Improvising in any context

Posted on Dec 28, 2009 in Featured, Improvising | Comments Off on Improvising in any context

The ability to improvise in any given situation be it musical, business, or personal is incredibly important.  Learning how to work and improvise within a given framework is a key to being successful and applying the musical principles of improvisation have allowed me to be successful in my non-musical endeavors.

The ability to improvise really means being able to adapt to different frameworks and those frameworks can be musical, in terms of form or complexity, to name a few, but frameworks are also be a part of life.  One’s job, one’s friends and family, co-workers, teams and projects are frameworks of a different sort and our ability to adapt to change and circumstance is critical.

Improvising is the ability to take the frameworks we have been handed and to alter the parameters that exist in them.  As a musician that means who you are playing with, the compositions you select, and how flexible or rigidly you approach the forms within which you improvise.  In a non-musical context it means adapting to the outlines of a project and the abilities of the people working on that project.

This is why the arts are so important in our daily lives.  Someone who has never tried to develop their artistic abilities will have a very different approach to solving problems and will not have the flexibility needed to sort out what the best outcome could be.  I’l develop this further but in a nutshell our society ignores the arts and it hurts us in in many more ways than most people imagine.