Last weekend I published a post highlighting a useful new website called pianocreativity.com. In today’s post, Garreth Brooke, who runs this website, has written his own article introducing his new project and sheds light on the importance of incorporating such an approach for use in piano lessons.
One of the curious paradoxes of being a classical pianist is that we devote a vast amount of time to learning the music of the great composers, yet rarely dare to create our own.
One the one hand, it makes sense. The greats wrote transcendent music; who are we to try?
On the other, it’s self-evident that most of the great composers loved to improvise and compose. Why do we deny ourselves that pleasure?
It’s partly the legacy of changing modes of musical education. For many of us who studied in the 20th century, piano lessons were focussed primarily on technique and performance. This result of this found expression in the music exam system, where performance held—and largely continues to hold—a prominent position, with composition generally relegated to a corner of the theory exam. Improvisation was something you did in jazz or, if you were feeling bold, in a concerto cadenza.
But as Prof. John J. Mortensen writes in The Pianist’s Guide to Historic Improvisation:
“Bach could improvise fugues not because he was unique but because almost any properly trained keyboard player in his day could. Even mediocre talents could improvise mediocre fugues. Bach was exceptionally good at something that pretty much everyone could do at a passable level. They could all do it because it was built into their musical thinking from the very beginning of their training.”
For many contemporary pianists, the idea of improvising at all is enough to make us break out into a cold sweat, let alone improvising a fugue!
In the last years I’ve been exploring ways to reintegrate composition and improvisation into piano lessons. I’ve noticed many benefits.
1.
Improvisation and composition are excellent ways to ensure that a student has a practical understanding of a theoretical concept. For example, if a student has just learned about fifths, an improvisation using fifths ensures that they are able to apply their knowledge all over the keyboard, which helps them to internalise both the theoretical concept and the muscle memory (i.e. the particular feel of a fifth)
2.
Improvisation teaches students to experiment with expression, which enriches their performance. For example, asking a student to play a melodic line with several different expressive shapes, then discussing which was the most beautiful shaping cultivates their musical imagination. As pianist Rhonda Rizzo—one of my favourite writers—puts it:
“Like any good friendship, becoming friends with a piece of music is a long conversation, not a one-way monologue. We don’t get to do all the communicating and neither does the composer. The magic happens in the dialogue that is established every time we play the piece. The notes are the language. The score decides the topics of conversation. In the most convivial situations, the music sparks new ideas in us, and we (conversely) tease out novel discoveries in the notes that perhaps others haven’t uncovered.”
3.
Improvisation can be a wonderful way to develop a student’s technique. For example, if a student has just learned the common Baroque technique of detached crotchets and legato quavers, asking them to improvise a melody that follows those rules helps them to embed it in their muscle memory. Indeed, one might argue that most Etudes are exactly that: pure technique transformed into music. We don’t necessarily need to use pre-written Etudes if we learn to create our own. To give you a very current practical example, when I was recently studying “L’Egyptienne” by Jean Philippe Rameau, I needed to improve my co-ordination for the opening cross-hands gesture and its B♭ major counterpart at the beginning of the second half, so I turned it into a looping mini-Etude. Over several weeks of practise this led to a fully-fledged improvisation that you can see below and which will be released by the record label Piano and Coffee Co. sometime early in 2025.
4.
Improvisation helps prevent practise from becoming too repetitive, which leads to more inspired performances. As Penelope Roskell writes in The Complete Pianist,
“Although much of our practise needs to involve a lot of conscious and systematic work, performing needs to be intuitive, creative and spontaneous. […] The more you ‘keep the flame alive’ during your practise and avoid mindless repetition, the more you will remain motivated to communicate the inner message of the music to the audience. Throughout your practise […] listen attentively and be open to any spontaneous ideas that might come to you”.
5.
Composition helps a student to understand a composer’s structural decisions better than any other tool I’ve come across. For example, while an elementary composer will often want to make their piece into a large textural and dynamic crescendo towards a climax, a more experienced composer will better understand the power of ebbs and flows and indeed of subito pianissimo. This can have a remarkable effect on the quality of their playing.
6.
Practising improvisation significantly improves resilience in the face of finger slips during performance. Juilliard’s musical performance psychologist Noa Kageyama PhD explores this in several posts and podcasts on his Bulletproof Musician site, including here.
7.
Finally, the creative approach often lends itself well to music where the composer themself was an improviser. There are a number of great composers—Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, I could go on—who have many documented stories of improvisation. Even if we don’t necessarily improvise in performance as they might have, approaching certain pieces or sections with a flexible, spontaneous spirit can help us better convey the intentions of the composer. (Incidentally I believe I recently watched Khatia Buniatishvili do exactly this. In the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, there’s a Largo passage, at bb143-148, where the sustain pedal should be depressed while the right hand plays a kind of singing recitative ‘con espressione e semplice’ that can sound quite dissonant on a modern piano with its powerful sustain. She played it extremely slowly and with such a vast freedom of tempo, she was clearly listening to how each note interacted with the resonance of those that preceded it. It felt like she was channelling Beethoven improvising for the first time with the sustain pedal. This sonata was written around the time that Beethoven first accessed a piano with sustain pedal, so it seems a very plausible interpretation for her to make; I can almost picture him doing exactly the same.)
Most teachers are aware of some or all the benefits listed above, but many are hesitant to include more creativity in their lessons. That is often because they themselves have not been trained in composition or improvisation. Time constraints, parent expectations and exam syllabuses also play a role. My goal with my www.pianocreativity.com project is to help teachers get started by giving them practical ways to incorporate activities into lessons.
Part of that is by helping them to find suitable resources. There is actually a great deal of composition and improvisation resources out there, many of which can be integrated into a standard piano lesson, but many are not as well-known as they deserve to be. Whether it is method books by Lucinda Mackworth-Young, improvisation guides by Forrest Kinney, imaginative twists on sight-reading by Alison Mathews, creative prompt cards by Joy Morin, complete 10-week composition lesson plans by Nicola Cantan, or “how-to” books on using lead sheets by Holly J. McCann, there’s a wealth out there. I’ve already reviewed quite a few resources and have many more reviews coming over the next months.
Another aspect is showing them how I integrate creativity into my own lessons. I regularly publish articles called “A Creative Introduction to…”, which give ideas for how teachers can present pieces to their students in a creative way. You can explore the archive here and more will be added regularly. It has been my pleasure to feature Melanie’s own music a couple of times and I look forward to doing so again in future.
I also write articles that dig deeper into more complex topics, like how to get your students to relax when improvising, the vital importance of using limits or rules to stimulate creativity, how to cultivate confidence, and when to use self-criticism (and when not!).
My hope is that by cultivating creativity in classical piano lessons, we can ensure that the classical music we love remains relevant for future generations. There will always be a pool of people who love classical music because of its inherent value, but there’s no denying that we live in a time where people are bombarded with “content” from all corners. My fear is that if we’re not careful, the pool of classical music fans will dwindle, eroded by demographics and gradually replaced by a younger generation who can’t see what classical music has to do with them. My experience has repeatedly shown me that students connect more closely with classical music when they are given creative activities that show them how they can make a piece their own. To quote pianist and writer Rhonda Rizzo again, “the magic happens in the dialogue that is established every time we play the piece.”
Creativity is the heart of great music. Let’s help our students fall in love.
