"Evolution" Improvisational Exercise

The exercise puts to the test your creative thinking skills through the application of improvisational variations on a particular subject. Here's how it works.

1. Improvise a simple musical subject.
2. Improvise a minimum of three variations that contain the subject, each with increasing complexity. For example, the following variation should be more complex than the previous variation. Resolution of the variation is not required.

To illustrate, I created three example subjects along with some variations. My example subjects are all in the key of C, however I encourage you to use different keys.

 (improvised and recorded on Sep 11, 2025)

Subject 1

Variation 1

 

Variation 2

Variation 3

Variation 4

Subject 2

 

Variation 1

Variation 2

Variation 3

Subject 3

Variation 1

Variation 2

Variation 3

Alternative Exercise

An alternative exercise to the "Evolution" Improvisational Exercise would be the "Variation" Improvisational Exercise. Both exercises are the same with the exception that you can ignore the complexity requirement and simply focus on creating variations that contain the subject.