2015 Link to the Dissertation: https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/24888 Scholars in many fields of study have examined confidence. Within music education, confidence is often studied through the lens of Bandura’s social cognitive theory, and for music improvisation, much confidence work has been accomplished through survey design and examined confidence to teach improvisation or gender differences. Though Bandura’s self-efficacy model provides a useful framework to study confidence as part of music (especially in understanding why people’s behavior may differ markedly in improvising), confidence may be important to improvising distinct from self- efficacy theory, and deserves inductive and explorative treatment; I completed three qualitative research studies on confident music improvising (CMI). These three studies are shared in this dissertation, a phenomenological study of CMI from the perspective of improvising performers (Chapter 2), a case study of teachers at the jazz portion of a summer music camp (Chapter 3), and most recently (Chapter 4), I explored CMI within the parameters of improvisation teachers helping students build a personal, subjective sense of confidence, which is needed to improvise musically. In the first study, interviews and observations were conducted with three self-described confident music improvisers: a bluegrass fiddler, a jazz bassist, and a baroque violinist. Participants described their learning experiences with CMI. The following essential themes emerged from that analysis – listening, criticism- free environment, sequential experiences, passion for a style, and openness to learning. The first three of these themes were considered pedagogical and the final two themes dispositional. In the second study, case study design was employed to test the essential pedagogical themes—listening, criticism-free environment, and sequential experiences—against situational reality of the jazz portion of a one-week summer music camp. The focus of this second study was on teaching CMI. Interviews, observations, and documents were used to triangulate data. Teaching through questions emerged as a theme of teaching CMI. In the third study, an emergent, responsive interviewing research design was used to explore the experiences of expert improvisation teachers’ teaching praxes for improving student confidence to improvise music. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand praxes of teaching CMI, that is, how expert improvisation teachers conceive the techniques they use to increase student confidence to improvise music. There were two research questions. What teaching praxes do participants use to help unconfident students become confident music improvisers? How does student gender affect teaching praxes?

Reviewed by Brian J. de Lima When I consider the zeitgeist of contemporary music education in North America, I can't help but feel that the tendency to prioritize the creative object over the creative act remains the approach of most music teachers. This leads all too often to discussions that seldom take into account the collaborative and social practices, the belief systems, and the historical contexts that shape music making. Music teachers teaching improvisation can often lean heavily on stagnant pedagogies that suffer from their failure to incorporate consideration of music's social dimensions. Improvisation, when it appears in academic environments, appears too often as part of a compartmentalized curricula emerging from a government-­delegated neoliberal compliance that often overlooks the crucial and historical socio-­ political turmoil and socio-­cultural norms that originally gave rise to many improvisational practices. Students get funnelled into programs constructed exclusively to fill ready-­made niches—curricula and pedagogy created by upper management bureaucracy that promotes the sustainability of the university's best interests. Ultimately, the result is an educational gap that destabilizes students' critical engagement with social issues and epistemologies. Pedagogies that fail to encourage critical engagement contribute to students who may never find the passion necessary to succeed in attaining improvisational fluency, to retention rates for schools that remain low, and to teachers at the mercy of government cutbacks as a result of their program's stagnant performance. Thankfully, the editors of Improvisation and Music Education: Beyond the Classroom (2016), Ajay Heble and Mark Laver, along with a host of other contributors, have not overlooked these issues. In this publication, various authors, scholars, and musicians have laid out their vision for what it means to teach improvisation, and how those skills, once acquired, may enable musicians to engage in real-­time creative decision-­making, risk-­taking, interaction, adaptation, surprise, and responsiveness. Heble and Laver's offering is replete with suggestions and methodologies that go 'beyond the classroom,' elucidating the multidimensional aspect of improvisation, not just an act of musical expression, but also a means of community-­building. By offering non-­conventional approaches that can be used in academia to demystify improvisation, and by offering new perspectives on improvisation's potential within the classroom, Heble and Laver's work offers freedom from the constraints of typical improvisation curricula found within neoliberal paradigms. Improvisation and Music Education strays from conventional improvisation pedagogy—offering its readers access to effective teaching paradigms along a variety of trajectories. In chapter three, "Improvisation Pedagogy in Theory and Practice," percussionist and educator Jesse Stewart examines musical improvisation's capacity to foster a sense of community both inside and outside of the classroom by describing his facilitation of a university music ensemble that is inclusive of non-­musicians, and his offering of courses that have no pressures of written assignments (32-­45). Stewart reports that the end result of these practices was higher student engagement and overall interest than would be likely with a more conventional pedagogy (42). In the fifth chapter, " Analysis, Improvisation, and Openness, " Chris Stover supports an " open, no wrong answers, interactive environment " that he feels (and I agree) contributes to the creation of trust, acceptance, attentive listening, spontaneity, storytelling, and nonverbal communication between musicians. At the same time, Stover emphasises that in such an environment it is important for musicians to have confidence that their own contributions are valid. Stover reiterates a point originally made by Hans-­Georg Gadamer, stating that we cannot discount " our understanding from our own experience, including the ways in which our experiences are historically and culturally situated " (61). Stover asserts that instructors must help students recognize that when they improvise in styles associated with previous eras and canonized creators that the frame of reference they bring to the music is just as valid as those of the individuals who were the original creators. Stover insists, for example, that when students attempt to solo over a piece of New Orleans style jazz, they should not be discouraged if their improvisations do not follow the kinds of structures likely to have been chosen by the players who originated the genre.

