Interviewing Garreth Brooke

For those who don’t know today’s guest, Garreth Brooke is a British-German pianist and composer. In addition to publishing and composing (I highly recommend following his music on Spotify), he is a very active piano educator.

Among many other things, he is the creator of the website PianoCreativity.com, where he shares several ideas for teaching piano in a more creative way. According to his own words, his blog “is for piano teachers who want to improvise and compose with their students but don’t know where to start.” It’s also for teachers like me, who already improvise with their students but are always looking for new ideas to enrich our lessons.

I hope you enjoy reading this interview and that it proves as insightful for you as it has been for me.

Were you taught in a creative way, or did you learn this later?

I spent most of my childhood preparing for ABRSM exams, so there was very little creativity in the lessons. But my piano teacher was a composer and although he never really trained me, he would often explain aspects of a piece in a way that made me aware of their creative potential.

Over time, this became my favourite part of playing the piano. Although I love playing great pieces of music by great composers, I find the deepest joy when I’m fully engaged, mind body and soul, with creating music. It’s wonderful!

How important is creativity in piano lessons for you? 

It’s the most important thing! But that doesn’t mean that my students are constantly composing. Rather it means that I teach them to take a creative approach to music. That might mean that I encourage them to create their own interpretation of a piece by a master composer like Beethoven or Bach. Or it might involve getting them to improvise around on a new bit of technique or theory that they’ve just learnt. This gives them a far deeper understanding of what they’re trying to learn, which makes them better musicians.

What specific activities or strategies do you use to foster creativity in your students from the very beginning?

Throughout my lessons I focus on play. Teacher tend to reflexively use the term “playing” the piano without thinking, but there’s a reason we use the word “play”. Play is fun. That’s fundamental to how I teach: if the student isn’t enjoying yourself, they’re probably not learning much, and you’re certainly not creating a good foundation for long term learning. Moreover, sociologists believe that the purpose of play is to learn, which is why you see young children roleplaying so much. As Carl Jung wrote, “The creative mind plays with the object it loves”.

To give you a specific example, instead of describing keyboard geography in terms the groups of 2 and 3 black keys, I get beginner students to improvise with the different groups of black keys, then ask them thought-provoking questions like “What’s the difference in sound when you play that down there or up here?” I try always to teach sound before symbol, which means that the student is learning to play music before they learn how to read/write music. This teaches students a great deal more than just getting them to read from a method book.

More generally, I’m constantly look out for opportunities to include a creative activity. For example if I’m teaching a scale, I always get them to improvise in that scale, while I accompany them. Or if we’re learning a piece that involves changing hand positions, I’ll encourage them to experiment with playing the piece in a different hand position and then ask them what the new position sounds like. This opens their mind to creative potential, and it helps them figure out their own set of musical aesthetics.

How can we find time to include creativity in our lessons?

This is a question I’m asked very commonly, especially by teachers from the UK, who are often under pressure to push their students through piano exams at a very rapid rate. It’s surprisingly common for students to be expected to take one exam a year, which is often detrimental to their long-term musical development, partly because it neglects creativity, but also because it often contributes to weak audiation skills, heightened levels of performance anxiety, and inadequate theory knowledge. So the first thing I suggest to those teachers is that they reconsider their working practises. Thankfully nowadays more and more teachers are moving away from annual exams, which is a really good thing.

More generally I think there are a few things to bear in mind.

Firstly, whenever you teach a new technique or theory concept, there’s an opportunity to improvise. Improvising puts knowledge into practise, which is the best way to really learn something.

Secondly, it’s useful to think of creativity in a broader sense than merely composition or improvisation. We can be creative when we interpret a piece, by experimenting with tempo, ornamentation, articulation, phrasing, etc. It’s extremely difficult for composers to write everything they intended into a score because notation is fundamentally inadequate — it strips out nuance. Béla Bartók is a particularly wonderful example of this: he’s extremely precise with his notation, but then if you listen to his recordings, you realise that he’s not following his notation exactly! So we have to be creative in order to perform convincingly!

Finally, one of the best opportunities to get creative is through arranging, and this appeals especially to teenagers, the age group who are otherwise most likely to quit taking piano lessons. Learning to play from a lead sheet or chord chart should be an essential part of every piano student’s learning. If teachers don’t know how to do it, Piano By Ear by Lucinda Mackworth Young or Chord Play by Forrest Kinney are good places to start.

I wrote a whole series of articles on finding time for creativity that you can find here: https://www.pianocreativity.com/t/time-for-creativity

I offer guides to teaching specific pieces creatively here: https://www.pianocreativity.com/t/creative-introductions

Thank you so much, Garreth, for collaborating on this interview for my blog. It’s an honor to have you on megustaelpiano.com and to have you share your ideas with my readers.