482921

research-article2013
GMTXXX10.1177/1048371313482921General Music TodayNiknafs

Article
General Music Today

Free Improvisation: What It Is, 27(1) 29–34

© National Association for
Music Education 2013
and Why We Should Apply It in DOI: 10.1177/1048371313482921
gmt.sagepub.com

Our General Music Classrooms

Nasim Niknafs1

Abstract
Improvisation, the third content standard for the National Standards for Music Education (Music Educators National
Conference, 1994), has received less attention from music teachers. This article advocates for more improvisation
specifically free improvisation in general music classrooms. The nature of free improvisation, and its evolution in the
Unites States and Europe is presented, followed by a rationale in incorporating free improvisation in general music
classrooms. It is emphasized that free improvisation can be a successful entry point for those teachers who do not have
ample time or do not feel comfortable using improvisation activities. Free improvisation has two distinct and valuable
features: it can be played by anyone regardless of age and musical capability, and it is the accumulation of musical
identities of all the participants involved in making the music. This author asserts that free improvisation is inherently
democratic, and by using it teachers can create a space for students to feel more self-assured, and autonomous.

Keywords
creativity, democratic, free improvisation, general music, improvisation, music education

Life is one big improvisation, and every human is a master
improviser.
—Tom Hall
Imagine a music performance by fourth graders in a gen-
eral music classroom comprising two groups of singers
singing in canon, xylophone players, and tubano players
who are prepared to play Old Abram Brown. The instru-
ment players in this ensemble are encouraged to impro-
vise on their instruments in the form of Rondo (ABACA),
where the A section, which is the complete song, is played
and sung by the entire ensemble and the even sections, B
and C, are consecutively improvised by xylophone play-
ers and tubano players. The improvising students are
instructed to follow some parameters for their improvisa-
tion, such as playing certain notes and a certain time
length. All the students involved in this performance as
well as the listeners, including the parents, other teachers,
and the staff of the school, know the structure of the
piece. There is an expectation of what will happen in the
song, regardless of all the various improvisational ideas
of each student. As the audience listens, they follow the
song smoothly because the students are using the familiar
language and structure of songs that are found in general
music classrooms.
Now imagine a music performance by the same cre-
ative and talented ensemble, but this time they do not
make music based on the conventions of a song or piece
previously learned, practiced, and performed in their gen-
eral music classrooms. Their music is not centered on a
particular principle. Each student performer chooses
sounds for the intriguing effects that he or she produces on
the instruments, incorporating the use of nondeliberate
and accidental ways of making music. The function of the
sounds is not situated in the traditional interplay of mel-
ody, harmony, and form but rather in the feeling and
exploratory nature of the music made by the student per-
formers. As the audience listens, they hear the interactions
of sounds that are encouraged by components other than
sequence, structure, and grammar (syntax) of a particular
genre of music. Instead, the music enjoys a curious ven-
ture of commitment to no commitment.
The latter example is a musical experience called free
improvisation that gradually emerged around 50 years ago
in the United States and the United Kingdom, pioneered
by musicians such as Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, Evan
Parker, and Ornette Coleman. To fully understand free
improvisation, I have provided three examples of free
1
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Corresponding Author:
Nasim Niknafs, 7408 N Greenview Avenue, #3E,
Chicago, IL 60626, USA.
Email: nasimniknafs2013@u.northwestern.edu
30 General Music Today 27(1)

Table 1. Web Resources for Listening Examples.

