Frame Innovation in Jazz Education

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As a composer I’m a big fan of “inside the box” thinking – working with a set of restrictions in material or method that challenge me to reimagine what might be possible within that box. I’ve found that creating a frame in this way is a powerful tool for unearthing new insights and outcomes;[1] as Igor Stravinsky posits (dramatically) in his Poetics of Music: “…the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.” (1942, p. 65)

This notion of framing forms the basis of Kees Dorst’s excellent book Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking By Design (2015). While Stravinsky’s ‘constraints’ might be interpreted as also limiting the scope of possible outcomes, Dorst presents a method of de-framing and re-framing via the rich, story-telling nature of metaphor that helps us free the chains that shackle our thinking to our existing paradigms. In the case of Dorst’s work as a designer, that means asking: what if we approached late night crime through the lens of a music festival? What if we examined retail theft through the lens of a catwalk?

For the last six weeks my colleagues in UTS’ MCISI program and I have been throwing these what if questions around together based on our own contexts, leading to some occasionally ridiculous (what if risk management was actually about brewing craft beer?) but often insightful conversations. After six weeks, this is where I landed as a musician and lecturer in jazz & improvised music.

1. Values

To begin, we zoomed out to explore our contexts through a values lens: identifying the core beliefs, themes and intrinsic drivers that define our workplaces. Value mapping allows us to dig into both what our organisations state they value in principle, but also, crucially, our own lived experience of what it feels like the people in the organisation value in practice (what are organisations, after all, but the people within them).

For example, students and teachers of jazz share the value of creative autonomy: in the case of students, to be in an environment that gives them the freedom and the tools to mine their own creative instincts and inclinations, and for teachers, the trust of the organisation to teach in the way and even the content they see fit.

Though according to Bruce Lee, “A teacher is never a giver of truth – he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.” At the values level, this means holding creative autonomy in balance with humility and enablement; students might want to study with me based on what do and what I know, but my goal is rather to teach them how I arrived at knowing it, so they might adopt and/or adapt similar methods towards their own creative ends. This sometimes means I need to check my own stylistic preferences to allow the student the space to arrive at discovery of theirs – so long as they are able to stay open to new ways of thinking and working.

The challenge in teaching – or in my mind, coaching – in this way is also balancing openness and curiosity with enough structure and purpose to help the student to set their own frames to work within. I’ve worked with many students who struggle to figure out how to practice, or with the feeling that their practice is not particularly effective; most often, the source of that struggle is actually a kind of formlessness or intentionality-lessness to their practice – they don’t have clear enough frames (i.e. tasks, goals, methods) in place to orient their focus during a session or document their progress over time. In this sense, Dorst’s approach to framing and its focus on examining methods bears similar hallmarks to Ericsson et. al’s (1993) notion of deliberate practice – mastery is not just about getting in 10,000 hours of practice, it’s about the quality or effectiveness of those hours.

At its best, the dynamic between ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ starts to become one of co-creation as both parties discover new ways of doing – the student, new ways of doing, and the teacher, new ways of communicating (and often, new ways of doing too!). Yet I’ve also felt a clash in values when it comes to talking about practicing improvisation. In jazz the value of autonomy often comes (perhaps subconsciously) hand in hand with freedom, and with that potentially also a disinclination towards working with formalised systems, structures or deadlines. I’ve found this mindset can be both a cause and an effect of a student encountering the dauntingly-vast question of “what to practice” – especially in an art form in which the only “correct” or “effective” answers are based fundamentally on what one feels is correct, or on feedback from one’s peers, mentor, and ultimately audiences.

Which brings us to community and service. Just as the pandemic gutted audience’s opportunities to see live music, so too has it impacted young musicians’ opportunities to play live, to feel the dynamic interplay between an ensemble and audience. I recently tutored a semester’s course in music business skills, and gradually realised that many of the students, some a few years into their undergraduate degrees, still had very little if any experience performing live. To me, this raises the risk that studying and making music is framed – perhaps dangerously implicitly, and because of the sheer nature of the times – as something one does singularly in one’s own room behind a screen. A lot of my favourite music is made this way! But as the scholar Fumi Okiji notes, spontaneity-driven music like jazz acts as a powerful conduit for reconciling individual agency and diplomacy – which seems increasingly pertinent in a polarised world:

[The novelist & literary critic] Ralph Ellison understood genuine jazz to be “an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment…springs from a contest in which each artists challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity as individual, as member of the collectivist and as a link in the chain of tradition.” (Okiji, 2022, p. 17)

In the same sense, the ritual of live performance offers a quintessential communion of artist & audience. Saxophonist Lou Donaldson describes this kind of emotional reciprocity in action:

