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The Creative Strings Workshop offers youth and adult string players a unique opportunity to study improvisational music through rehearsals, masterclasses, and concerts alongside world class artists in jazz, fiddle styles, blues, rock, and more. June 19 to 23, 2012 marks the 10th annual camp in Columbus, Ohio.

What happens in the brain during improvisation, and how do we use this to get better at improvising?

This is exactly the thing Dr. Martin Norgaard researched for his doctorate in music education.

Now a professor at Georgia State University, Martin got together with me recently to talk a little about his findings, share  approaches to teaching improvisation and jazz violin, and play some tunes. Martin is a thought leader in our niche and one of the coolest guys I have ever met.

Among many things we agree on:

1) Improvisation is easier when you’re working with information you’ve already ingrained.

2) Improvising over unfamiliar  musical terrain (including chord progressions, meters, or stylistic frameworks) is nearly impossible,  leading quickly to diminishing returns.

These situations correspond with two states of mind:

a) Creative mental state (while playing in familiar musical terrain): In this state of mind, you can train your attention and energy  on your imagination, easily architecting melodic lines, rhythms, and gestures like a painter applies color and line to a canvas.

b) “Learning/drilling” mental state (when playing over unfamiliar terrain): In this state, you are creatively paralyzed, until you internalize or memorize the material which was giving you a hard time. After that  you can engage the imagination and focus on being creative (but it could take a while to internalize that unfamiliar material!).

Unfamiliar musical territory could include rhythmic and stylistic conventions, but it is often usually related to harmony, i.e., the voice-led relationships between chords and scales.

Accomplished jazz musicians often have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge, like a mental map, of chordal and scalar relationships. To learn all this, you’re probably well advised to work from a jazz violin method book of some kind, for example:

Martin has a very popular course called Jazz Fiddle Wizard, (Mel Bay). Many high school and middle school string teachers have used this method in the classroom with positive results.

My method and curriculum can be found in a host of instructional videos, media, and publications easily accessed either via my shop or through my comprehensive online school: the Creative Strings Academy.

Among many recommendations, for starters, I prescribe studying chords, their inversions, and accompanying scales in extended range (instead of learning chords and scales in root position, start from the lowest note on your instrument in the scale/chord and end on the highest note in first position).

Remember when you were 5 years old and you were just learning how to read? When shown  a word, you’d look at the first letter and think about what that letter was and then what that letter sounded like. Then you’d go to the next letter and think about what that letter was and what it sounded like. Then you’d put the two letters together and think about how they sounded together. Remember how long it took to read one word ? That’s similar to what classical musicians experience when they begin improvising over chord progressions. Now, when you look at a phrase written in front of you it probably takes you a fraction of a second to comprehend a series of words, let alone one letter. This is the kind of fluency you want to develop with harmonic language.

Once you learn the ABCs of harmony, your mind can operate on a high level in a creative way. But first you’ve got to learn harmony.

Don’t take my word for it. Martin pretty much agrees. But he added this:
“I advocate that you should develop your creative playing in one part of the practice on an easy tune and work on unfamiliar tunes IN THE SAME PRACTICE. If you only work on the hard stuff you never get to develop stuff like developing a motive etc.”

Here Martin talks about these different kinds of mental operations. Once you learn something it becomes second nature and you can be creative with it.

How does this show up for you in your experience? Leave a comment below and let me know.

Finally here we play down the tune “Have You Met Miss Jones”

 Leave a comment here. Then check out Creative Strings Academy (there’s a free trial).

Schedule Christian Howes to perform at your next clinic, residency or event. Critically acclaimed string musician, Christian Howes does not disappoint.

Christian Howes’s Creative Strings Festival promises to inundate Columbus with the sound of strings! Violins, cellos, violas, and basses will be heard singing and wailing through bluegrass, jazz, rock, Celtic, Latin, blues, avante garde and more at markets, theatres, restaurants, cafes, and clubs throughout Columbus.

The online school for improvising string players. Watch the video below to learn more about the Creative Strings Academy.

Learn more…

Violin Monster makes a living playing violin in a halloween mask. see the video below

Legendary jazz drummer Billy Hart once told me, “You’re more than good enough to be a star”.

