Idea Bank: Revisiting the Past in the Present: Improvisation in Interaction with Classical Music

Music Educators Journal June 2022 Copyright © 2022 National Association for Music Education DOI: 10.1177/00274321221107682 http://journals.sagepub.com/home/mej Julia West earned a doctorate in music education at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City and a master’s in harpsichord performance and a bachelor’s in music education at the University of North Texas, Denton. She is the managing editor of Visions of Research in Music Education. She can be contacted at jmw2252@ tc.columbia.edu. Practices of improvisation are often disconnected from the performance of classical music. As historical musicologist Clive Brown describes, Western European art music was once played in a manner more closely resembling popular music practices today, “responding to the messages that lie behind the notes on the page.” How can we, as music teachers, open classical repertoire to improvisation by our students? How might our students interact with the messages “behind the Idea Bank