Releasing butterflies

The other day, two of my students stayed in my classroom to play the piano after choir, before walking home. As I puttered around, cleaning up the classroom for the weekend, I overheard their efforts and realized that they were trying to improvise on the black keys together but were getting frustrated.
I had given a mini-lesson on improvisation a few weeks back, but had not had the chance to work individually with each 5th grader, so one of the girls was trying to explain the process to the other. When they asked me if I would play, I was glad to join them at the piano.
“Improvisation is a sharing of ideas, like a musical conversation,” I reminded them. “It can be long, short, complicated, or simple, just remember to listen to what the other person plays. You can use pieces of that person’s idea in your next answer, so that they have something in common, and then add something new of your own. The other person then can use pieces of your idea. Sometimes you choose something completely different, and start a new conversation. You never know exactly where you’re going to go since you come up with it on the spot, and that’s what is so fun about this, together you can create a piece of music that you could not have made by yourself because you are sharing ideas.”
Using only the black keys –“because they are pentatonic and always sound good together”- I played first with one girl and then the other, our ideas sounding back and forth across the keyboard; rhythm patterns emerged and dissolved, tonal centers shifted, miniature melodies flowed in and out of each other, time was flexible, the atmosphere was relaxed, the possibilities infinite, or so it seemed. Finally, we ended it, and with a tinge of disappointment she said “It makes you want to just keep going…”
I agree. The music didn’t have to end there, so perhaps it is just paused, frozen inside of us until we come again to share it with each other. Having the chance to enrich someone else’s life with moments like these, where music comes alive and feeds the soul, these are the moments that make teaching rewarding.
Thinking back on that moment today, I realized that improvising a musical conversation is indeed like truly meaningful conversations that people share. They are most rewarding when we share ideas, follow another person’s lead, discover new topics to explore together, and let the energy of it surround us and run on and on until it has to be ended, frozen until our next meeting. Maybe this is why ending conversations always feels awkward to me; I know that we have explored to the outer reaches of a topic and reached the end of the discussion, or that time demands we move on to other things again, but still I wish that it could keep on going. However, those unexplored possibilities wait, trapped like butterflies in a jar, just waiting to be released from inside of each other by our next conversation… And so I wait with anticipation for those moments, moments of releasing butterflies, music, words, and pieces of ourselves in conversation.