A critique of current university music provision, Miller demonstrates how placing improvisation at the centre of the curriculum enables the development of creative musicianship skills. Using a practical example of research-led teaching Miller shows how students can develop idiomatic improvisation skills by documenting their creative process whilst simultaneously acquiring historical and cultural information. Miller argues for stylistic improvisation from a variety of traditions to be taught, expanding Historically Informed Performance (HIP) to make full use of audio and visual recordings of the last century. Miller demonstrates how this can be done by merging the analytical study of recordings with ethnomusicological fieldwork and performance. The divisions between vernacular and classical music forms need to be broken down, she argues, in order to foster creative teaching and learning, calling for a more imaginative and less Anglocentric approach to music education where improvisation plays a major rather than minor role.

This paper seeks to address the problem faced in teaching Musical Improvisation. At some point in their career music teachers will have to face the sometimes daunting prospect of using composition or improvisation in the classroom. Improvisation and composition are strictly related to creativity. It is imperative that all music teachers, or, in a wider sense, music educators, be aware that through their activity they can promote or inhibit the creative potential of each student (Deliege & Wiggins, 2006). The possibility of an entirely fresh rendition is denied almost every time the piece is performed. Musicians strive to copy what they have heard on record or what they read on music scores. Creativity is the key essence to improvising while performing thereby providing the musician a chance to play composer adding to a richer and an aesthetic experience. This problem is important to address because Musical creativity tends to be identified with composition or improvisation though both seem similar, they are different structurally at the same time. Both involve the production of new music; while composition allows a revision, improvisation is an irreversible process. Studies on composition and improvisation are generally considered as investigating musical creativity since the fundamental activity they look into is the 'creation 'of 'new 'music (Deliege & Wiggins, 2006). Since musicians going through music training are drilled to perform a piece to perfection, it often results in limiting the scope to improvise on any level. Some researchers have referred to the term 'improvising 'as a particular aspect or initial stage of composition (Paynter, 1992) whilst the opportunity to revise a piece has been considered more compositional (Webster, 1992).

The artistic process I have gone through has led to me finding a method called Facilitating improvisation. My goal is to create circumstances and structures, which readily suggest the musicians and listeners to take a phenomenological approach to listening to my music and facilitate for intuitive playing and improvising, leading to an interpretation that also is meaningful regarding my compositional aesthetics. The wished outcome is increased amount of emotional content in my music, which again leads to increased amount of emotions conveyed to- and elicited in the listener, strengthening the listener’s experience of my music. The main outcome of the process is artistic; recordings of three concerts are attached. I introduce some philosophical and aesthetic concepts, such as phenomenology and wabi-sabi in order to communicate and exemplify the artistic decisions made and reasons thereof within the process, which generally has followed the principles of artistic research. The hoped re...