Review: Music-Creativity-Joy by Forrest Kinney

This book is profoundly enriching and deeply encouraging

Even though we never met, I don’t think anyone has impacted my teaching and music-making more than Forrest Kinney. This gentle soul had a radical heart and a powerful intellect. He could dismantle lazy arguments for traditional pedagogy with an electrifying ease, but he always did it with a kindness and good humour in keeping with his evident humanism. I’ve used so many of his books — Pattern Play (both versions!), Create First, Puzzle Play, Chord Play — and they’ve had a profound influence on the way I teach.

Forrest Kinney in 2016. Source: https://forrestkinney.com/about

But when my friend and colleague Ruth Alberici got in touch to tell me how much she loved Forrest’s book Music-Creativity-Joy: Exploring The Four Arts of Music I admitted, somewhat shame-faced, that I’d never read it.

I’ve now read the whole thing, and it’s wonderful. It’s profoundly enriching and deeply encouraging.

Music-Creativity-Joy is a collection of 105 essays and articles that, quoting the blurb:

“explore a creativity-based approach to music education that is fundamentally different from the usual performance-based one. The ideas and approaches explored here are based on the understanding that music can be like a native language and offer a similarly broad spectrum of creative possibilities.”

Designed not to be read cover to cover but dipped into according to your interest, it’s a delightful read. Forrest is unfailingly wise, extremely knowledgeable, and often very funny:

You have no doubt heard of F.E.I.S., a nervous condition afflicting piano teachers. I’m referring, of course, to Für Elise Irritation Syndrome.

(You’ll be delighted to know that Forrest has an excellent remedy for F.E.I.S.!)

The book is full of a profoundly creative radicalism that will inevitably appeal to readers of this blog. Forrest’s challenge to teachers is as follows:

let’s not make “the listener” or “the performance” our primary focus. Those who have a lifelong love affair with a musical instrument are making music to please their own soul, not a listener. If that is not the primary motive, even the loudest applause and the greatest accomplishments become empty and meaningless.

In other words, our goal is help our students fall in love with making music. Amen to that!

The book has various topics, which Forrest breaks down into the following categories:

• pedagogy

• history

• “flowology” (i.e. “piano technique”. Forrest writes: ‘I think flowology is a better

  name because of its sound (all those long vowel sounds instead of those choppy consonants) and its meaning (“the study of flow”)’)

• “freeology” (i.e. the psychology of healthy playing)

• theory

• therapy

• arranging

• improvising

• composing

• interpreting

It’s wide-ranging and thought-provoking. Over the course of this review I’ll highlight a few of my favourite articles, but I can’t adequately cover even a fraction of the knowledge it contains, so I highly recommend you get your own copy.

Music-Creativity-Joy is available as a physical book in the USA, and as a PDF download for the rest of the world.

Highlights

Forrest the radical pedagogue

There’s an outstanding essay called “The Man Who Recites Shakespeare But Doesn’t Speak” which is one of the most effective demolitions of the arguments for traditional music pedagogy that I’ve ever read. In it, Forrest pictures a man arriving at an airport. The man is obviously disorientated but when you ask him if he needs help:

“his mouth opens as if to speak, but he doesn’t utter a word. He says nothing. He apparently doesn’t speak English. … Then an odd thing happens. The man begins to recite what sounds like a Shakespeare Sonnet. He recites it with an assurance born of countless repetitions, but you have the feeling (is it the slightly stilted delivery? the archaic words? the distant look in his eyes?) that he doesn’t understand what he is saying. You are mystified. How can this man recite Shakespeare but not reply to your simple question?

It turns out that the man has been studying English with a teacher whose goal is “is public performance of great literature, not conversation.” Remind you of anyone?

Forrest the historian

There are innumerable references to the lives and works of the great composers, most notably Bach, Chopin, Beethoven and Brahms.

Indeed, Forrest sees his creative pedagogical approach as in keeping with the goals of Johann Sebastian Bach, and he draws from numerous sources to back up this claim. It’s a really reassuring read, especially if — like me — you have always been drawn to teaching creativity but have not always had effective arguments to hand for persuading student parents that learning creativity is in their child’s best interest.

Forrest points out that in the preface to the Inventions:

Bach clearly states that two-part intention. He wishes “amateurs of the keyboard” to play cleanly and “achieve a cantabile style in playing” in both two-part and three-part playing… “And not only to obtain good inventions, but to develop the same well” and “acquire a strong foretaste for composition.”

and that:

A man named M.T. Pitschel wrote about J.S. Bach in 1741: “The famous man, who has the greatest praise in our town in music, and the greatest admiration of connoisseurs, does not get into condition to delight others with the mingling of his tones until he has played something from the printed or written page, and has thus set his powers of imagination in motion.”

Mozart and Bach did not view a piece of music as something only to play as written—that was just the first step. The piece was to be used to inspire creation, to “set the powers of imagination in motion”! Mozart and Bach had the attitude of creators, not of modern performers. A score is a diving board into the pools of creativity.

What an inspiring and liberating outlook!

Forrest the teacher

The book contains many insights that teachers can put into practical use, the vast majority of which involve some kind of creative activity.

The excellent solution to the aforementioned “Für Elise Irritation Syndrome” is one such insight, because it helps the student to understand the opening motif, which then helps them play it more insightfully.

Another one that particularly appealed to me is as follows:

I have always loved the piece by Kabalevsky usually translated as Fairy Tale, and I teach it regularly. However, it begins with quite a challenge: there are seven B-flats in a row, making a melody that students often murder by denying it its life-giving inflections.

Here’s one way I help students grasp the nature and importance of inflection in music, especially with melodies like this one. I show a student the following sentence and then ask the student, “Can you read this sentence aloud?”

“All the money he had had had had no power to change the outcome.”

The student is puzzled because all those “hads” make no sense. Then I ask the student, “Can you change the way you say those four ‘hads’ so that the sentence makes some sense?”

Try it yourself! I’ve now put this into practise several times with students and it’s remarkably effective, and it is just one of many great practical pedagogy tips and ideas.

Conclusion

Hopefully these few brief outtakes have whet your appetite for this wonderful book. I highly recommend it! Music-Creativity-Joy will enrich your teaching, reassure you, and remind you why you love music in the first place.