We argue in this article for greater role for improvisation in the music classroom. Based on an extensive examination of scholarship about improvisational practices, we propose three conceptualizations—ability, culture, experience—that can serve to guide the teaching of improvisation. When considered as an ability, improvisation is a creative aspect of overall musicianship; considered as culture, improvisation is a distinctive way to understand specific musical practices; finally, considered as experience, improvisation is a distinctive way of being in and through music that reflects the fact that the act of living is largely improvisatory. Although we see merit in all three conceptualizations and provide pedagogical examples to support each in turn, we conclude that the last of these holds the greatest potential to positively affect school music classrooms.
Community music facilitators move in and between many diverse settings. They can be found facilitating local music activities in arts centers, schools, sporting grounds, recording studios, places of worship, living rooms, and a wide range of other community contexts. This article focuses on community music facilitators who have been invited into the school environment to stimulate or establish active music-making opportunities. It shows that community music facilitators can provide music educators working in schools with models of a range of teaching practices, which can connect to a wide diversity of learning styles, especially in socially and culturally diverse environments. Likewise, music educators working in schools (who tend to have formal education qualifications) can provide pedagogical models for community music practices. Both positions have much to offer each other in this respect.
The purpose of this article is to explore the desires and tensions inherent within the act of facilitating creative music-making workshops. Following the introduction, the article is divided into three sections: (1) a discussion of the workshop event as a contingent structure through which creative music-making may take place; (2) an exploration of the facilitation process as a mechanism of engaging participants in creative music-making; (3) as a heuristic framework, a notion of the gift is shown as a means to think through face-toface musical encounters. This article concludes that the ideas and concepts presented may assist workshop facilitators in thinking more deeply about the processes they engage in.
This article discusses the concept community in relation to the larger concept of community music (CM). It suggests that the community within community music is best understood as hospitality. Hospitality encompasses the central characteristics of community music practice, broadly understood as people, participation, places, equality of opportunity, and diversity. This does not mean that hospitality should replace the term community , but that hospitality evokes the practical meaning of community in that which is named community music . From this perspective, community can be conceived as “an act of hospitality” that runs deeply through the practice of CM, and that an acute awareness of hospitality exposes the distinctiveness of CM in music education.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.