Thinking Sideways

How do you think when you improvise - and can that thinking be developed deliberately?

Thinking Sideways: Creativity Techniques for the Free Improviser draws on Edward de Bono's concept of lateral thinking to explore what happens when three widely used creativity techniques - Brainstorming, Six Thinking Hats, and Random Stimulation - are brought into the practice room, the rehearsal space, and onto the stage.

Free improvisation is one of the most cognitively demanding forms of musical practice, and one of the least systematically taught. Musicians are expected to develop - through accumulated experience alone - the capacity to generate ideas spontaneously, respond to the unexpected in real time, and sustain creative momentum across the full arc of a performance. What is rarely offered is any systematic way of understanding what that thinking consists of, or of developing it deliberately.

This book is an attempt to do exactly that. It examines how creativity techniques developed outside music can be adapted for free improvisation practice, and what they make possible when used with intention. The result is both theoretical and practical: a close reading of the techniques themselves and their relationship to lateral thinking, alongside a concrete framework - the Improviser's Self-Reflection Diary Template - that brings all three techniques together into a tool any improviser can use.

Thinking Sideways is addressed to improvisers, music educators, and anyone interested in the relationship between creative thinking and musical practice. It grows out of research conducted during the author's master's studies in contemporary improvisation at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn.

Michael Sagulin is a musician, improviser, and educator based in Finland. He holds a Master's degree in Contemporary Improvisation from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn, where this research was originally developed, and a background spanning music education, journalism, and arts administration. Thinking Sideways is his first book.