The art of the improvisation in music and performing arts consist in creating or performing something spontaneously and suddenly without a specific preparation or particular script.

The skills of improvisation can be applied to different faculties, not only artistic but also social, physical and cognitive. Improvisation can have academic or non-academic goals. In this workshop, the research in improvisation aims to explore what are the possibilities that will allow the musician to be able to apply this concept in the pedagogical field.

For the students, improvisation is sometimes a fundamental topic in the artistic research: its logical structure is connected to social faculties; the search for sounds and experimentation with or without conventional musical instruments; interactive skills among group members and/or with the public; interdisciplinarity; versatility of the performers and much more.

In our workshop we want to mix and experiment with two different ways of improvising with one goal in common: artistic research for and by music academics.

Irene Malizia and Angelo Tatone will coordinate a group of students who will experiment with improvisation (with common objects and musical instruments) in order to use them as a learning and teaching tool. They will coordinate the aforementioned group that will improvise and try to discover different and new sounds as well as other technical and expressive possibilities.

Through an analytical, exploratory, dialogue method and a "let discover" procedure, participants will work together but also individually.
Why should students improvise? How do you improvise? What are the possibilities of interaction between different methods, processes and ways of improvisation? How can teachers involve students more actively in the teaching and learning process?

The intent of this workshop is to analyze improvisation outside of a precise and defined musical and stylistic context, in order to learn how to improvise only with a note or with several musical elements. You can improvise with/through:
• one sound;
• a single rhythmic element;
• with a simple pattern (with it you can create a musical phrase and then a period or a section and so on ...);
• with harmony (working on a chord based on a minimum of two or more sounds or on a chord
progression);
• with rhythmic patterns;
• with different scales;
• with your instrument in an "unusual" way;
• you can dialogue through improvisation;
• you can "spatialize" sounds through improvisation in order to create a sort of "picture" or sound image;

You will work with basic or advanced elements, in order to cross different disciplines. Each musician/performer in the group can bring their own skills, competences and knowledge, in order to improvise and create a kind of dialogue between the members of the group itself.

If we think of improvisation, we will immediately associate it with jazz (or improvised music, random music ...) but improvisation can also be a starting point for composing music. It is a form of dialogue and in this sense, we can use it as the main basis for developing communication skills within an ensemble. This will also result in a sort of exchange of knowledge and skills between musicians from different musical disciplines.