Page 68 - How to Shine on Stage

tures, focusing on linear movement instead of reading note by note,
simultaneous clapping the rhythm and singing the melody)
3. expressive playing at the right tempo
4. building the students’ confidence in their a vista reading skills by us-
ing simple notations and gradually increasing the difficulty

2.1.7.1.2 Improvisation Practice
66 Improvisation is a complex musical activity involving various processes
that take place in a performance simultaneously in real time. Improvisa-
tion is possible when one internalizes the musical vocabulary and is able
to understand and express musical ideas spontaneously during the musi-
How to Shine on Stage to be present in all people from an early age (Burnard, 2012). Howev-
cal performance. The basic form of this kind of creative ability is thought
er, it should be acknowledged that, despite its free nature, improvisation
is subject to historical and cultural influences, with the underlying in-
tention of transforming traditional elements by adding new ones (Ram-
shaw, 2010).
The fact that the ability to improvise is a natural and spontaneous
human activity, representing the beginnings of musical expression, is ev-
idenced by very young children who playfully and joyfully improvise
with their voices as early as at the age of two or three (Pucihar, 2016).
The skills that enable us to improvise are often understood as a continu-
um, yet, it is difficult to discern the achievement of the expert level of im-
provisation (Biasutti, 2015).
Beaty (2015) states that in improvisation, a musician faces the
unique challenges of managing multiple simultaneous processes in real
time, such as generating and evaluating melodic and rhythmic sequenc-
es, coordinating performance with other musicians in the ensemble, and
making elaborate fine motor movements to create aesthetically pleas-
ing music. Many improvisers point out that it is essential for a musician
to hear in advance from within them what a piece will sound like before
laying the instrument (Odena, 2012). In addition to the internal hear-
ing, improvising requires the development of the ability to internalize
the music in the short time of the actual performance of the improvisa-
tion, sufficient knowledge of the analysis of musical structures, the abili-
ty to control the instrument/voice to achieve the performance intention
with fluency and persuasiveness, sufficient knowledge of the improvisa-
tion forming strategies and, if necessary, of their modification, and the
ability to transform the stylistic conventions into an authentic musical
expression (Kratus, 1995, in Pucihar, 2016).