How can we be taught to create our own personal music? We can't. While many books about creativity and improvisation are filled with methods and formulas, the Pattern Play books are based on the understanding that something personal can only emerge from a state of mind that is inspired. Our own quirky genius is revealed via intuition and imagination. When we are told
how to create, it is not really creativity and certainly not inspiration!
The Pattern Play books are full of rich musical patterns that you can play with immediately. To create your own music is to discover what it really means to play music. As Carl Jung said, The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
With the Pattern Play books, you learn by creating. Creating inspired melodies is the first step to becoming a creator of music. Mozart once said, Melody is the essence of music. With this book, you learn to create your own melodies with the most popular scales (major, minor, blues, and pentatonic) in a number of diverse musical styles.
This book has 31 pieces, each with musical patterns in a different style. It comes with a CD featuring the author improvising on each of the pieces. The book is made with high-quality paper and a lay-flat binding, and is meant to be a companion for a lifetime of exploration.
Anyone with a desire to create music can do so. Just as we spontaneously create new sentences each day with words, we can create fresh and personal music at any moment with musical Patterns. We can all be inspired.
Forrest Kinney began studying classical piano at fifteen, composing at sixteen, and teaching at seventeen. Since then, he has made his living as a pianist and as an educator devoted to discovering the unique gifts in each of his students.
Forrest is the composer and author of the Pattern Play series (patternplay.com), books that allow pianists to create their own music in diverse styles. He is also the author of Creativity Beyond Compare, a book about the lost nature of art that took eighteen years to finish. With his wife, Akiko, Forrest regularly gives workshops on creativity for music teachers and their students in the United States and Canada.
He is currently patenting a pocket-sized device that will allow users to type all the letters of a word at once, making typing words like playing chords on a piano. This will finally make it possible to write at the speed of speech.