...[I] play various types of pieces at the beginning of the evening, and from the audience's reaction, I'll know what to work on for the rest of the evening. (quoted in Berliner, 1994, p. 468)

Educators and policy designers have recognised this disconnect between artists & learning institutions and audiences for some time (Knell, 2006), and argued that institutions must place the experiential needs of the communities they are training musicians to serve at the heart of policy and practice – with diversity & inclusion and social justice foremost in mind (Horbelt, 2021; Russonello, 2020). Putting this philosophy into action seems more pressing then ever as venues continue to close doors even after the worst of the pandemic has seemingly past (Holmes, 2022) and the economic challenges to contemporary musicians trying to make a living from their art are now well known (Manojlovic, 2021). In that sense, effectiveness is also aligned to the common value of career readiness (Canham, 2022) – a graduate’s ability to find sustainability and security of work. As Knell (2006) suggests, perhaps this means institutions need to foster a conscious and ongoing dialogue about the relationship between our creative autonomy and the music we really want to make, and the music that our communities really want to hear.

2. Frames

Out of this exploration of values, discovery and effectiveness stood out as promising departure points for frame innovation. From this, one frame in particular emerged as having particularly rich source of methods and metaphors.

Jazz as…space exploration?

Few things have sparked human imagination and discovery more than the mysteries of the cosmos. As a child of the 90s, bouncing around the platform games in The Magic School Bus Explores The Solar System looking for Ms Frizzle is etched into my memory (“Wahoo it’s beautiful out here!!). In Australia, First Nations knowledge, navigation, economics and mythology is deeply informed by the movements of celestial bodies. In his address at Rice University in 1962, JFK described space travel as “…the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

Space itself evokes a sense of endless possibilities and what ifs, a terrain so unimaginably vast and ever-expanding it is likely we are still only at the very beginning of our understanding of its content and workings. To pioneers like Elon Musk, space exploration is an opportunity to strive towards the best version of ourselves as a species, to prove that even previously unfathomable things – such as a human colony on a terraformed Mars – are possible in time with big dreams and deliberate, persistent, iterative and effective effort.

JFK also famously recognised this relationship between effort and discovery – that we pursue and find satisfaction in our work “not because it is easy, but because it is hard”. Even if they arrive via a eureka moment, grand discoveries and scientific advances are rarely random (Heid, 2019). Isaac Newton’s eureka! thanks to a falling apple in 1666 captures our imagination, but it took the next twenty years for Newton to formulate his ideas into his ground-breaking book The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687).

In the context of jazz improvisation, viewing discovery and effectiveness through the metaphor of space exploration turns up some evocative (if dangerously cliché...) analogies.

We can, for instance, think of our pursuit of finer and finer craftsmanship much like the boundlessness of space. While we might eventually be perceived as having some mastery of our craft (i.e. or understanding of the universe), we also recognise that we can never possibly discover everything there might be to know; music offers us the privilege and humility of being an eternal student (see, e.g. Marchese's interview with legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins (2020)). The question then becomes – what part of the infinite cosmos of music do we choose to explore? What tiny corner of what galaxy do we want to really know? Or are we more inclined to fly from place to place, sampling a little of many musical planets? Either way, our journeys will ask us to be deliberate or effective in our pursuit and practice of our craft to get anything meaningful done.

In the context of space exploration, the value of effectiveness can be literally a question of life or death; a lack of effectiveness – even just a slight miscalculation – can have explosive or fatal consequences. In the case of jazz education and the ephemerality of sound in general, perhaps it might be worth us asking: what if we saw what we do as having life or death consequences? How might that framing inform our objectives, our values, our methods?

First, research continues to demonstrate the formative role participating in music can play in children’s cognitive, coordinative and social development (Collins, 2021). Sadly (and staggeringly) in 2013, 63% of primary schools and 34% of secondary schools in Australia offered no classroom music education (Glover & Hehir, 2013). While those figures have likely improved in the past decade, there are still significant funding and access challenges associated with delivering music education in Australia:

Music education in Australia continues to be inequitable, highly variable and in many cases undervalued and poorly understood…just as we have become most aware of the profound benefits of a quality music education we are most unable to provide it to all Australian children. (Collins et al., 2019, p. 51)

Not life or death consequences, maybe, but a lot of kids deprived of a rich source of growth & development.

In the case of jazz education at the tertiary level, perhaps not sufficiently fostering a student’s ability to plan and practice deliberately and effectively – essentially, to navigate the open & complex system of their craft development – might have flow on affects to their ability to navigate complexity in their lives more broadly. As we continue to experience the pressures of our age of accelerations (Friedman, 2016), it is these kind of skills that will define graduates’ capacity to adapt and flourish in a unpredictable, changing world. With 63.5% of performing artists reporting a deterioration in mental health during the pandemic (Rusak, 2022), ‘life or death’ outcomes are tragically all too real, and learning institutions thus bear a responsibility to interrogate and continually reimagine their practices to ensure students are prepared for their future both holistically as well as artistically.

