The Nature of Improvisation: the Improvisation of Our Nature?

As far as I'm concerned, it's the key to education--the difference between dry discipline and soaring creativity, between earthbound drudgery and ethereal effortlessness, the difference between science and art.

I'm talking about improvisation, that skill that's not really a skill but is built on skill.  The ability to take the basic skills than many can simply do but combining them in a way that includes your own style, that includes heart, that includes that breath of creativity that brings something to life.  Perhaps I'm simply thinking about style--the ability to put your own mark, your own flair upon something.

For me, it was the piano that remained forever lifeless, a monolith that oppressed, that remained flat and two-dimensional no matter how many times I tried to play it--which admittedly wasn't that many times. 

My dad tried to get me to catch the vision a couple of different ways.  One of them was simply by insisting that I practice.  But being forced to sit down to drudgery didn't do it because I didn't have my own spark, didn't have any appreciation for the music that I was supposed to be making, so a second thing he did for me was model what might be. 

It's still one of the grandest visions of my life, a moment of sheer transformation: my dad, perhaps 46 sitting down at the piano, built like a stout piano himself, with stubby fingers at least two keys thick from milking cows for at least 44 of those 46 years.  Immediately he went from Mack truck of a man to light-hearted dancer, dredging up from somewhere in his memory the opening bars of "The Entertainer," his hands jumping with life over the keys, giving off an energy that moved the room itself, his whole torso swaying as if the piano was an alternator generating physical shocks that were animating his body.  I could hear the difference, see the difference.  That was music.  It had life and style--it had the life of him in it. 

But I never made it, never got to any level where I can remember a song I played that I loved, that I returned to just to play and hear it for its own sake.

My daughter takes piano lessons.  Within her first year she'd attained the level that I never did in five years of lessons.  All it took was for me to compliment her on a song or two--one of them with that lilting eeriness of a snake charmer's song; another with the stalking measure of a cat after its prey; a third with the staccato of a rainstorm.  "Ooh, I like that one, Sommer," I'd say with an accompanying description of what it sounded like to me.  Almost inevtibably she'd return to it in succeeding days to please me, and then it was an easy switch to return to it simply to please herself. 

She'd found the formula of style, of improvisation:  a song on the page, plus her own skill, imagination, and life giving the song a life of its own, a new creation put into the atmosphere.

But how many different areas can style and improvisation be applied to?  Professor Bill Elgersma is teaching an education class, something like Strategies for Secondary Education: he can teach his students the tricks of lesson plans and they can plug something in, but if they can't make the students care, can't hit that level where gimmicks and passion get a lesson plan off the ground and airborne where someone might get caught up in it, where the time passing in classroom might cease to matter, the lesson will remain exaclty that: gimmickry.  So certainly it works in education.  Might it also apply in nursing?  In physical therapy?  In accounting? 

I'm certainly not expert enough in these other areas to know where improvisation and style might matter, but certainly in human existence on earth, these elements remain the breath of life, the heart of the creation itself, put there by a Creator who after setting his masterpiece in space pronounced it "very good."