ABSTRACT:
Music can be a powerful means of exploring and liberating the self and in developing an understanding of the individual's place in the community. Unfortunately, music education has traditionally focused on developing skills for learning, interpreting, and performing the canon of European art music. In the pursuit of these goals, the individual's needs for creativity and self-expression have often been pushed to the periphery. In this tradition, the student musician often remains unaware of music's innate transformative power and self-liberating potential because they are caught up in the activity of performing someone else's music.
For many people in Western society today, identity is a matter of what we consume. We live in a world where having the right kind of running shoes or sport utility vehicle can seem essential to a sense of belonging and well-being. Music making, especially improvised music making offers a more substantial way of constructing a view of self where a sense of identity stems from what people create and share with their communities. The process of free musical improvisation draws the musician into a confrontation with existential questions about aesthetic values and identity: What is my music? What do I want to share with the world through music? As an alternative to traditional music pedagogy, this paper proposes a pedagogical approach which focuses on developing and liberating the musical identity of the individual and explores the ways in which free improvisation can help students to confront and begin to answer existential questions.
