Hi. My name is Maud Hickey and I'm an associate professor here in Music Education
at Northwestern in the Bienen School of Music.
I'm pleased to be giving this little talk today.
I want to raise a question: what if we taught visual art
like we teach some music in schools?
Imagine a scenario where your fifth grade beginning art students come to your class.
They have their paintbrushes in a case. The first thing you do is
teach them how to open the paintbrush case properly: open it, close
it, make sure it doesn't fall out. Of course, some of your students rent their
paintbrush and some own really fancy paintbrushes because they've got more money.
Perhaps in the first week you teach them that one is red and two is blue
and three is green and you ask them to memorize that.
Of course, you teach them how to hold the paintbrush. For the first
exhibition you might perform this
piece where the students have to paint by number.
Remember, one is red, two is blue, three is green, and stay in the lines.
This is your first visual art exhibition and everybody looks the same.
Maybe by eighth grade the
visuals get a little more complicated, as you can see. There are more numbers to memorize
and the design is a little more tricky, but still, everybody has to paint
by number and everybody must stay in the lines.
By now maybe some of the students quit and dropped out of visual
art because they just didn't want to paint by number or stay in the lines. They
got together with their friends and now they paint in the garage
and they do some really cool murals.
So then we get into the high school visual art, and now
it's very important that we teach our students to replicate the masters and
they're still painting by number; staying in the lines. We've lost of the students along the way
but replicate the masters. Of course,
we want to be cool and hip in our high school program so we do some Jackson
Pollock. Paint by number, stay in the lines.
Of course, one of the requirements for the visual art class
is that we also paint the logo on the basketball field and the football field
as well. Pretty ridiculous to imagine
that scenario for a visual art class. But in many ways,
sometimes that's how we approach our music classes in our schools.
Sometimes because of that I think of all the arts
classes we offer in schools, our music classses are
often the least creative, if you will.
The emphasis is on painting by numbers and staying in the lines.
So for this very short presentation,
I want to urge you to consider how we might teach music education differently
than maybe you've been taught; that is, infusing more
creative thinking throughout the curriculum, thinking about
music composition and improvisation, allowing children to choose their own
numbers and to paint outside the lines, if you will. Something to think about in your own
education as you've come through school music
:have you ever had a music teacher who asked you to be creative in the school of music?
Have you ever had a music teacher who asked you compose?
Have you ever had a music teacher who's asked you to improvise?
If your question is yes, I say great.
If your answer is yes, I say great. If your answer is no,
that's something to think about: why is that? I think the
reason we struggle with more creative activities in our
school of music programs is because we have some myths about
what composition and improvisation is, and we have definitions that I think
might get in the way, and I want to share some definitions I think might make it
easier for all of us to imagine doing composition, improvisation, and more creative
thinking in our classrooms. The first is creative thinking.
It's not a mystery. Creative thinking simply is just the ability
to create something new. Everybody can do that.
Music is sound and silence, intentionally organized
to be expressive. It doesn't have to notated. The sound
doesn't have to be coming from an orchestra necessarily. We can use
our own sounds to make music. Composition is just
combining sounds in silence with the intent to replicate.
Improvisation is music made extemporaneously, without
intent or desire to replicate. If we think about those four definitions,
I hope we can
say that creative thinking, improvisation, composition is not that hard; anybody can do it.
It doesn't seem so difficult.
So how do we start? How do we do this? Where do we
begin as future music teachers? I say start now.
Improvise. Next time you go into your practice room to practice your instrument or your
voice for your lesson, spend five minutes making stuff up. Just
improvise five minutes a day. I'm not talking about jazz improvisation with
chords, etc. Just make stuff up on the spot. Try composing.
If you're improvising, you're doodling around on your instrument, you're getting into it,
and you play something you like, write it down. Play it again. Share
it with a friend. You're composing. Then observe. Observe your
classes, your music classes, observe teachers in schools with these
questions in mind. How could we possibly think more creatively or turn a lesson
into something that would be more creative for students. Question. Think.
Finally, teach it. I really encourage you if you are
working with young children especially, beginning lessons of some sort,
I encourage and dare you to ask the child to compose. If you
just taught them three notes on their clarinet, ask them to
go home and compose a piece with those three notes. I can 99.9%
guarantee you the child will do that. They will come back; they will have practiced it more
than they do anything else in their books, and they'll be excited about it. So
really take that first step and ask one of your students to compose.
I want to share some resources with you next. I think that also has
gotten in our way in music education. There haven't been resources for
teachers to begin thinking about how to get creative thinking and composition
and improvisation in our school classrooms, and now there are.
The first two, though, are old, but they're tried and true. They're by
John Painter. You can find these used for cheap on Amazon. I don't know if you want
that on the tape. One is Sound and Silence, and the other is
Sound and Structure, and they're full of really wonderful
composition and improvisation exercise. Brand new,
and equally good, is a book by John Stevens called Search
and Reflect, full of really fun improvisation games, not related to
jazz but to kind of loosen up and get thinking more creatively.
Jeffrey Agrell wrote a book Improvisation Games for Classical
Musicians, and it's a big
book full of really great exercise for classical musicians. He's
followed with several other books for solo musicians, duet musicians
and for chamber musicians. If you're in a chamber group, get one of these
books and start improvising, because they're full of really good ideas. For
music teacher educators, Michele Kashub and Jan Smith have worked
together to create a book: Composing Our Future; ideas for those who are going
to be music teachers and how they can infuse composition and improvisation in the classroom;
and then Minds on Music, full of ideas for composing.
A recent publication that I recommend
if you're looking for ideas, because it's full of practical ideas for how to
get composition and improvisation into your classroom, whether it's a choir or a
band or an orchestra or first grade children. So we now have resources out there
to help us as music teachers help children compose.
So to end this, I'm going to turn the question around.
What if we taught music like we teach visual art in our schools?
What would that look like? What if we allow children to paint by
numbers other than what we dictate and to be able to draw outside the lines,
giving them freedom to do some composition and improvisation
in the music activities as a way to enrich
that side of their brain. I urge you to think about these ideas.
Give it a try, and thank you for listening.