Just before he said that I had asked him, “what should I be working on to improve?”, thinking that if I could just become “good enough”, somehow this would translate into success as a jazz violinist.

In retrospect, I now understand his answer to mean that any artist, given a baseline of talent (i.e. “good enough”) can create a successful career, provided that he or she hustles hard enough (doing promotion, sales, marketing, networking, etc…)

If you’ve been playing the violin for 10 years you’re probably more than good enough to succeed as well.

You don’t have to be a blues viola player or a rock violinist to build your distinct brand and succeed. But you DO have to work hard, and creatively, to build your audience, find your niche, and make a living playing music.

Check out Violin Monster in this video- He’s not a virtuoso, but he’s paying his rent playing the violin, and it seems like he’s having fun doing it.

Regardless of the style of music he plays, Mr. Monster fits my definition of a “creative string player”, because of the clever way he interacts with his community and makes a living making music.

How often do you hear people complain about how their community isn’t cool enough to “get” what they do? 

I really have a problem with this way of thinking. Just like teachers, doctors, lawyers and everybody else, we should be able to create a demand for what we do as artists. We can’t, and we shouldn’t expect to count on the “stability” of an orchestra job…

Being good isn’t good enough.

It’s not enough to be good at playing music. Most artists believe that if they’re good enough, success will fall in their lap. This amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world works.

Philosophers and historians have argued that major historical changes can only occur through a confluence of ready-made socio-economic/material conditions with the bold actions of visionary individuals. See Noam Chomski, Karl Marx and Georg Hegel.

Consider the emergence of any major religion, World War 2, the Civil Rights movement, the Arab Spring…. All of these events involved not only the change in both popular thought and material conditions, but also the drastic action of strong-minded individuals which helped to create a Tipping Point.

As I always say, living on a mountaintop with goats does not a jazz violinist make, and even if you live in a booming cultural mecca, it may take time to generate the reception you’re hoping for if you’re presenting a new heavy metal string quartet.

So exactly how big/diverse does a community need to be in order to accommodate or support a “creative” artist’s expression? Consider Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Violin Monster is based. It turns out this small town has been the growing grounds of all kinds of creative string players and teachers.

Not more than 20 feet from Violin Monster, I met locals who remembered Grammy-winning Jeremy Kittel playing at the same farmers market when he was 8 years old.  (Just an hour before, my friend Dana Leong and I jammed out in a free-jazz parade as part of Kerrytown Concert House’s annual “Edgefest”)  Check out the hilarious pictures on Dana’s flickr page!

Ann Arbor is not a thriving metropolis, but it has enough of the necessary conditions to allow a courageous musician to build an audience. 

The next time a fellow musician complains about how “the scene in this town really sucks”, tell them that they need to either MAKE their own scene, or move… 

Don’t wait for a club to open that features jazz violin 7 nights a week. Open your own venue or work with management to transform an existing spot into something new. Promote shows in unlikely locations. Try stuff!

Kerrytown Concert House took advantage of everything its community has to offer over years of doing concerts and festivals (and free-jazz parades!) again and again, making Edgefest a staple of the international creative music community.

One of Jeremy Kittel’s teachers, Bob Phillips started the Saline Fiddlers in a little town outside of the city. Bob is one of the leading advocates for modernizing string education today.

Other members of the Saline Fiddlers such as Corinna Smith have gone on to play with Barrage, offer forward-thinking music education programs, and are defining a new era of Creative String playing today.

Other proactive and cool creative string players from Ann Arbor include Gabe Bolkosky and Brandon Smith.

What’s the difference between these Ann Arborites and everyone other musician complaining how the world hasn’t caught up to their vision? They took a chance. They acted boldly. They had the courage to act on what probably seemed like a CRAZY idea. Now they are powerful brands succeeding at their art on their own terms.

Jeremy and Corinna will be coming back this June to the Creative Strings Festival, my annual Columbus, Ohio-based fiddle camp built on the unlikely idea/curriculum that every participant performs improvised music in public concerts throughout venues around the city. (All together, we perform over 25 concerts during the week!)

When we began ten years ago, I was barely sure whether it would work, but I took a chance, kept doing it every year, and found that the community, as well as the string players who come from around the world, make it better every year.

