- CreativeMusicWorks.net (formerly .com until 2021)
- In what we do best, we are all self-taught
CreativeMusicWorks.com was originally hand-coded in 2005, by myself, Renee Leech. Now, in 2021, the dot com having expired, it’s renamed as a dot net, and formatted in WordPress software.
By landing here, even if only as a one-time visitor, you are part of a community of persons who deeply want to do more than participate in music-making: you also want to create music.
That’s why I’m here too, as website author. I’ve both taught music and had the experience of playing and improvising music, sometimes playing for others but always as an amateur, mainly playing for my own interest, alone. It’s that deep self-teaching experience, including improvising, that led to my understanding of music theory, and gave me the insight to teach music as a credentialed teacher, and to compose music. It’s that self-teaching experience that this website was built to share.
Music is, in large part, its own teacher, and its students are, in large part, self-taught. To learn to make music, one has to listen to it, think about it, and re-create it. One hears Bach in church, plays an instrument perhaps in a school orchestra or band, and finds particular types of music on perhaps the radio, TV, and Internet.
But how do you make music from your own experience? Which musical language will you use? What form will you apply?
Like yourself, perhaps, I tackled such questions, according to my resources (I had piano and violin knowledge to work with). I was determined to figure out how to invent music, and avoid copying music I heard around me, and being narrowed by it. I took a hard look at the 3-note improvisation, without suggestion or instruction from others. I also noticed the effectiveness of the I-IV-V chords in western musical structure, and the freeing effect of exploring melodic patterns over a repetitive accompaniment pattern which I later learned to term an ostinato. I listened, tried things on the piano, and learned.
With that background, some music theory courses in university, and the experience of having observed children’s creative dance while working as a dance piano improvisor, I later discovered the Robert Pace piano teaching method which incorporated creative music into the teaching of piano.
The Pace pre-piano “Music for Moppets” materials established a perfect ground for teaching creative music to preschoolers, a perfect conceptual antidote to rote learning, while being easily compatible with early-learning methods such as that of Schinichi Suzuki.
With access to a very extensive public school teaching resource library, after teaching largely pre-piano by the Pace method for 8 years, and then entering the work force as a K-8 music teacher for 1 school year, I saw in the teachers’ resource materials that the Pace method had incorporated teachings of composer-educators Carl Orff and Zoltan Kodaly, and developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.
Although this site is built out of my own devotion to improvisation and desire to share this important knowledge, its presentation is grounded in the work of many composers and educators, but especially Robert Pace, Carl Orff, Zoltan Kodaly, and John Cage (who accompanied dance), and Jean Piaget (who identified the critical importance to learning of peak experiences).
Without a doubt, regular improvising of music can develop facility in skills needed for musical performance and composition, and can be highly satisfying and expressive.
This is so at any level, beginner to advanced, with any instrument, and at any degree of complexity or simplicity.
So if you arrived on this website, I feel you are a kindred spirit. I urge you, when you make use of any concept on this website, to revere the experience improvisation brings you, respect the importance of each individual achievement, and be inspired to do more.