Reflection 3: Improvisation, Failure and Process

This reflection emerged from Workshop 3, where we were asked to share a personal lesson we have learned through assessing creative work. My initial input was the importance of valuing process against the goal, which has been an important insight for my coming from an engineering background and moving towards its intersection with the artistic/musical realms.

Starting with this idea of process-centred learning, I would want to extend a bit more by grabbing some ideas that come from my own practice and reflection as a musician and, more in particular, from music improvisation. I think there are three foundational values in music performance that could be of interest in the learning context.

1. Improvisation: In music performance, improvisation stands as a fundamental value. Improvising doesn’t mean to be spontaneous. Actually, improvisation in music is tightly related to a high developing of skills [1]. The ability to improvise relates to having a skillset with which you are prepared to the uncertain. In education, such skills are fundamental nowadays: instead of preparing students for every kind of context or environment, we should focus on how to give the proper skillset to adapt to an uncertain contexts. Eloquence, body language, empathy, they are high-level skills that I feel could be especially important to develop in contemporary academic contexts.
2. Failure: In jazz improvisation, there is a famous adage: “it is not a mistake if you play it twice”. This reflects the place of mistakes in music improvisation not only as something accepted, but further something that can be used as new creative material. If you played a note out of scale, maybe that could be the starting point to change to a new scale. Surprise becomes serendipity (jazz vibraphonist Stefon Harris illustrates this masterfully on his TED talk [2]). I feel there is an urgent need to value mistakes in the classroom. Because technical barriers continuously lower with the advent of AI and other technologies, so it has the frustration barrier in students (and likely, in ourselves as well). Now we can create an app/video/image/song in seconds, just with a prompt, which easily drags us to the comfort zone of of self-indulgence and maybe, lack of criticism. Relygin on this automatic and transparent technologies disconnects us with the trial and error process, that moment where we materially work in our goal and we transform the idea through the making itself. This leads me to the final musical value.
3. Value the process: Particularly within music improvisation contexts, the process tends to be much more praised than the goal, or the polished final song [3]. You usually go to see and listen an improvisation concert. It’s less often (although still common) that you listen to a recorded improvisation. Why? Because improvisation is impregnated of value by its present making, by its liveliness. We like to feel the risk, the uncertain, the openness. The more you focus on the moment as an improviser – or the less you think of the goal, the polishing, or the final recorded song – the more you feel you are doing it well (this is my opinion that coincides with some impro literature and also many improvisers I have interviewed, but I have to raise the point that it is not an unanimous view within music improvisation). How could we take this values into the classroom? Here is where assessments come into play again. Agreeing with what many of my PGCert classmates argued, we have to look for assessments that focus on valuing a proper process. Even if it ends in a failed goal, the process can be a success in itself. We should pay attention and work into new ways of acknowledging the process. This, as a byproduct, will help making space to plural voices that go beyond the conventional skills that are hegemonically praised.

[1] Biasutti, M., & Frezza, L. (2009). Dimensions of music improvisation. Creativity Research Journal, 21(2-3), 232-242.

[2] https://www.ted.com/embed/stefon_harris_there_are_no_mistakes_on_the_bandstand

[3] Peplowski, K. (1998). The process of improvisation. Organization Science, 9(5), 560-561.