Ultimately, the success of that interrogation and re-imagination lies at the conversation level – in our ability to collaborate and critically, to navigate conflict together effectively to reach new discoveries. ISS astronaut Paolo Nespoli depicts this vital role of teamwork in space missions:

Everyday all day you are doing a whole series of complex activities that requires attention, that requires a lot of knowledge – eventually you are going to make a mistake. And if you do not have a team there ready to catch this mistake, ready to help you not to make this mistake, then the situation can be very disastrous. It’s more about what the team can do, than what that single person can do. (Nespoli, 2020)

I’ve found that teamwork of this kind is not necessarily an integral part of teaching; I can go even several weeks at a time without having more than a brief, passing hallway conversation with a colleague, let alone having opportunities for an entire staff team to come together for any substantiative conversation, review or futuring. As a result, an organisation can feel more like a collective of individual teachers working in micro-silos, rather than the kind of richly connected, actively self-curious, continuously improving and evolving organism that defines successful organisations and networks (not to mention space missions) today (Ehrlichman, 2021).

Greater effectiveness is also often guided by tiny discoveries in the form of iteration. SpaceX is renowned for its embracing of (often explosive) failure and rapid iteration cycle, all building towards the remarkable goal of a fully reusable spacecraft launcher (Etherington, 2020). While jazz musicians might use iteration in the form of say, spontaneous alterations to learned melodic phrases, without an clearly defined vision or constant re-examination of one’s assumptions, there is a risk of finding our view of possible iterations limited by our frames (for example, jazz standards). To me this is one of the detrimental impacts of the doctrine of jazz chord-scale theory – while chord-scale relationships provide a useful framework, I’ve found they can also lead students to think about what note choices are “correct” at a certain point, rather than deeply listening to the shape and trajectory of their melodic lines. In Frame Innovation, Dorst identifies these potential negative side-effects of once-useful frames:

Once frames are accepted, they become the context for routine behaviour…frames [eventually] become limiting rationalities in themselves, holding back new developments. Creative and innovative people battle against fossilized frames. (Dorst, 2015, p. 65)

3. Future Actions

Having explored these possible implications of this new frame to the original context, the question then becomes: how can we tangibly embed these insights, or even just framing practice as a method into how our organisation works? What might be the first step?

In the case of discovery, for example, we might:

• Establish a regular “reconnaissance reports” meeting with our staff team, solely focussed around sharing, exploring and documenting insights from lecturers’ most recent missions (i.e. teaching periods). Having flown off to the planets of their own classes, a practice like this stands to further foster the sense that the faculty is actively pursuing the value of discovery, via a feedback loop back to “mission control”. To be most effective, perhaps all staff might have 1 minute to present a single discovery in a rapid-fire format like Pecha-Kucha (“chit-chat” in Japanese). Notable discoveries or “solutions” might then be adopted or prototyped by other teachers, or even expanded and formalised into more concrete departmental practices.

In the case of effectiveness, for example, we might:

• Through a series of faculty workshops, explore and codify the existing knowledges within the department around creative and deliberate practice, or even extending to holistic well-being. Then from these workshops, develop a set of resources and readings for students – a kind of almanac for creative artists. Such an initiative stands to further enhance the organisation’s reputation for self-observation and continuous improvement, and to play a central role as a network weaver in sharing that knowledge. While this ethos has now long been flourishing at the practice-based research level amongst practitioners, extending it to organisational and teaching practice remains a promising area for further integration.

4. Frame Organisation

There’s a reason jazz standards written in the 1930s continue to be recorded and reimagined by musicians today – they provide frames rich enough to allow the kind of cognitive unshackling Stravinsky described earlier. As jazz has evolved, so too have the various methods of exploring those frames – new harmonic perspectives, a deeper incorporation of African rhythmic vernacular, and so on. Yet to continue to innovate within both creative and organisational practice, it’s vital that we make regular concerted effort to recognise the risks of our fossilized frames (i.e. long-standing curriculum, ways of working and collaborating), and to explore and prototype new ones.