Web resources for listening examples

1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H8Iw_JYBxM
This video shows Sabina Rakcheyeva on violin, Kinan Azmeh on clarinet, Kathleen Tagg on piano, and Todd Isler on
percussions at the Bechstein’s Hall, New York, recorded live on April 4, 2009. This is an excellent example to start
familiarizing yourself with free improvisation that might be more familiar to the listeners’ ears.
2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdnXFXrUhE&feature=related
This is a fine example by Pauline Oliveros on accordion—she developed a strategy called deep listening. Deep listening is a
way of employing sound as a source of meditation. I refer the reader to Oliveros’s website for further reading on this topic:
www.paulineoliveros.us/
3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmjaeOpAQOk&feature=related
This video shows Tony Oxley on drums and Derek Bailey on guitar at the Brooklyn Knitting Factory, 1995. This is a modern
take on free improvisation by its pioneers. The reader can get the feel of such music.

improvisation in Table 1 and will walk you through the
first example.
In this example, a quartet of four expert musicians per-
forms in a small and welcoming environment. The music
starts smoothly with the percussion player entering with
the sound of his udu, followed by the piano player and
clarinet player at the same time. The transition of one
sound to three sounds at this instant is so smooth that one
might think that the piano and clarinet are one instrument.
About 1 minute and 30 seconds into the music, the violin
player, with the same silky attitude as the other players,
enters the music. One can see that the piano player uses
various ways of creating sound on the piano and not nec-
essarily on the keys themselves. The music has a colorful
and at times whimsical feel to it. One striking element
about this music all through the performance is that the
performers are coherent, and profoundly listening to one
another. The music has an overarching form, starting
smoothly, reaching to its peak in the middle, and ending
the piece similar to the start of the piece. The performers
did not use any score as the basis of their music; there was
an apparent synergy among them through which they
breathed, listened, and performed together.
This example illustrates that the pillar of free improvi-
sation is not the chord progression, harmony, or the pre-
defined syntax but rather the interplay between sound and
silence, the feel and texture of the sound, and the ways in
which performers respond to one another’s musical stim-
uli. Not having any commitment to predefined musical
language or not following any rule in this music does not
connote disorder and confusion. The music finds its own
path through each performer’s musical and creative deci-
sion, and this is what we call commitment to no
commitment.
Free improvisation has two distinct features along
with its other beneficial characteristics, which makes it a
valuable creative musical practice in our general music
classrooms: It can be played by anyone regardless of
age and musical capability, and is the accumulation of
musical identities of all the participants involved in mak-
ing the music. In other words, free improvisation is inher-
ently democratic since everyone is welcomed to
participate in creating it. Free improvisation encourages
students to value collective decision making while enjoy-
ing their individualistic approaches to music making.
Free improvisation can instill confidence in students,
raise students’ awareness of sound, foster trust, and alle-
viate performance anxiety. More specifically, free impro-
visation helps refine students’ listening skills and thus
their musicianship.
Derek Bailey (1992) believes diversity is the most con-
sistent characteristic of free improvisation. He further
continues that free improvisation “has no stylistic or idi-
omatic commitment. It has no prescribed idiomatic sound.
The characteristics of freely improvised music are estab-
lished only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or
persons playing it” (p. 83). Although Bailey regards free
improvisation as a demanding musical craft, he also
believes that free improvisation “is open to use by almost
anyone—beginners, children and non-musicians. The
skill and intellect required is whatever is available. It can
be an activity of enormous complexity and sophistication,
or the simplest and most direct expression” (p. 83).
As music educators, improvisation is triply inter-
twined in our lives: It is an essential part of our daily
lives, our teaching careers, and our music making and
teaching. As human beings, we improvise on a day-to-
day basis when, for example, we converse with one
another or there is an obstacle in life and we try to find a
solution the problem. As music makers, we improvise on
our behaviors, attitudes, and stage presence when we
rehearse and perform with other people so as to have the
optimal musical experience. As teachers, we constantly
improvise based on our students’ needs and desires
according to circumstances in our classroom manage-
ment, lesson planning, and school responsibilities. As
music teachers, we improvise by coming up with inven-
tive ideas to fill in the blanks when a student needs
Niknafs 31

Table 2. Resources on Free Improvisation.

