The Case for Improvisation in Music Education

 The following article is extracted from …

 Kongo, Zabana and Jeff Robinson, “Improvisation” in Herbst, Nzewi & Agawu (eds) 2003.               Musical Arts in Africa : Theory, Practice and Education. Pretoria : UNISA Press,               95-117.

 Introduction

To improvise music means to compose it as it is being performed. Improvisation can take many forms ranging from merely elaborating or modifying existing, pre-composed material to 'free' improvisation, where there are few if any parameters, conventions or rules within - or according to - which the improvisation must fit. Even with pre-composed music, improvisation most often plays a role in the conception of the musical ideas upon which a composition is built.

Improvisation in some form is found in nearly all musical cultures and traditions. In a number of these, improvisation is a vital, distinguishing feature and musicianship is judged according to an individual's improvisational skill. This is clearly the case in jazz as it is in many of the dominant genres of South and West Asia , Indonesia and Africa .

Improvisation is not exclusive to music of course. The term refers to any act of spontaneous creation and is applicable to all of the performing arts. In its most general sense, it means to make do with whatever is immediately at hand, including what one brings into a situation by way of knowledge, skill and imagination.  In every episode of the American television series "McGiver", the hero had to improvise solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems, equipped with nothing but a Swiss army knife and whatever materials happened to be at hand.  This kind of resourcefulness can be observed in the play activity of children who will make use of a cardboard box, a discarded tin, a stick, or whatever else happens to be lying around to meet the requirements of their play activity.[1]

Improvisation in music is the equivalent of extemporization in verbal discourse. But while it would be ludicrous to call someone linguistically competent if unable to extemporize, many call themselves musicians though unable to improvise. Imagine not being able to speak beyond saying words that have been worked out and written down in advance, usually by someone else.

An important point regarding extemporization is that virtually everyone can do it! Some may do it better than others, but it is by no means a specialized behaviour demanding special talent that one has to be born with.  Shinichi Suzuki realized this and based his well-known and widely used instrumental teaching method on the way young children learn their mother-tongue, that is, by observation, imitation, repetition, and lastly, intellectual understanding. It is perplexing that the Suzuki method excludes improvisation given the obviously crucial role of extemporization in linguistic development. 

Western music education, especially as practiced in African schools, has hitherto placed little emphasis on improvisation. This is surprising given its prominence in the pedagogies of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and Carl Orff, which are staples in most tertiary Music Education programmes. It seems that music educators in 'training' too often only learn about these without developing real competence in applying them in their teaching. 

Real musical empowerment

One question worthy of serious reflection: Is the idea of music education without improvisation any less ludicrous than the idea of language education without extemporisation?   A related question would be: Is not the ability to improvise an ESSENTIAL component of musicianship?[2]  Or put differently: Is it possible to call someone a musician who is not able to create or convey musical meaning spontaneously? 

The cognitive case

The most convincing case for improvisation in education is a cognitive one.[3] Formal schooling gives the greatest emphasis to those subjects that most directly involve conscious reasoning and problem solving, what Howard Gardner terms "logical/mathematical intelligence".[4] Increased time and resource allocation to Maths and Science is seen as a necessary response to market forces and in developing countries is regarded as crucial to becoming globally competitive. Reasoning and problem solving abilities are obviously important and are universally considered fundamental to being educated, but more important are the preconscious processes that make these abilities possible in the first place.

It must be remembered that we are unaware of most of what is going on in our brains at any given moment. That which surfaces in the conscious mind are but fleeting glimpses of the brain activity from which they emerge. They represent only the products of a vast amount of preconscious processing and reveal little if anything about the processes that give rise to them. What filters through into conscious awareness is analogous to what gets on the screen display of a computer.

The essential precondition to conscious reasoning is what the epistemologist Michael Polanyi calls "tacit knowing". His theory can be condensed into three key premises, i.e. that:

1. "all knowledge of must rest upon knowledge from an interpretive framework that is its defining ground;"
2. "what we know from, we know tacitly (intuitively); and
3. "tacit, feelingful, intuitive knowing undergirds and gives meaning to all that we know explicitly." (Bowman, 1982: 80)

The term 'intuition' is commonly applied to this faculty. Immanuel Kant claimed that it is intuition that makes it possible for us to construct and maintain the fundamental elements of our world - "our sense of space and time, our sense of identity, our sense of the truth of things, our sense of beauty and goodness" (Mishlove, 1998). Intuition has been likened to the Hindu deity Vishnu, "the sustainer of reality".  Without the "glue" of intuition "all our sensory perceptions and rational cognitions would fall apart like cards in the wind" (Mishlove, 1998).  Stephen Nachmonovitch speaks of intuition as "a synaptic summation, our whole nervous system balancing and combining multivariate complexities in a single flash” (Nachmanovitch, 1990: 39-40).