In practice this might require us, as the creators of our institutions, to recognise that we are always working within a frame, consciously or not, and build into our work the opportunities to deeply examine and reimagine them. For instance, perhaps we ought to start each year by getting together to explore frame innovation in our institutions, to playfully interrogate what we do and how we do it. This seems especially vital in the tertiary landscape, punctuated as it is with long mid-year and summer breaks. For instance, we might:

• Co-create a mission plan. What would mission success look like this year? How will we know if we’ve achieved it? What are the outcomes we can measure? What new units of measurement might we need? (i.e. the various scales of molecules, atoms, protons, quarks, etc.) For instance, The University of Sydney’s recently launched Student Relationship Engagement System (SRES) allows lectures to tailor individual content and track student progress on a far more granular and personal level than an end of semester survey – enabling teachers to better visualise the effectiveness of their teaching and the needs of their learners. This emphasis on feedback loops reflects long-established trends in the corporate landscape and the work of pioneering businesses like Culture Amp.

• Review or design a new Voyager. What small scale, very-long-term initiatives might trickle-feed us new information from unknown realms? Even if the payoffs might be years, even decades in the making? For example, where might we be able to weave a more dense, integrated network? Who might be our Voyager that can facilitate new collaborations or transdisciplinarity?

• Reposition our Hubble telescope. What part of our cosmos (industry) is our attention most focussed? What if we flipped that field of view? What if we looked where we would usually not think to look? Is anyone in the organisation already looking there? Or connected to people that are?

• Frame play & iteration. Using one particular existing practice as a focus, take a deep dive into frame creation. Zoom out to the values & principles level of that practice. Think about other disciplines that embody those values. Look at the ways they work. Propose or even protype what those methods might look like in the realm of our own focal practice.

To meet the needs and accelerating changes of our time, we must foster our organisations’ ability to breathe and evolve in step – to frame up new interstellar colonies for our ideas – so that we might discover new riches in those parts of our cosmos still hidden from view.

References

Barry, S. (2017). Blueprints and Vignettes: Pitch-class sets, Serialism and Intervallicism, and the Integration of Systematic and Intuitive Music Making [PhD thesis, The University of Sydney].

Berliner, P. (1994). Thinking in jazz : the infinite art of improvisation. University of Chicago Press.

Canham, N. (2022). Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work: Transformational Approaches to Music Careers Education. Routledge.

Collins, A. (2021). The Music Advantage: How Learning Music Helps Your Child's Brain and Wellbeing. Allen & Unwin.

Collins, A., Dwyer, R., & Date, A. (2019). Music Education: A Sound Investment. https://www.alberts.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Alberts_Music-Education-Report_A4.pdf

Dorst, K. (2015). Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. MIT Press.

Ehrlichman, D. (2021). Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Romer, C. (1993). The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406.

Etherington, D. (2020). SpaceX anticipates building ‘many rockets’ as it iterates Starship toward orbital flight this year. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/21/spacex-anticipates-building-many-rockets-as-it-iterates-starship-towards-orbital-flight-this-year/

Friedman, T. L. (2016). Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide To Thriving in the Age of Accellerations. Penguin.

Glover, D., & Hehir, F. (2013). Music to our Ears: A Guide for Parents in the Campaign for Music Education in Schools. https://musicaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Research-Report-Music-To-Our-Ears-Published-Sept-2013.pdf

Heid, M. (2019, August 1). The Science Behind Eureka Moments. Medium. https://elemental.medium.com/the-science-behind-eureka-moments-6729e3ce4de7

Holmes, D. (2022, 20 March). Farewell to 505: curtains close on one of Australia’s most important jazz clubs. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/mar/20/farewell-to-505-curtains-close-on-one-of-australias-most-important-jazz-clubs

Horbelt, S. (2021). Switching Orbits: Observations on Gender in Jazz. Dingo Jazz Journal.

Knell, J. (2006). Whose art is it anyway? Arts Council England.

Manojlovic, N. (2021). Spotify Wrapped. https://novakmanojlovic.squarespace.com/writing

Marchese, D. (2020, February 27). Sonny Rollins Is at Peace. But He Regrets Trying to One-Up Coltrane. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/24/magazine/sonny-rollins-interview.html

Nespoli, P. (2020). ISS Astronaut Paolo Nespoli on the Power of Teamwork and Failure [Interview]. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyUDk8friR0

Okiji, F. (2022). Jazz As Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford University Press.

Rusak, H. (2022, January 19). 63.5% of Australia’s performing artists reported worsening mental health during COVID. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/63-5-of-australias-performing-artists-reported-worsening-mental-health-during-covid-174610

Russonello, G. (2020, September 3). Jazz Has Always Been Protest Music. Can It Meet This Moment? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/arts/music/jazz-protest-academia.html

[1] This idea and its implications for composition and improvisation was the basis for my doctoral research & portfolio. Barry, S. (2017). Blueprints and Vignettes: Pitch-class sets, Serialism and Intervallicism, and the Integration of Systematic and Intuitive Music Making [PhD thesis, The University of Sydney].