Powell, B. & Berstein, S. (2017). Popular Music and Modern Band Principles. Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education (2017).
One topic that the authors Powell and Burstein talked about is the importance of improvisation. Improvising is creating something spontaneously. It helps to expand the creativity in people as they are able to do whatever they want with their (music) ability to create their own composition. In my Music Education Lab, we have to incorporate 5 minutes of improvising in our daily practice and record one day as our weekly assignment. At the beginning it was pretty challenging mainly because I was very used to have outlines to follow when I do assignments, but my Prof gave me a lot of flexibility, so I was able to compose my own music.
However, despite the 2 months of daily improvising, people would assume that improvising would get easier. I actually find it harder still and still have to sit down and sometimes write an outline to my improvisation which is not the assignment. And there is also this excitement when it comes to improvising as, again, the freedom you have to create something spontaneously. Improvising can come easy to people as they have a lot of creativity or hard if they don’t.
Another topic is music as a second language. In the article, it says that “music is more as a communicative tool (language) and more about music learning.” I feel like it is also a communicative took as it is such a subjective thing that even words can’t talk about
I find it hard to incorporate classical repertoire and modern music into music courses. In the article it says that modern music is hard to define, because it is always changing. At my high school, we always play 1 classical piece and 1 modern piece. We learn classical to learn the basic skills and techniques needed to play any piece. We then incorporate the skills into modern music. I don’t believe that you should only learn one genre of music in a course because there is so many skills can that be transferred to a contrasting genre.
Thanks for your response. Thanks for reflecting on improvisation and the concept of music as a second language. In terms of improvisation, do you think anyone can improvise at any stage of their music education? Should anyone be encouraged to improvise? Do you need a “formal” musical “basis”? There are a lot of implications for those words I just wrote, but as presented in class, some may argue that you need a classical music basis in order to move into popular music education concepts such as improvisation. Yet this does not exactly fit with the concept that Powell & Burstein (2017) concept of music as a second language, where learners naturally “acquire” music learning like a language rather than being…