Fresh inspiration for child creativity
Joy Morin's "Composition and Improvisation Prompts for Piano" will give your students an endless supply of ideas
Cultivating a younger student’s musical imagination is one of the most effective ways to help them to fall in love with music.
But if you are anything like me, you will know that it is sometimes hard to switch into the imaginative world of a child. Whereas they look at the world with fresh eyes, I look at the world through the filter of my previous experiences and long-established interests. (To give you an example, I’m currently re-reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy of sci-fi novels about the colonisation of Mars. Unsurprisingly, not all of my students are as excited about hard sci-fi as I am—fair enough!) This discrepancy between our interests is likely to increase as I get older. How can I ensure that I continue to connect with a child at their level?
That’s where Joy Morin’s excellent Composition and Improvisation Prompts for Piano are a really valuable resource. I’ve been testing them in my studio over the last few weeks and have found them really useful.
The cards follow a simple format, just like the example below: there’s an appealing short story, a cute illustration, and a list of prompts that use musical terminology.
I bought both sets, printed them out and laminated them, as you can see below.
I’ve used them with almost all of my elementary students in the last weeks and they’ve gone down very well. The method that seems to work best is as follows:
pre-select 2 or 3 cards with prompts that match the theory concepts and/or techniques you’re exploring on in the lesson
get the student to read through the selection and check they understand all the musical terminology
talk through the story and prompt them to think more about what could happen
experiment on the piano with some sounds and ideas (they might just start improvising but if not you could show them a few simple ideas and encourage them to copy you and then try out their own)
lend them the card for the week and ask them to come back to the next lesson with a completed composition
next week, get them to play their composition
ask them:
what do you like about it?
is there anything you think could work better?
if they haven’t written the composition down, get them to do that as homework for the following week
The prompt cards are available as two sets, with 20 cards per set, which you can download on a studio license. I found them to be good value for money.
Set #2 has slightly more advanced theoretical concepts, but the overall tone is still pretty elementary. If you can only afford one set, Set #1 is the best place to start.
I’m pretty sure these will have a valuable place in my composition pedagogy toolbox going forward, and I recommend them to you.
Update!
Since I wrote this, Joy has turned the first set of flashcards into a physical book.