Composer Angeline Bell's favourite improvisation activities
Easy ideas to inspire your elementary students
As I wrote last week, I’m a big fan of Angeline Bell’s music — and my students are too!
In this post the popular composer shares two easy activites that you can use to inspire your younger students to get creative.
Improvisation inspiration #1: black key pentatonic
This is a real classic way to get started with student improvisation, but Angeline does it with contemporary style. Check out her explanation below:
The first thing I always do with my students when introducing them to composing or improvising is using the pentatonic scale. You have two choices: whether to start with the D♭ or to start with a G♭. The riff that I use is E♭ minor, B♭ minor, D♭ major, A♭ major and I ask them to use two notes to begin with, […] then three notes, […] then four and five, […] then two notes at the same time, […] and then two octaves, […] and then some tremolo maybe. That would be a whole lesson’s activity.
The slow increase in complexity that Angeline recommends is really crucial to ensure that your student doesn’t feel overwhelmed. My tip: get your students to make a recording of your accompaniment so they can play along at home.
Angeline got this idea from a former colleague called Patrick Allen, who is author of Composing Matters, published 2002 by Heinemann.
Improvisation inspiration #2: E blues
This is a great, easy introduction to the blues.
The second idea that I like to use is using the four note descending scale taken from “Fever” (E, D, C, B). The student plays just E, G, A, B♭, just those four notes to begin with. That's the E blues scale and we have lots of fun with that with me playing the bass line and then later on they go on to playing two hands if they're confident or they can record on their phones or on their digital piano that E, D, C, B bassline. And it's also quite nice to have a tacet in the end.
Here’s Angeline’s talented student Flora to show us how it’s done! Well done Flora!
Thanks to Flora’s parents for permission to use this video.
Interested in more?
Angeline has lots of ideas up her sleeve — if you’d like more, let us know in the comments!