Improvisation is music to his ears
[attach]3738[/attach]A walk in the park literally inspired him with a business idea.
Moore Park resident Mitchell Wong was backpacking across Germany three years ago when he found himself in a Berlin park listening to two Turkish musicians. Though he couldn’t communicate verbally with them, he pulled out his sax, started improvising with the musicians and playing with them for hours in front of a crowd.
It was after that moment that the 24 year old music student at the University of Toronto saw that music could be a powerful communication tool.
“I realized, ‘Wow, music really is a universal language,’” Wong says.
That realization led to [url=http://www.mslmusic.ca]Music as a Second Language[/url]. It launched in September with the opening of Wong’s second-level studio at 842 Yonge St.
In the 10-week program, Wong teaches musical improvisation techniques to classically trained adults and high school students who are accustomed to playing sheet music.
The way music has been taught since the 18th century, Wong says, has been simply to practise the notes that are on the page, which is essentially recreating someone else’s work.
Through a methodology Wong has developed, students learn how to improvise their own melody over a recorded background track.
A sax, guitar and bass player, Wong started a pilot program with University of Toronto Schools in 2009, when he was in his last year of university. That improvisation program has now expanded to include six private and public schools in Toronto.
Wong started the program, he says, with the goal of teaching musicians the skills to communicate with anyone. Learning to socialize with other people and make music with them nurtures confidence and creativity, he says.
“Students who were shy to begin with found their voice through music,” he says of his experience teaching improv.
Though he does offer classes to individuals, the sessions are also taught in groups of three as the interaction is important, he says.
In the new studio location, past students congregate monthly for open jam sessions where the group will play a song and improvise over it.
“It’s always full,” Wong says.
One of Wong’s goals is to get into curriculum development. Musical improv is a specialized goal for only certain grades in the Ontario curriculum, he says, but he wants to introduce a solid musical improv component that’s for all high school grades.
“My plan is to prove (improvisation) works.”