Why Classical Musicians Need To Improvise (Part 1)
What do you think of when I say improvisation? Most people probably have an image of jazz musicians, or perhaps comedians, enter their minds. Maybe contemporary dancers, if you’re involved with that sort of scene. Some may even think of a crafty coworker – a la MacGyver – making some clever contraption out of unusual objects to solve a problem around the office.
What do you think of when I say discipline? Perhaps you think of an elite ballet dancer. There is the archetype of the soldier, diligently carrying out his mission – or the concert pianist who practices 10 hours a day to prepare for their Carnegie Hall debut. We think of people who have a plan and execute that plan without fail.
Are these concepts mutually exclusive? I don’t think so. In fact, I think to excel in either of these fields there needs to be facility with both of these skills. What is a jazz pianist that can’t play any scales? What is an actor that mechanically recreates a scene night after night?
Why am I singling out classical musicians in this post? (Hint: It's not to be mean.) In the light of The Boston Conservatory’s impending merger with Berklee, I want to recall some of my experiences from attending the conservatory. Let me preface this by saying that I studied jazz piano and saxophone in my youth. I did not have strictly classical music aspirations when I started at the conservatory but I knew that the discipline of a classical program would address one of my weaknesses. It was to my great surprise that, by and large, musicians from these schools did not seem to get along.
To the classical musicians there was a certain sanctity that accompanied following the “notes on the page”. That there was a sublime nature, almost a sacred duty, in faithfully bringing the composer’s intent into the world. Many conservatory students believed that the jazz musicians were simply too lazy – that they lacked the discipline to be able to complete this lofty task. Conservatory students would critisize artists who created popular music as hacks who only had a 4-chord vocabulary.
On the other side of the fence were the jazz musicians. They found the classical musicians unoriginal and uninspired. They questioned the worth of bringing something into the world for the nth time when there was so much music out there that didn’t exist yet (and will never exist again). They found the rigidity of the classical world stifling. They said that the classical musicians lacked the mind or spirit to bring meaningful music into being. That there was no, for a lack of a better world, soul in the profession.
(Now, I think seeing these viewpoints put down on paper highlights how juvenile they really are. Yet, who in their late teens and early twenties doesn’t enjoy tearing down what they don’t understand in order to make themselves feel superior?)
Yet, what I found in my jazz musician friends was this: virtually all of them still respected discipline. They knew they needed to memorize their chords, have their scales at their fingertips, develop their riff banks – they knew how important it was to be “in the pocket” or have an incredible inner sense of rhythm.
Unfortunately, the classical musicians I knew that took on an elitist attitude refused to acknowledge the incredible skills that our brothers and sisters from other disciples exhibited. To them, technique was the be-all-end-all (when perhaps they should been paying a bit more attention in music theory and ear training). Unfortunately, we cannot hide behind our technique in the professional world. The notes and rhythms, even the beauty of tone, these are simply the starting place – they are the given.
The Boston Conservatory is extremely lucky to have an incredible instructor of improvisation, Pierre Hurel, who quite literally changes the artistic lives of his students every year through his improvisation workshop for classical musicians. In the next blog post I want to talk about some of the ways in which Pierre guided a room full of classical musicians back to the simple joys of making sound through improvisation, and some of the ramifications of this work for anybody in a “rigid” or “precision based” artform, especially musical theater and opera singers.