What’s up?

Are you a Creative String Player?

Come to the Creative Strings Workshop or check out the Creative Strings Academy.  2012′s festival and camp happens June 19 – 23rd.

Are classical musicians creative? 

Any musical activity is creative, but we can all agree that there is a difference between performing a piece of music from the page on the one hand and improvising, arranging, or composing on the other.

I love classical music, and yet, after 25 years of exploring improvisation and composition in many styles, my musical life has been enriched by not only the sheer variety of musical situations I now regularly enjoy, but the challenge and reward that comes from putting my creative energy to work and seeing how my artistic voice has grown.

Pursuits in jazz, improvisation, and more have ultimately led me to get more out of classical music as well.

It’s hard for some to break into “creative string playing”, i.e., including improvisation and composition, whether it be in jazz, rock, fiddle styles, etc… One reason is that classical musicians assume they must have access to “insider information” such as tunes, chord progressions, or specialized stylistic vocabulary. This isn’t necessarily true.

To get started going “out of the box” musically, you can use what you know. Classically trained fiddler and jazz violinist, Eli Bishop, was pretty much exclusively a classical string player just four years ago. He didn’t know if he wanted to play fiddle styles, jazz, classical music, or whatever. But one day he had the idea to try to play the bach-double with both parts at once. He ran with that idea, taking what he was familiar with and getting creative with it (see mind-blowing video below).

After 4-5 years of regularly pushing himself out of his comfort zone, Eli is now one of the most advanced jazz violinists his age anywhere in the world. He’s worked closely with Billy Contreras, Buddy Spicher, Rob Thomas, myself, and attended my annual Creative Strings Workshop. Currently on scholarship at Berklee College of Music, he recently sat down with me to do a set of interviews which are being published exclusively for subscribers of my Creative Strings Academy Program

Here’s a video showing Eli playing some jazz during a very informal rendition we did of Scrapple from the Apple:

Eli also loves fiddle styles including Texas Contest Fiddle and Bluegrass and I’m sure his tastes will continue to evolve. What I’m most excited about is how much he’s evolved, from a purely classical player to a well-rounded creative string player. He’s a great model for us to continue to watch.

So how do you get from “A to B”? This video here shows one method I used to get people going into free improvisation from zero to creativity in 5 minutes. Feel free to grab your instrument and try this out.

My recommendation to classical string players who are curious? Simple: take 5 to 10 minutes during practice sessions to doing something “creative”. Take a  moment to get out of your comfort zone. Treat your instrument as if it were a crayon and a piece of paper and take time to scribble, mess around, play around, come up with something outside of your box. You don’t have to be a “jazz violinist”, or get locked into any one kind of style, per se… You don’t need to be fluent with tunes or chord progressions to get started exploring, and soon enough your voice will begin to emerge, (and whether or not it’s a “jazz violin” thing is unimportant.)

Join Eli and me at the Creative Strings Workshop again this coming summer!! Sign up for a free trial to learn improvisation online at the Creative Strings Academy.

Clark Chaffee- helping so many young people find joy, a sense of community, and self confidence through music.

I’ve always loudly maintained that classically trained instrumentalists (particularly string players) lag far behind musicians trained in jazz, rock and other traditions when it comes to improvisation, composition, and general “know-how”, and that this equates to a deficit in musicianship for string players.

The cycle continues as generation after generation misses out on key aspects of what should be standard in any musician’s education. Forget about whether you’re into jazz, classical, pop music, or whatever… I’m talking about musicianship, plain and simple, and this includes more than performing on an instrument.

Where this needs changing the most is in our classical music education system. (For more on this, see my editorial article in the July issue of Strings Magazine).

In May when I visited to work with orchestra director Clark Chaffee’s string program at Stevenson High School I was pleasantly shocked to learn that he requires every student to write their own composition, including bass lines, inner voices, counterpoint, melody, and chord progression. Perfect!!

As far as I’m concerned, his curriculum should be adapted by every classical music education program in the country. His worksheet is really well done and should enable any music student to understand and execute a decent piece of “tonal” music. And it’s a direct refutation of anyone who thought this couldn’t be done. Thanks for lifting our standards and setting the bar where it should be Clark!

