The new (old) normal
Composition and improvisation don't belong on a pedestal, they belong to everyone
As Seth Godin eloquently puts it, “If you went back to 1820 or even 1920, all the sudden changes would discombobulate you. And the same is true for someone who came forward to today. […] 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. If you wanted to become a successful professional musician, it was near-essential: access to printed music was expensive and difficult to get hold of; if you couldn’t create your own, you were very restricted.
“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 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”. — John J. Mortensen, The Pianist’s Guide to Historic Improvisation, Oxford University Press, 2020.
This is actually still true outside of the classical world. Writing your own songs is essential to success as a pop musician. If you can’t do it, many people won’t take you seriously. Rightly or wrongly, “they are a covers band” is not generally considered a compliment.
For various reasons, creative musicianship has declined in importance in classical piano pedagogy. It’s become abnormal. This is risky.
Creativity in education is normal. In language classes all over the world, children are being asked to write stories and improvise conversations with one another. It’s a primary method for testing a student’s comprehension. Putting the theory into practise is how we internalise it.
The purpose of this site is to renormalise creativity in piano lessons. I’m really glad you’re here. Please share it with other piano teachers!
Excellent. And I enjoyed the analogies.
My first encounter with the piano centered around making up songs. When I started formal lessons, playing became about right or wrong ways of doing things. Had composition and improvisation been part of my early training I never would have learned to fear both. I've spent many years working to recover that innocent pleasure I had of just making stuff up at the piano.