Resources on free improvisation

1. International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM): http://www.isimprov.org/
ISIM promotes performance, education, and research in improvised music and illuminates connections between musical
improvisation and creativity across fields.
2. European Free Improvisation Pages (EFIP): http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/
EFIP is an information resource for all aspects of European free improvisation.
3. Watson, B. (2004). Derek Bailey and the story of free improvisation. London, England: Verso.
This book, through interviews with the pioneers of free improvisation such as Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, illustrates the
entire history of free improvisation.

assistance in his or her performance or music-making
activity. It is then all the more astonishing that improvisa-
tion, the third National Standard for Music Education,
has received the least amount of attention from music
teachers (Orman, 2002; Ward-Steinman, 2007). Whatever
the reason may be, I suggest that free improvisation can
be a great entry point for those teachers who do not have
ample time or do not feel comfortable using improvisa-
tional activities in their music classrooms to encourage
more creative practices in their teaching.
Free Improvisation: History and
Definition
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a movement emerged
that encouraged a less bounded style of jazz improvisation
in contrast to the more restricted styles of bebop and hard
bop (Sansom, 2001). Musicians such as Ornette Coleman,
Cecil Taylor, and, later on, John Coltrane were part of this
improvisation movement. The movement was not, how-
ever, exclusively confined to jazz improvisation. A similar
style change took place in Western art music. At the time
when serialism, with its sophisticated, calculated, and
rigid adherence to time, notation, and organization, was at
its zenith, composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, György
Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, and John Cage were creating music
in which indeterminacy and uncertainty were integral
parts of their compositions. This movement inevitably
“led to an openness towards the role of notation and devel-
opment of graphic scores and a shift by performers
towards a more improvisational role” (Sansom, 2001, p.
29). Here it is pertinent to mention musicians who played
key roles in shaping free improvisation: Cornelius Cardew,
Eddie Prévost, Derek Bailey, Gavin Bryars, and Tony
Oxley. In Table 2, I have provided further reading on the
history of free improvisation and organizations that sup-
port free improvisation.
Free improvisation must be considered from two per-
spectives, as both a process and a product. Free improvi-
sation, according to Matthew Sansom (2001), is akin to
abstract expressionism in the visual arts. In both media,
intellect, form, and structure come second after the
immediate emergent experience; consciousness and a
pronounced technique follow unconsciousness and
exploration.
In free improvisation, significance shifted from the
harmonic progression, counterpoint, and melodic and
thematic qualities of the music to the timbre, texture,
color, and overall disposition of the sound. Arbitrary,
spontaneous, and haphazard sounds, along with sounds
derived from the environment and nature, gained in
importance. Idiomatic music gave way to a less gram-
matical and standardized aesthetic. The participatory
roles in music creation, including composer, improviser,
or performer, changed from strictly bound functions to
“looser,” less definitive ones. The performer became as
involved in the process of music making as the composer,
and the composer was no longer a mere music architect
but a part of the performance. The improviser was not
bounded by stylistic limits and was free to explore beyond
the peripheries of standard music. He or she was free to
create by whatever means he or she desired. Accordingly,
music became more of a happening than a prescribed
work of art. It became more experimental.
Why Free Improvisation at Schools?
As stated by Lukas Foss, a German-born American com-
poser, free improvisation blurs the sharp line between the
role of the composer and the performer (as cited in
Sansom, 2001). Free improvisation also blurs the line
between the soloist and the accompanist, the performer
and the audience, and, specifically in our case, the music
teacher and the music student.
The concept of changing roles in music making is of
great importance in the discourse of free improvisation,
particularly for music educators. For music teachers, this
phenomenon is something we grapple with on a day-to-
day basis: deciding whether we are the leaders or facilita-
tors in our classrooms, whether we are teachers first or
musicians first, whether we are in a music ensemble with
our peers or in an orchestra where we are the sole
32
