Forging Pathways to Improvise Music
Forging Pathways to Improvise Music

Author: Joseph Montelione

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-22

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1000932974

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A step-by-step resource on forging one’s own pathway to improvise music, this book guides the musician through a clear and simple method that will easily translate to the reader’s genre of choice. Many musicians struggle with improvisation. Coincidentally, educators also find it challenging to integrate improvisation into curriculum. This book breaks down the barriers most performers and educators combat in the learning and teaching of improvisation, and is a helpful approach to demystify the complicated sphere of music improvisation. Divided into three sections, the first part of the book helps the reader develop an improvisatorial mindset to mentally conceive musical ideas, regardless of genre. The second portion then connects the improviser’s mindset to translating those ideas into a compelling musical performance in real time. The book’s final third assists the reader with discovering how to apply this method of improvisation to the nuanced liturgical, comedic, jazz, and classical styles. Forging Pathways to Improvise Music offers a practical introduction to improvisational methods essential for educators, students, and musicians of diverse educational backgrounds and musical genres.

The Pianist's Guide to Historic Improvisation
The Pianist's Guide to Historic Improvisation

Author: John J. Mortensen

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0190920394

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Keyboard artists in the time of J.S. Bach were simultaneously performers, composers, and improvisers. By the twentieth century, however, the art of improvisation was all but lost. Today, vanishingly few classically-trained musicians can improvise with fluent, stylistic integrity. Many now question the system of training that leaves players dependent upon the printed page, and would welcome a new approach to musicianship that would enable modern performers to recapture the remarkable creative freedom of a bygone era. The Pianist's Guide to Historic Improvisation opens a pathway of musical discovery as the reader learns to improvise with confidence and joy. Useful as either a college-level textbook or a guide for independent study, the book is eminently practical. Author John Mortensen explains even the most complex ideas in a lucid, conversational tone, accompanied by hundreds of musical examples. Mortensen pairs every concept with hands-on exercises for step-by-step practice of each skill. Professional-level virtuosity is not required; players of moderate skill can manage the material. Suitable for professionals, conservatory students, and avid amateurs, The Pianist's Guide leads to mastery of improvisational techniques at the Baroque keyboard.

Improv Wisdom
Improv Wisdom

Author: Patricia Ryan Madson

Publisher: Harmony

Published: 2010-03-24

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0307531848

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In an irresistible invitation to lighten up, look around, and live an unscripted life, a master of the art of improvisation explains how to adopt the attitudes and techniques used by generations of musicians and actors. Let’s face it: Life is something we all make up as we go along. No matter how carefully we formulate a “script,” it is bound to change when we interact with people with scripts of their own. Improv Wisdom shows how to apply the maxims of improvisational theater to real-life challenges—whether it’s dealing with a demanding boss, a tired child, or one of life’s never-ending surprises. Patricia Madson distills thirty years of experience into thirteen simple strategies, including “Say Yes,” “Start Anywhere,” “Face the Facts,” and “Make Mistakes, Please,” helping readers to loosen up, think on their feet, and take on everything life has to offer with skill, chutzpah, and a sense of humor.

Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism
Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism

Author: Gavin Rae

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-11

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1000222616

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This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book’s chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard—in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche—and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, and the visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines. Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

Musicians in the Making
Musicians in the Making

Author: John Scott Rink

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0199346674

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Musicians are continually 'in the making', tapping into their own creative resources while deriving inspiration from teachers, friends, family members and listeners. Amateur and professional performers alike tend not to follow fixed routes in developing a creative voice: instead, their artistic journeys are personal, often without foreseeable goals. The imperative to assess and reassess one's musical knowledge, understanding and aspirations is nevertheless a central feature of life as a performer. Musicians in the Making explores the creative development of musicians in both formal and informal learning contexts. It promotes a novel view of creativity, emphasizing its location within creative processes rather than understanding it as an innate quality. It argues that such processes may be learned and refined, and furthermore that collaboration and interaction within group contexts carry significant potential to inform and catalyze creative experiences and outcomes. The book also traces and models the ways in which creative processes evolve over time. Performers, music teachers and researchers will find the rich body of material assembled here engaging and enlightening. The book's three parts focus in turn on 'Creative learning in context', 'Creative processes' and 'Creative dialogue and reflection'. In addition to sixteen extended chapters written by leading experts in the field, the volume includes ten 'Insights' by internationally prominent performers, performance teachers and others. Practical aids include abstracts and lists of keywords at the start of each chapter, which provide useful overviews and guidance on content. Topics addressed by individual authors include intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, performance experience, practice and rehearsal, 'self-regulated performing', improvisation, self-reflection, expression, interactions between performers and audiences, assessment, and the role of academic study in performers' development.

Purposeful Pathways, Book 1, Second Edition
Purposeful Pathways, Book 1, Second Edition

Author: Roger Sams

Publisher:

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780991065684

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A collection of curricular materials for learning music through active music making. Based on the philosophies of Orff, Kodály, and Dalcroze, this collection of developmentally sequenced learning activities offers elementary music educators diverse choices for how to present folk song material, including lessons in singing, literacy, movement, improvisation, composition and instrumental ensemble. Includes a CD-ROM of PDF files for printing hands-on manipulatives. Optional CD-ROM of electronic visuals is also available for purchase.

Music Is Rapid Transportation
Music Is Rapid Transportation

Author: Lawrence Joseph

Publisher: Charivari Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1895166047

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A truly alternative look at music lists, not one that merely includes the obvious but shows the connections of popular music to the avant garde, the obscure, the experimental, the quirky, and the adventurous, this edition leads the curious reader towards new musical experiences hitherto unknown to them.

Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness
Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness

Author: Edward W. Sarath

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2013-04-02

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 143844723X

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Jazz, America's original art form, can be a catalyst for creative and spiritual development. With its unique emphasis on improvisation, jazz offers new paradigms for educational and societal change. In this provocative book, musician and educator Edward W. Sarath illuminates how jazz offers a continuum for transformation. Inspired by the long legacy of jazz innovators who have used meditation and related practices to bring the transcendent into their lives and work, Sarath sees a coming shift in consciousness, one essential to positive change. Both theoretical and practical, the book uses the emergent worldview known as Integral Theory to discuss the consciousness at the heart of jazz and the new models and perspectives it offers. On a more personal level, the author provides examples of his own involvement in educational reform. His design of the first curriculum at a mainstream educational institution to incorporate a significant meditation and consciousness studies component grounds a radical new vision.

Music Theory Through Improvisation
Music Theory Through Improvisation

Author: Ed Sarath

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 113521526X

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Designed for Music Theory courses, Music Theory Through Improvisation presents a unique approach to basic theory and musicianship training that examines the study of traditional theory through the art of improvisation. The book follows the same general progression of diatonic to non-diatonic harmony in conventional approaches, but integrates improvisation, composition, keyboard harmony, analysis, and rhythm. Conventional approaches to basic musicianship have largely been oriented toward study of common practice harmony from the Euroclassical tradition, with a heavy emphasis in four-part chorale writing. The author’s entirely new pathway places the study of harmony within improvisation and composition in stylistically diverse format, with jazz and popular music serving as important stylistic sources. Supplemental materials include a play-along audio in the downloadable resources for improvisation and a companion website with resources for students and instructors.