The Nobel laureate economist and cognitive scientist, Norman Simon, has attempted to demystify intuition, suggesting that it is "nothing more than the brain's capacity for subliminal computation” (Mishlove, 1998). Nachmonovitch concedes that intuition is "like computation", but emphasizes that what we normally conceive of as computation, such as is the main issue in Maths, "is a lineal (sequential) process, going from A to B to C", whereas "intuition computes concentrically. All the steps and variables converge on the central decision-point at once, which is the present moment."

Reasoned knowledge proceeds from information of which we are consciously aware - only a partial sampling of our total knowledge. Intuitive knowledge, on the other hand, proceeds from everything we know and everything we are. It converges on the moment from a rich plurality of directions and sources…" (Nachmanovitch, 1990: 40.)

If we accept that intuition is the essential precondition to conscious reasoning, then education should give priority to activity that develops it.  But can intuition be developed? Jeff Mishlove, the Director of the Intuition Network posits that intuition is "derived from the very structure or essence of our minds" (Mishlove, 1998) and this suggests that it is something akin to the 'Language Acquisition Device' theorized by Noam Chomsky.

Intuition is something we all have and must have. Our survival depends on it.  It is like the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of your computer.  All of our cognitive software depends on it. But with humans, it cannot simply be upgraded to a more powerful version. Yet surely it can be modified, refined, and made more efficacious in its operations if activated and exercised on a regular basis.  The implication of this for education should be clear. In every school day, students should be engaged in those learning activities that most thoroughly call intuition into play.  The Maths and Science taught in schools mostly calls upon students to utilize the software that has been 'installed' in their brains through schooling, i.e. the formulas, rules and methods. Intuition is necessarily involved, but it is not actively exercised or modified.

It is ironic that most of the great mathematical and scientific breakthroughs of history have issued - not from reasoned knowledge - but from intuition activated by some serendipitous event like a falling apple in the case of Newton or getting into a bath tub in the case of Archimedes. The great artist Michelangelo claimed to have been guided by a faculty he called intelleto by which he meant "intelligence, not of the merely rational kind, but visionary intelligence, a deep seeing of the underlying pattern beneath appearances” (Nachmanovitch , 1990: 31).  Surely this is what Polanyi calls 'tacit knowing' or 'intuitive knowledge' and clearly it is what is called into play when improvising. Indeed, Nachmanovitch defines improvisation as "intuition in action".

According to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, intuition is "direct perception … independent of any reasoning process."  In improvisation, not only is it direct perception but also the instantaneous conversion of perception into action.  The same is true when one is verbally extemporizing, but the demands compared to those when improvising music are different in crucial respects. When extemporizing, one doesn't have to make what comes out of one’s mouth work rhythmically (unless rapping), melodically, or harmonically, or make it fit in with what others are doing at the same moment.

All creative acts involve a dual exchange between two cognitive processes, divergence and convergence. In divergent thinking, the mind must generate several solutions to a problem, for example, how a melody should continue. In convergent thinking, possible solutions must be evaluated and narrowed down to the best one for the given situation. In music and dance improvisation these processes must occur virtually simultaneously which is possible only if they occur at an intuitive, pre-conscious level.

Experienced jazz improvisers will say that they are at their best when the conscious mind is playing a minimal role if any at all. They are not consciously thinking of chords, scales, forms, patterns, or the like.  What is coming from their instruments is seemingly direct from the source, whatever that might be.  It is not being mediated by conscious thought processes, something that only gets in the way. In other words, there is no cogitation, only intuition.

The kinesthetic case

Music and dance are largely psychomotor activities and the indispensable condition to artistry in either is what is called kinesthesia or what Howard Gardner calls "bodily/kinesthetic intelligence".

