skills, and I constantly use the keyboard as a creative tool even though I'm not a "keyboardist." Who knows? You may even come to a truce with music theory . . . |
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Jan 21, 1998 |
© Copyright 1998 by JC Rockwell | |||