{"id":49,"date":"2009-12-17T02:16:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T07:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/spblog\/2009\/12\/17\/at-end-of-my-first-semester-teaching\/"},"modified":"2016-01-22T10:27:34","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T15:27:34","slug":"at-end-of-my-first-semester-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/at-end-of-my-first-semester-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Improv Class End-of-Semester Wrapup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of my first semester teaching improv class, I am smiling about how much fun it was, despite the very small class. We practiced some great ear-training exercises, like follow the leader by repeating a 4-beat snippet of melody, predictably trickier the less diatonic the melody. Another good drill we liked (which you can do by yourself at the piano), is to play a chord, then, eyes-closed, play another note and figure out by ear how it fits with the chord.<\/p>\n<p>We tried techniques to break out of ruts, like putting a speech on the music stand and &#8220;playing&#8221; the speech. Sometimes our warmups were the most sensitive. Usually I forgot to turn on the recorder for the first, and best, one.<\/p>\n<p>We listened to a bit of Jeffrey Agrell and friends&#8217; wonderful CD &#8220;Mosaics&#8221;, which helped us open up to the idea of letting one voice have a lot of space to solo, rather than jumping in and thickening the texture with constant imitation or constant accompaniment.<\/p>\n<p>I feel like I need a teacher too, to get feedback and keep out of ruts, so I&#8217;ve signed up for the February workshop of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.musicforpeople.org\/\">Music for People<\/a>. I&#8217;m hoping it will be a fantastic weekend of improvising. I&#8217;d better make sure I have my horn playing in good shape so I&#8217;ll be able to play as long as I want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of my first semester teaching improv class, I am smiling about how much fun it was, despite the very small class. We practiced some great ear-training exercises, like follow the leader by repeating a 4-beat snippet of melody, predictably trickier the less diatonic the melody. Another good drill we liked (which you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[33,94,96],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-improvising","tag-improvisation","tag-jeff-agrell","tag-music-for-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}