Kinesthesia is the feedback mechanism of the nervous system that conveys information between the mind and the body and is fundamental to all forms of music making and dance because it is what coordinates all the faculties we use in these activities: hearing, seeing, feeling, knowing, and reasoning. Wherever movement is involved "the brain must instantly covert a complex of physical sensations (information received through the senses) into information about bodily position, weight, force, muscle tension and movement AND this information must instantaneously be converted into electro-chemical impulses that prompt the muscles to respond appropriately" (Robinson, 2001: 2).  Kinesthesia is not something apart from intuition; they are really two sides of the same coin, especially in music and/or dance improvisation.  Both are essential to so many of life's activities that it is incumbent on education to provide adequately for their development.

The development of kinesthesia is the primary goal of Eurhythmics, an approach to musical arts education first advanced by Emile Jacques-Dalcroze over one hundred years ago.  More will be said later regarding Eurhythmics and its particular relevance to musical arts education in Africa . Given its relevance, it should be widely used in African classrooms.  It is not and this may reflect the continuing dominance of Western ‘art music’ precepts in musical arts education in Africa .

Given the need for a more Afrocentric musical arts curriculum, it is apropos to briefly contrast the predominantly aesthetic approach of Western art music (which informs the philosophy of ‘music education as aesthetic education’) and the profoundly kinesthetic approach of traditional Africa .

The experiencing of Western art music is meant to be primarily an aesthetic affair.  Any overt form of kinesthetic response (dancing, hand clapping) is deemed antithetical to a truly aesthetic experiencing of the music. This reflects a belief going back to ancient Greece that sight and hearing are the primary aesthetic senses. They are distance receptors and thus make possible the physical detachment necessary for maintaining the isolation of the contemplative mind.

Such detachment is anything but desirable in traditional musical practices in Africa .  The same is arguably for most of the world’s musics.  In the case of African musical traditions, this may in part be explained by the fact that indigenous religions do not call upon adherents to sub­jugate the physicality that Western Christianity has traditionally censured. African spirituality is rooted in sensuousness and physiological response. Chernoff describes African religions as “danced faiths” in which “worship becomes a style of movement that manifests one’s relatedness for all to see” (Chernoff, 1979: 144).

Improvisation in any of the performing arts is vital educational activity in that it integrates intuition and kinesthesia in spontaneous creative acts.  There simply is no other form of artistic activity that manifests such complex and efficient pre-conscious processing.  And it provides the clearest indicator of how thoroughly artistic concepts have been assimilated as opposed to merely learned about.

The psychosocial case

Common to all forms of improvisation is the element of risk. Risk taking is crucial to psychosocial development for it is only through successfully asserting oneself in situations where the outcome is uncertain – where one has to step outside his/her comfort zone- that self-esteem is developed. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, self-esteem is the precondition to self-actualisation.  Of course, if the risk taking is unsuccessful, this leads to a lowering of self-esteem. But so also does the avoidance of risk taking. Educators must challenge students in ways where the risks are small enough that there is a high probability of success.  In improvisation, this entails an appropriate limiting of musical parameters as will discussed further along.

In any form of ensemble improvisation, in either music or dance, there is additionally the need to balance individual assertiveness with collective intentions and the implicit 'rules' as demanded by genre, style, and/or context. The interpersonal dimension in collective improvisation is far more complex and holistic than in other forms of group activity such as team sport or score-based musical ensembles. 

It is the degree to which genuine empathy is demanded that makes group improvisation so uniquely valuable from a psychosocial and/or educational point of view.  Both of the Merriam-Webster definitions for ‘empathy’ are apropos in this regard.

       the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present

·      the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it …

In improvisation, and in pre-composed music for that matter, the object referred to in the second definition would be the music being created. But in improvisation, there is little if any opportunity to pause for reflection or to apply conscious reasoning to what is being created. Being so much an intuitive affair, it follows that improvisation more directly and honestly reveals the subjective self from which it issues.  Indeed, one’s very identity is laid bare.

The first definition suggests empathy to be a form of self-transcendence, in Shelly’s words, “a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful that exists in thought, action, or person, not our own” (quoted in Enright and de Chickera, 1962: 233-4).