The Senior Director of Orchestras and Guitar at Stevenson High School in Illinois, Clark Chaffee is also currently serving as Vice President of the Orchestra Division of the Illinois Music Educators Association (MENC) and was recently appointed to the MENC Orchestra Education National Advisory Board.

With all the talk of national standards for music education and very little action, it’s nice to see real leadership. Most string teachers still only pay lip service to the idea of incorporating composition, improvisation and/or so-called “alternative styles”. I don’t blame them. It takes a lot of courage to pursue a brand new skill set….

Everyone should literally take a page out of Clark’s book. In fact, just take the whole book. Contact Clark directly to ask him about his composition assignment at cchaffee@d125.org . The way this guy works, he’ll probably just give it to you…

What’s the result of this kind of innovative and holistic music educational approach?

One example is the work of Clark’s daughter, a formal student in her father’s orchestra program, and CIM cello undergrad, Sarah Chaffee, who is quickly gaining notoriety for her Youtube covers of pop tunes, many containing meticulously crafted arrangements which incorporate motifs from the classical cello repertoire.

Here’s an example from her youtube channel which contains an array of super-awesomely-creative multi-media works which she poured her heart and soul into:

It’s cool how Sarah blends her love of pop music and classical music, and she can improvise, compose, arrange, play the cello, produce videos, market herself, etc… Sarah is an example of what I define as a “creative string player”. She is taking her career in her own hands and I predict that by the time she receives that orchestra job she’s been working so hard towards she won’t need it, because she’s so capable as a musician of doing an array of fun and self-directed things.

Maybe she will take the gig, and continue doing her “creative” work on the side… That’s the point, isn’t it, that Sarah’s work is initiated by Sarah. How many college string players are initiating their own music productions in this way?

On a side note: Here’s another example of how classical source material can be used creatively. In this live performance, I improvise over Paganini’s 24th caprice with an ensemble comprised of church musicians raised by ear on music and encouraged to play all styles. These guys weren’t phased in the least when I suggested playing Paganini….

Clark’s work as a teacher and the resultant impact it has had on his daughter, demonstrates the kind of result that courageous string teaching can have over generations. One irony is that Clark is not a string player (he’s trained as a percussionist).

Over his entire career, Clark has developed curricula, materials, and routines to help students become better musicians sooner. Publications of his includes Rhythm Workshop and Key Shapes for Strings.

Interview With Clark Chaffee

What’s next for you?

CC: The student & parent video production team at Stevenson will soon be launching our own YouTube channel featuring short humorous and instructional videos to help our students understand how to thrive in our orchestra family and in our curriculum.

Serious discussions and planning have begun for the Stevenson Strings Academy – a sequence of orchestra and guitar ensembles that will prepare younger students for the musical and academic rigors of the Stevenson Orchestra program. The official start is expected to be September of 2012.

The program will be unique in part because it will be run through the high school’s community outreach program (PREP) and will have very tight coordination with the high school and sender school orchestra and guitar faculty. The initial concept was mine and I will be the first artistic director. When word about this got to the rest of our Fine Arts faculty, they all began to work on designing similar format offerings. It will be interesting to see where this goes – it could become a great resource for our community and department.

What motivates you?

CC: 1. Developing supportive communities in which making music is the reason for being together, but becoming better and more productive members of society is the primary focus.
2. Performing music at a level that changes lives.

What do you want people to know about that you’re doing?

CC: Ever Evolving.  “Retirement” comes next summer but I’ll continue to be on the lookout for ways to perform and serve the larger music education community. Our Stevenson Strings Academy will provide an opportunity for me to hone a variety of master classes that I’ve developed over the years- most of which come from continually seeking ways to better serve my students.

We also hope to have a fairly complete set of videos that will help students and parents become comfortable with our orchestra ‘corporate’ environment and our annual activities.

…

Some clinics Clark is developing include: “Rhythm Workshop- help for the rhythmically dysfunctional”, “Blues Basics for Strings”, “Key Shapes for Strings”, “Fingerboard Geography”, “Basics for Beginning Composers”, and “Basics for Song Writing and Arranging”. 

Learn more about the Creative Strings Workshop and sign up for a free trial to learn improvisation online at the Creative Strings Academy.