conductor, and whether we should have a monologue or a
dialogue with our students in our music classrooms. No
matter what we presume our role, free improvisation pro-
vides an opportunity to modify these roles, allowing us to
communicate with our students and create nurturing rela-
tionships with them.
Since free improvisation does not adhere to a specific
style and idiom of music, it absorbs the accumulation of
musical styles and languages of all the students involved
in the process of free improvising. Each student, whether
competent or with less developed skills, and whether
born and raised in or outside the United States, can par-
ticipate and be a part of the shared musical experience.
John Stevens (2007) states, “The main requirement [in
free improvisation] is to have an open-minded enthusi-
asm for music” (p. 2). Although free improvisation is a
stylefree music, each musical interaction, from one per-
former to another and from one ensemble to another,
reveals the various sonic identities and historical back-
grounds of each performer. Through free improvisation
we can get to know our students more deeply and
become more aware of their musical preferences. With
this knowledge we can create a more relevant
curriculum.
Free improvisation not only serves students but also
provides valuable opportunities for music teachers. Music
teachers who have less experience in improvisation and
are more apprehensive about applying improvisation in
their music classrooms can use free improvisation tech-
niques to easily unravel the assumed mysteries of impro-
visation. Those who do not often improvise might be
self-conscious about their playing and fear the critical
opinions of others. Free improvisation creates a safe
space for both students and music teachers to experiment
with new ideas without the fear of making any mistakes.
Mistakes are celebrated, for “they highlight innocent
human failings . . . [and] the person who uses a sound as
a musical statement is the only possible judge of whether
it is musically valid or not” (Stevens, p. 2). In other
words, there are no mistakes in free improvisation. Free
improvisation is self-affirmation, a recouping of our
musical identities, whether as students or as teachers.
Entry Points to the Application of
Free Improvisation in the Music
Classroom
Free improvisation can be used in some commonly used
general music activities, including speech and poetry, sto-
rytelling, movement and stomp activities, and bordun
exercises. The resources listed in Table 3 can assist
teachers as they incorporate free improvisation in the
classroom.
General Music Today 27(1)
Table 3. Resources for Applying Free Improvisation in Music
Classrooms.
Resources for applying free improvisation in music
classrooms
Agrell, J. (2008). Improvisation games for classical musicians.
Chicago, IL: GIA.
Agrell, J. (2010). Improv games for one player. Chicago, IL: GIA.
Hall, T. (2009). Free improvisation: A practical guide. Boston,
MA: Bee Boy Press.
Higgins, L., & Campbell, P. S. (2010). Free to be musical: Group
improvisation in music. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Education.
In this section, I highlighted two pedagogical possi-
bilities for those interested in applying this creative musi-
cal approach in their general music classrooms. Because
of the nature of free improvisation, these possibilities are
what I call entry points and should not be considered as
step-by-step instructions. Each entry point can be modi-
fied to meet the needs of different ensembles and music
classrooms. These entry points could be valuable for all
music teachers in all music-teaching venues but espe-
cially useful for music teachers who have not had exten-
sive experience in making and teaching music
improvisation.
Entry Points to the Application
of Free Improvisation in General
Music Classrooms
Entry Point 1: Greatest Mistakes!
Materials: The materials used are classroom instru-
ments such as Orff instruments, piano, guitar,
and so on.
Purpose: This entry point is specifically designed to
foster trust and reduce performance anxiety. The
intention of this entry point is to embrace mis-
takes, making them something to cherish rather
than hide. In the long term, this entry point is
also constructive in refining students’ sense of
form and structure as well as group leadership.
Instruction: The students can make any sound they
want on their instruments, and as loudly or as
softly as they wish; however, they should make
only one sound. As the start of this activity, the
teacher can instruct the students fade in one by
one. When the students produce the desired
sounds, they can sustain the sound until the
teacher has them fade out one by one. This rou-
tine can have many variations according to cir-
cumstances. It is up to the teacher and students
Niknafs
to navigate through this activity based on the
needs of the class.
To be considered: This entry point might be chaotic at