As with self-esteem, the capacity to empathise is an essential attribute of self-actualising individuals, who, according to Maslow, no longer regard others as gratifiers or thwarters of their own emotional needs but as persons in their own right. They are no longer preoccupied with what others do to or for them, or what others think or feel about them, but have been set free to discover and actualise new potentialities. They have greater personal autonomy, but also a stronger sense of compassion and social responsibility, this because their outlook is less egocentric and less distorted by anxiety, competitiveness and prejudice. They are more aware of and in control of their impulses and subjective reactions and therefore less intimidated by the unconventional or un­known. They seek mystery, adventure and transcendent experiences, rather than avoid them.

The capacity to empathise is also a precondition to moral maturity. Only when we are capable of “going out of our own nature” can we achieve genuine identification with moral virtue, defined not by the prescriptions, proscriptions and the prevailing opinions of society, but by our own certainty in the inherent validity of standards or principles as revealed in the behaviour of those we regard as moral exemplars. According to Lawrence Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development, this highest level (what he terms ‘post-conventional’) is achieved only when there is an active understanding of social mutuality, a genuine interest in the welfare of others, and an uncompromising belief in principles held to be unalienable and universally valid. In Kohlberg’s view, only a small minority of adults achieve this level, as was Maslow’s view with regard to self-actualisation.[5]

Approaches for developing improvisational skill

For improvisation to be employed productively in education, the crucial requirement is an educator who is active and competent as an improviser. Improvisational competence in the broader sense is an essential attribute of any true educator irrespective of the ‘subject’ or learning area.  It is clearly essential in what is called heuristic teaching, where the teacher facilitates the student’s own exploration and discovery of ways and means to solving problems. Effectual facilitation, where the teacher intervenes minimally but with maximum effect, demands keen divergent thinking skills.  Because the ways a student may pursue a solution are so variable, the nature and content of the teacher’s inputs cannot be determined ahead of time. Rather they must be improvised according to how the student’s self-discovery proceeds.

Improvisational consciousness is revealed in the way a skilled teacher quickly formulates an appropriate question based on the input just given by a student, perhaps an answer to a previous question.  With such teachers, even a ‘wrong’ answer contains the seed of a ‘right’ or better answer. Isolating this and finding the best way of using it in subsequent questions requires the dual exchange between cognitive divergence and convergence discussed earlier.

The suggestion here is that improvisational consciousness is a cognitive inclination that is generic, implying that it can be applied variously in different forms of creative problem solving. Children apply it spontaneously in their play activity and even musically, but schooling seems to have the effect of suppressing this natural inclination when it should be cultivating it. As most educators are themselves ‘products’ of such schooling, it is not surprising that improvisational activity features so minimally in their programmes.

The ability to extemporize speech fluently and articulately obviously relies on an extensive, thoroughly internalised vocabulary, grammar, and syntax as well as an extensive stock of stored 'information' (ideas) from which to draw. Similarly, fluent improvisation in music and dance requires a vast repertoire of structures so thoroughly internalized that they can be spontaneously accessed, ordered and converted into actions. However, a young child with limited vocabulary and ‘knowledge’ is nevertheless active in extemporising. Indeed, it is through his/her extemporising that linguistic fluency is developed. So it should be with improvisation in music and dance.

This realisation accounts for the emphasis that improvisation is given in the educational approaches[6] of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Carl Off. Both are predicated on the fact that children enter school already possessing a vast repertoire of internalised structures that can be evoked in improvisational activity.  Moreover, barring genetic accidents or injury, human beings come into the world “wired” for music and movement, that is to say, the neurological connections are present at birth.

Eurhythmics

What Emile Jaques-Dalcroze noted as a major flaw in music education in late nineteenth century Switzerland is arguably still a cause for concern, especially in Africa , that insufficient attention is given to developing genuine musical and creative agency. The students he observed, though technically advanced and knowledeable of the theory of music, were rhythmically unstable, lacked a developed sense of pitch, and were generally uncreative.

On the premise that the underlying cause of these deficiencies was underdeveloped kinesthesia, he devised an approach centered on movement, Eurhythmics.  This entails more than stepping to the beat and clapping rhythms. Unfortunately, much of what is passed off as Dalcroze Eurhythmics is little more than this and only succeeds in invoking the sense of tactility (touch), not kinesthesia. The touching of the foot to the floor or the bringing together of the hands is only the attack of the beat and only part of the total movement experience in which what occurs before and after the attack is just as important. Zulu Ngoma dancing with its dramatic anticipations and prolongations is a case in point and evidences the highly developed kinesthesia Dalcroze was seeking in his students. ‘Natural rhythm’ is the racist explanation for the multirhythmic ease attributed to African people.  But the Dalcrozian explanation would be that Western education arrests kinesthetic development whereas African indigenous forms of education encourage and exploit it.  The aesthetic versus the kinesthetic underpinnings of the two has already been highlighted.

