Improvisation: Exploring My Neighborhood

Last time, we were improvising with three notes: our home note, a lower neighbor and an upper neighbor. This time, we’ll explore our neighborhood going up the hill and use our lower neighbor, our home note, and four upper neighbors. This gives us a little 5-fingered scale with one extra note.

The 5-fingered scale has the home note, a passing note, the third of our tonality, another passing note, and the fifth of our tonality. We also have that extra lower neighbor.

We won’t spend a lot of time talking about the music theory of these notes here, but in summary, we have a tonic (our home or tone pitch), the super tonic (upper neighbor), the mediant which determines the mode of the scale (in this case major), the sub-dominant, and the dominant, an important scale note that leads back to the tonic and helps define it as the home and defines the tonality of our piece. We also have the lower neighbor which is our leading tone and “leads” us to our tonic also helping us define and communicate our tonality.

Things get a little trickier now, particularly with fingering, but we’re not caring about proper scale fingerings or anything at this point. Use what you know, but mostly, enjoy improvising with the notes.

Improvise in the same way we have been doing so, but now with six notes. Be sure that the first four elements: Dynamics, Duration, Silence, and Repetition are prioritized as these are just as important as the note tone.
Most students are surprised at this point how good the improvisations begin to sound.