times. In the beginning, the sounds the students
create might be disorderly. However, with the
teacher’s encouragements (asking detailed ques-
tions about the quality of the sounds, the ways in
which one can enter the music and end the piece,
etc.), the students become more aware of what
they play and start to listen to each other. The
music starts to flourish from within. Eventually,
students make a complete piece of music using
sounds they might otherwise consider mistakes.
In the long term, the teacher can transfer the lead-
ing responsibility to the students.
Entry Point 2: Express Yourself. . .
Materials: The materials used are pitched class-
room instruments or any pitched instrument of
students’ choosing.
Purpose: This entry point provides a space for stu-
dents to express themselves musically accord-
ing to outside stimuli.
Instruction: The teacher performs a short musical
pattern comprising only four pitches on a
pitched instrument—it can be any phrase of his
or her choosing. One by one, all students in the
classroom or in the ensemble play the same pat-
tern on their instruments but with one condi-
tion: They need to add their own musical
expression to it, such as different rhythm,
dynamic, texture, and so on.
To be considered: As the previous entry point, this
entry point can also include variations. The
teacher can prompt students by asking them to
play a certain mood or a story. If the students are
more expert in their instruments, the teacher can
play a phrase comprising more than four pitches
or even a complete musical phrase that is be
familiar to students. An extension to this entry
point could be to play this activity in different
genres and help students understand the subtle-
ties of each style of music.
Moving Beyond
As a classically trained musician, I have always been ter-
rified of performing without written music. The term
improvisation had always elicited fear in my mind, a fear
that was difficult to overcome. It has not been long since
I finally found the courage, dedication, and peer support
33
to start improvising. And this entry point for me occurred
through one of my colleague’s suggestion to start a free
improvisation ensemble. Beginning with small steps,
eventually I made improvisation a central part of my
musical endeavors, in both music making and music
teaching. Free improvisation has changed my musical
life. I am in constant and direct contact with my instru-
ment, I play more in ensembles, and consequently I per-
form with musicians of all kinds and ages. Most important,
free improvisation has improved my abilities as a teacher:
I am more flexible toward learning goals and students’
desires and more at ease with unforeseen events.
It took me a long time to finally conquer my fear of
improvisation and to enjoy its benefits. Now I am aware
that part of my fear was lack of knowledge of the exact
nature of improvisation. Perhaps armed with more knowl-
edge and experiencing improvisation earlier, I would not
have been so reluctant to incorporate improvisation into
my musical and teaching careers. One reason for writing
this article is to transfer this achievement to music teach-
ers who have not yet been exposed to this exceptional
musical experience. I have struggled to reach to this point,
and I would like to share my knowledge and experiences
with music teachers, who might find a valuable new tool
in free improvisation. With free improvisation, teachers
can create a space for students to feel more self-assured,
autonomous, and self-directed. Improvisation can expand
boundaries, heighten awareness, and increase creative
thinking. Our task is to overcome our fears of improvisa-
tion in order to create opportunities for our students to
achieve the most meaningful experiences of their creative
and musical lives.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
Bailey, D. (1992). Improvisation: Its nature and practice in
music. New York, NY: Da Capo Press.
Orman, E. K. (2002). Comparison of the National Standards for
music education and elementary music specialists’ use of
class time. Journal of Research in Music Education, 50,
155-164.
Music Educators National Conference. 1994. The school music
program: A new vision. Reston, VA: MENC.
Sansom, M. (2001). Abstract expressionism and free improvisa-
tion. Leonardo Music Journal, 11, 29-34.
Stevens, J. (2007). Search and reflect: A music workshop hand-
book. Middlesex, England: Rockschool.
34 General Music Today 27(1)

Author Biography include improvisation in general music classes, community

music programs, and equity in music education. She holds
Nasim Niknafs is currently pursuing her PhD degree in Music
degrees from New York University, Kingston University
Education at Northwestern University, where she is completing
her dissertation research on K-8 general music teachers’ use of London, and University of Art Tehran.
improvisation in the State of Illinois. Her areas of research