In a typical Eurhythmics class, students move freely while the teacher (or a student) improvises a musical accompaniment. Specific rhythmic challenges are introduced aimed at helping students to internalise specific modes of rhythmic organisation in music, for example, moving different parts of the body according to different metres. In one popular Eurhythmic activity, the teacher improvises on a short theme, say two minims and a crotchet in 5/4 time, while the students step on the second and fourth beats of each measure.

According to Dalcroze, improvisation should feature in every lesson in some or another way, initially with as few parameters imposed as possible and making use of sounds from the environment. Progressively, rhythmic and tonal parameters are increased and the improvisations become more complex and challenging. Dalcroze’s intention was the development of musical imagination to a level where music and movement can be improvised as easily as one can extemporize speech.

The Orff Approach

The German composer and educationist Carl became acquainted with Dalcroze Eurhythmics early in his career and in 1924 helped found the Gunther Schule where teachers were trained according to Dalcroze’s principles with a major part of the programme being devoted to improvisation. The instrumen­tal ensemble Orff developed at the school used a range of percussion instru­ments, melodic and non-melodic, together with recorders and other inexpen­sive and readily accessible instruments.

Orff concluded that the eurhythmic approach, with music drawn from the natural rhythms of speech, movement and dance, would produce the best results if started in early childhood. The melodic percussion instruments he had developed for the Gunther Schule, with some modifications, proved especially well suited for this.

The Orff approach holds to the essential premise, which can be seen as Dalcrozian, that feeling must precede intellection. Kinesthetically grasping a musical concept is more important than understanding it theoretically.  It also exemplifies the most common-sensical of educational maxims, i.e. proceed from the known to the unknown. Orff drew on the chants, rhymes and games that were already part of the vocabulary and day to day experience of young children, using these to help them internalize a repertoire of rhythmic and melodic pat­terns which could later be recalled and applied in their own creative efforts.

As is clearly revealed in his compositions, Orff reversed the prevailing idea that melody is the basis of rhythm. His conception of sonority as the result of a layering of rhythms and his conviction that harmony should be sub­ordinate to the interaction of melody, rhythm and sonority are clear in his best known work, Carmina Burana. Similar thinking influenced the emergence of modal jazz in the early Sixties where melodic invention was freed from the fetters of Bebop’s fast moving harmonic sequences.

The melodic percussion instruments Orff designed, now widely available from a range of manufacturers, include glockenspiels, xylophones, and metallophones in all pitch ranges. These are mostly diatonic, but because the keys/bars can be removed and replaced with chromatic notes, many scales and modes are possible. Also, being able to remove keys makes allows one to configure the instrument for the greatest possible ease of playing, e.g. to create pentatonic patterns and thereby remove any possibil­ity of harmonic clashes. Intriguing, complex sounding rhythmic and harmonic textures are easily arrived at through the combination of simple ostinati, drones and what Orff called ‘borduns” (drones of open fifths).

These so-called Orff instruments, originally based on African and Indonesian prototypes, are by no means essential for an Orff based musical arts education. The vast variety of traditional instruments from sub-Saharan Africa provides unlimited possibilities, as do the musics in which they are traditionally used. This has been demonstrated so convincingly by the eminent musician and educator, DR Komla Amoaku, Director of the National Theater of Ghana, in the workshops he has conducted world-wide on applying Orff’s ideas using the musical traditions of Africa .

The multi-metric nature of African indigenous musics is often daunting to Western ‘trained’ musicians without any significant eurhythmic dimension in their music educations. The problem often lies less with the combining of contrasting metres than in the locating of ‘down-beats’.  In the following example, the mbira (Nyunga Nyunga) pattern of “Shumba Panzira” (Shona) puts the downbeat one quaver pulse behind where a Westerner is likely to place it (to correspond with the lowest note). 

Learning to play this pattern is relatively easy and is a quick way of developing a kinesthetic grasp of the interlocking of different downbeats that characterises so much African indigenous music.  Shifting the placement of the downbeat is really only a matter moving it from one thumb to another.

