Creativity Digest - 30.3.2024
What I've been reading, watching and writing this week
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What I’ve written:
Creative activities to introduce Allegretto, op. 125/3 by Anton Diabelli
It’s really important to connect exam pieces to a student’s wider development as a musician. Here’s a set of useful creative activities for Diabelli’s Allegretto (ABRSM Grade 1) to enable you to do just that! Click here to download the activities for free as a PDF. You can use the worksheet to…
3 elementary Easter composition activities
Good elementary composition activities need to be simple and fun, and ideally they’re also something you can complete in less than 10 minutes, so that your younger students’ attention spans don’t wander. Here are 3 simple activities I’ve used sucessfully with my youngest students.
The new (old) normal
As Seth Godin eloquently puts it, “There’s no ‘the new normal’. There’s simply the normal of now”. A couple of hundred years ago, learning basic improvisation and composition skills was an important part of your musical education. But for various reasons, creative musicianship has declined in importance in classical piano pedagogy. It’s become abnormal. This is risky…
Things I’ve enjoyed this week:
Vikingur Ólafsson’s Tiny Desk Concert is an utter joy, from the first to the last note. One of the few first class classical performers to really understand the so-called “contemporary classical” aesthetic (felt piano, etc), he’s able to bridge the classical and contemporary worlds like no other. I wrote about his wonderful 2022 album From Afar for A Closer Listen, you can find it here if you’re curious
This post from Sara Campbell’s Savvy Music Studio about language, and specifically how powerful it can be to use “we” instead of “I” and “you”
Noa Kayegama’s Bulletproof Musician email about research exploring whether focusing on expression affects accuracy in performance
Finding out that the months of the year are laid out on the piano keyboard from Robert Cunningham’s amusing and intriguing post
Good to know:
The Art of Piano Pedagogy Awards have announced their finalists
What’s in my drafts folder:
How to get started with Forrest Kinney’s Pattern Play resources
Creative activities to introduce Gigue by Samuel Arnold
Interested in improvising in the style of William Gillock’s “Carnival in Rio”?
A post about a fascinating German-language musical creativity book called “Impro-Mosaic: the crazy folding book with unlimited ideas for improvising”. My friend and colleague Barbara Arens told me about it after visiting the Leipziger Buchmesse — it’s awesome.
I’m about to take a short Easter vacation (visiting Lisbon — I’m excited!) and will be back with more posts in the second week of April.
Take care,
Garreth