Creativity through music composition

Oct. 9 5-6 pm

 Cognitive development

• Encourages creative and divergent thinking. Improvisation is a practice in "thinking outside the box," where children learn to generate multiple original musical ideas rather than just one correct answer. It engages the creative centers of the brain that help with self-expression and forming new connections.  Improvisation encourages children to think flexibly and create new musical ideas on the spot, promoting originality in their music-making. Improvisation activates various cognitive functions and improves real-time problem-solving and decision-making abilities. 
• Improves listening skills. Improvising with others requires deep, active listening to respond in real-time, sharpening a child's ability to hear how different notes, rhythms, and harmonies interact.
• Enhances memory. Improvisation helps develop a child's working memory as they learn to recall musical motifs, harmonic progressions, and other musical patterns to create coherent, expressive phrases on the fly.
• Strengthens executive functions. Exercises used in musical and theatrical improvisation, such as quick-fire games and scene work, train a child's ability to focus, organize thoughts, and control impulses. This helps improve cognitive flexibility and working memory. 

Emotional and social development

• Fosters self-expression. By improvising, children use music to articulate their immediate emotions and feelings in a healthy, creative, and non-verbal outlet. This strengthens emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Music improvisation offers a pure form of creative expression, helping children explore and manage emotions. 
• Builds confidence. Performing spontaneous musical ideas in a supportive environment helps children overcome the fear of making mistakes. As they gain confidence in their creative abilities, their self-esteem grows.
• Promotes collaboration. Group improvisation teaches children how to collaborate and communicate non-verbally as they take turns and bounce ideas off one another. This fosters teamwork, respect for others, and empathy. 
• Creates a positive attitude toward learning. When improvisation is introduced as a fun, low-pressure activity, children learn to associate exploring new ideas and taking risks with a positive experience. This can foster a lifelong love of learning. 

Musical and technical benefits

• Develops musical intuition and ear training. Learning improvisation from the beginning helps a child internalize the building blocks of music, like scales and chord progressions, through sound rather than just notation. This strengthens their musical ear and lays a solid foundation for more advanced playing.
• Supports learning to read music. For young students, combining rote learning with improvisation can ease the sometimes-daunting transition to reading sheet music. Their developed musical intuition allows them to focus on deciphering the notation while still maintaining their musicality.
• Encourages holistic musicianship. Students who improvise learn to understand music as a language, rather than just a set of written rules. This creates a deeper connection to the music they play, even when performing from a score. 

 Transferable Skills

• Language skills: Music and language share common structures, and improvisation in music can help develop skills relevant to speech, indicating a broader transfer of learning to other domains. 
• Improved traditional musicianship: A deep understanding of improvisation can make a classical performer more sensitive to musical communication and more aware of the nuance of sound, even when reading a score