ABSTRACT

Many music educators have long recognized the fact that the piano is an indispensable tool for music teaching and considered piano study an essential foundations for the musical training of future teachers. Prospective elementary teachers must develop a comprehensive keyboard musicianship necessary for classroom teaching through exensive training in functional piano skills such as transposition, sight-reading, improvisation, harmonization, accompanying, playing by ear, ensemble playing, and score reading. But many elementary education graduates are experiencing difficulty in using these skills in school music teaching, especially in demonstrating improvising skills. The purpose of this study was to develop the instuctional program for two semesters to promote creative keyboard sldlls for future elementary school teachers. The study was primarily concerned with the teaching of improvising skills to beginning level students at the elementary teacher training institutions in Korea. The teaching materials presented for this program were devised to be used as additional supplementary teaching materials to the currently used class piano textbooks in such institutions. Since most of these textbooks do not contain the study relating to improvisational experience, the learning materials and various performance approaches presented in this proposed program will be useful for teaching improvisation. By reviewing the related literature, the following aspects were examined to provide the theoretical basis for the development of this program: (1) goals and objectives of the piano curricula for the elementary education majors, (2) educational values of studying improvisation skills, (3) various types of improvisational techniques at the keyboard, and (4) content and teaching approaches of American adult piano methods published for use in college piano classes, focusing especially on the area of improvisation. The study described the procedures for designing overall structure of the program, for determining course content and learning activities, and for collecting and analyzing numerous compositions to select appropriate teaching materials for various types of improvisational activity. Course content and learning activities of the functional piano course of the institutions of elementary teacher education should be cerrelated as much as possible with elementary music curriculum and elementary music teaching. For this reason, this research examined the revised national standards for the 7th educational curriculum of music study in elementary school in Korea in order to identify course content to be taught in the creative keyboard program proposed in this research. The program consisted of thirty instructional units to be taught in two semesters, which were sequentially organized and arranged according to the level of difficulty. The learning content and the improvisational activities for all units were outlined in a summarized format. Each unit consisted of several learning tasks which employ a variety of improvisational approaches, encourage creative experiences at the keyboard, and promote an understanding of musical concept. For each task, specific performance sugesstions, practicing procedures, and explanations for musical terms and concepts were given in detail. Creative keyboard skills included in this proposed program were improvisation, composing, creative music reading, transposition, harmonization, ensemble playing, playing by ear, and accompanying. Especially improvisation skills were taught in diverse ways by utilizing a variety of approaches such as creating rhythm and melody, musical question and answer, creative music reading, composing sound pieces, baroque style melodic embellishment, making variations based on compositions, improvisation employing elements of Korean traditional music and the twentieth century compositional techniques, spontaneous multi piano ensemble, and creating music with sound effects of digita