Piano4t Improv
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All Students preparing for Grade exams are recommended to use the Hofnotes on-line training pages to practise for the aural tests. 

At higher grades  you must be able to discuss with the examiner musical features such as texture, form, style, and period of a piece of music.  My own  web pages to help with these parts of the test at Grade 5+ and at GCSE are available here!

 

 

 

 

 

Many people are looking for the door to the treasury of music in the wrong places. They obstinately keep hammering on the locked gates and pass right by the open doors that are accessible to everybody.

- Zoltan Kodaly

Improvisation games: notes for teachers

All rhythm and pitch games can be used as a resource for improvisation. 

Always improvise in the new key when you are learning a different scale.  (Try modes too!)

Also try:

  • performing a mime and asking the students for a sound track - using voices, bodies or instruments
  • starting from a poem, a picture or even a shopping list
  • start with a simple phrase, and produce different versions:
    • high and low versions
    • fast and slow versions
    • staccato and legato versions
  • when this is easy, try variations
    • major, minor or modal variations
    • repeat the phrase starting on notes of an ascending or descending scale
    • produce a 'happy', 'angry' or 'sad' variation on the theme
    • upside down or reversed versions
    • transpose the theme

This paper, produced as part of the CT ABRSM course in June 2006, looks at ideas for teaching improvisation and composition in more detail.

Resources

  • Jazz Piano from Scratch, Charles Beale
  • Do It Improvisation Vols I and II, J. Froseth
  • Cakewalk