For Teachers
III. Creativity
Email exchange with a student on creativity training idea
I was thinking about implementation of expressive elements on the way home from the jam last night and ways to get me incorporating it better. I am going to work on creating and practicing with constraints, like we discussed, I think that is going to be helpful.
Always remember the kids in the sandbox. They make up rules to help make play fun. If the rules are too loose or too complicated though, the game falls apart.
My lesson idea would be building up a few lick ideas from scratch by starting simple then adding in a expressive elements to make it more complicated/interesting? Maybe talking through the elements and as we add them in.
Great idea! This is exactly what we did for hours in Chicago one year in the creativity training course. There were modules called “polish the turd” where you had to make an ordinary group of notes sound amazing. There were also ones called “microphrases” where you could only do 1, 2, or 3 notes at a time. We’ll start to incorporate these in lessons.
We also did a lesson where we did follow the leader where each person tries to play what the other just played and in time. That was helpful also. I think Combining these two might be good for me.
This is also great. There was one module where not only you had to copy someone else but harmonize what they were playing and then play it together a la Thin Lizzy or Iron Maiden. It was good fun. We’ll start this as well.