Improvisation Workshops

We spend a great deal of our free time together improvising in a carefree, spontaneous, and communicative way that always relaxes us and unifies our creative energy. Sharing this process with students always ends up opening their minds to a new, more natural way of expressing themselves—and it’s a lot of fun. We begin by picking a topic and brainstorming out loud with the students. For example, if we play a piece about trees, we would come up with words to describe trees and their sounds: strong, tall, rough, windy. Then we would find ways to play those adjectives on our instruments: circular bow, dry articulation, bold dynamics. After performing this idea as a quartet, we repeat the process and invite the students to join in with us.