Modifying Pressing’s Model of Improvisation, Syntactical Meaning, Embodied Language and The Creativity Continuum: a new way of Seeing the Meaning and Purpose in Musical Creativity
25 Years ago Cambridge educated professional jazz musician doctors and twin brothers Tom & Phil Bancroft began developing a pedagogical approach for teaching beginner jazz improvisation skills starting with an auto-ethnographic study of their own improvisational practice. This resulted in a rich (but not academic) publication history: of an online interactive creative music resource and teacher training approach used by more than 10,000 teachers around the world, along with conservatoire level teaching, multiple CD releases and many concert performances. Along the way they have developed a theoretical framework which helps educators design curricula and develop reflective practice around creative music education for a wide range of educational settings and end users, and has flipped their conception and definition of creativity on its head.
Tom is now working on a PHD at Edinburgh Napier University which is explaining this research process he is describing as iterative auto-ethno-meta-pedagogy ie methodology as an interplay between: a practice based auto-ethnography based on elite level improvisation and composition AND action research based around testing theory-based activity designs in a range of classrooms working with a range of educators and students
in the non-academic publication journey touched on above. This joint presentation by Tom & Phil will focus on two outcomes of their research that both relate to the impact of memory and stored experience, via ‘conscious and below awareness musical language & syntax’ processing, and meaning on both the practice and definitions of and understandings of creativity. This will include an attempt at re-visiting Jeff Pressing’s model of Improvisation with new thinking about improvisation, meaning making, embodied language AND offers a new perspective and definitions of creativity around the creation of meaning and how the location of that meaning changes from early childhood to leave a legacy in creative adulthood.
Keywords: creativity, meaning, memory, embodied, improvisation
Edinburgh Napier University, United Kingdom, t.bancroft@napier.ac.uk