Interlocking patterns based on different downbeats is obviously more challenging when it involves two or more musicians, as in playing Amadinda xylophone music from Uganda .  But the problem can be solved eurhythmically resulting in nothing less than a quantum leap in one’s rhythmic perception and capacity for applying it creatively.[7]

The Kodály Approach

It is doubtful anyone would argue that pitch sense is not essential to musicianship, and yet the development of ‘relative pitch’ is generally not given the attention it merits, especially in the teaching of instruments.   Unless improvisation is purely rhythmic, or unless it is atonal, it requires – and greatly assists the development of – relative pitch.   Relative pitch is also essential to true musical literacy.   Many people are proficient at reading music in that they are able to get their instruments to do what the score calls for in terms of correct pitch sequences, but this does not mean that they are necessarily able to internally ‘hear’ the notes, merely that they are able to produce the correct pitch (by enacting the correct fingering or pressing the appropriate key).  

Zoltan Kodály’s principal educational objective was the achievement of mass music literacy and found tools for this in the Tonic Sol-fa sys­tem of sight-singing and notation devised in the 19th century by the English clergyman and educationist, John Curwen.   In it, the pitch of ‘do’ (doh) is relative. It can be any pitch (e.g. C, C#, D, etc.), but once fixed, all other notes (‘re’ (ray), ‘mi’ (mee), ‘fa’, ‘so’, ‘la’, ‘ti’) become fixed in relationship to it.

When in a major key, ‘do’ is the key-note (tonal centre) and the vowel sounds of the notes are meaningful in terms of each note’s ‘character’ (e.g. stable or wanting to move) relative to ‘do’.    ‘Do’ and ‘so’ with their distinctive vowel sound (‘oh’) correspond to the tonic; ‘mi’ and ti are both notes that ascend by semitones (‘mi’-’fa’ & ‘ti’-’do’).   Using notes other than ‘do’ as the key-note results in different modes, each with their own character and creative possibilites. 

Hand signs can and should be applied in improvisational contexts.  For example, against a simple, ostinato-based accompaniment, one student ‘dictates’ a spontaneously created melody to fellow students using hand-signs representing the notes of a relevant scale or mode.

The use of rhythm names and stem/stick notation are also associated with the Kodály approach and offer much more practical and learner-friendly means of developing music literacy and the capacity to internally represent what one hears, whether externally or internally.

Concluding remarks

Eurhythmics, Orff and Kodály based musical arts education are proven and highly adaptable means of developing improvisational ability in the music.  Clearly, Eurhythmics and Orff are consistent with indigenous approaches in Africa as has been stressed. It is beyond the scope of this paper to say more in respect of them but readers not already conversant with them are encouraged to investigate further. 

Success in teaching improvisation ultimately hinges on the ability of the educator to imaginatively create contexts for improvisation with parameters (which control the risk factor) appropriate to the level of students involved. These should sufficiently challenge the students to develop and apply new skills, concepts and techniques in a supportive environment where success and enjoyment are continuously experienced.

The parameters are obviously fewer with music improvised on non-pitched instruments.  In this regard, ‘drum circles’ have in recent years become the means for vast numbers of people with little or no formal musical ‘training’ to participate and grow as improvising artists.  

REFERENCES

Anderson , S. (2001) ‘Learning Interlocking & Rhythmic Perception Skills through Amadinda Xylophone Music’.  The Talking Drum, No. 15.

Bowman, W. D. (1982) ‘Polanyi and Instructional Method in Music’. Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 16, pp 75-86.

Chernoff, J. M. (1979) African Rhythm and African Sensibility, University of Chicago Press: Chicago .

Enright, D..J. and E. de Chickera (editors) (1962) English Critical Texts. London ,  Oxford University Press.

Misholve, J.  (April 1998) ‘Intuition: A Link Between Psi and Spirituality’.  www.intuition.org/revision.htm  (electronically accessed 8 March 2003 ).

Nachmanovitch, S. (1990) Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. New York ,  Jeremy P Tarcher / Putnam.

Regelski, T. A. Thomas Regelski’ (1998) ‘Critical Theory and Praxis: Professionalizing Music Education’. www.nyu.edu/education/music/mayday/maydaygroup/papers/crittheoryrev.htm  (electronically accessed 8 March 2003 ).

 Robinson, J.E. (2001) ‘Eurhythmics for South Africa ’. The Talking Drum. No. 15, pp 2-5.