Providing Helpful Boundaries for Improvisation

Again drawing on inspiration from my friend Agnieszka Lasko (author of the First Class Piano method!) and her fabulous ideas regarding improvising at the piano, I set out to help one of my students become more comfortable trying his own improvisation. He has a great ear for music and some definite natural talent, but he is reluctant when it comes to trying his own ideas. So once he had finished learning the piece Dragon Dance from Piano Safari Level One, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to give him some helpful parameters to experiment with improvising. After all, as we discussed, dragons are known for flying, so we shouldn’t keep this poor dragon confined to one place on the keyboard! In light of that, I told him that he should play everything as he had already learned it with the exception that for the right hand melodic parts, he could move to any register on the keyboard. He loved this! Here’s what he came up with:

It was so fun to watch him enjoy moving around the keys and contributing his own creative touch through a little bit of improvisation on this imaginative piece!

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