Why Classical Musicians Need To Improvise (Part 2)

In the last blog post I spoke about the intersection of discipline and improvisation in the performing arts, especially with regards to classical musicians. While many other musicians make ample use of this skill, it is certainly under-taught or even completely neglected by many teachers of a classical persuasion. This is concerning, for sure, considering there are countless stories of Bach improvising fugues, or Mozart being able to create variations on a piece he had heard only moments prior. Improvisation is one of the ways in which the inner ear meets with the creative spirit. If written compositions are musical prose, than improvisation is musical speech.

Improvisation is important because it forces us to create. It forces us to be vulnerable. It moves the brain from being goal oriented into being process oriented. These are just some of the important shifts that happen when we abandon the “notes on the page” mentality and move into an “art in the space” mentality.

What do I do?

Now, if one has never been taught how to improvise, how do they begin? How does one improvise if they are worried about doing it “right”? What if it doesn’t sound good? What if the technique isn’t as solid as what their teacher wants?

While attending Pierre Hurel’s improvisation seminar at The Boston Conservatory, we addressed just that. And while I don’t have time to reflect on every class, there is one exercise in particular that we did on the first day of class that taught an valuable life lesson, even though it was incredibly simple.

Step 1: Pick a few people to participate. We used 4-5 people.

Step 2: Everybody silently picks a single pitch.

Step 3: Create a piece using only the pitch you have decided on (you may use the same pitch in any octave, but you must use the same pitch).

That’s it. Everybody gets one pitch. Many people were skeptical in the class. What about us modern buffs who want to manipulate tone rows? What can the violinist do without a single scale? Or the pianist – what can they do without any chords?

The results? You would be amazed at the quality of the compositions that were created when the students began to accept this limitation. Of course, most pieces began awkward. Who will play first? How does your pitch interact with your friend’s pitches? Is that interval pretty? Does it matter? Am I dominating the conversation? Am I not playing enough?

Yet, by focusing on only one pitch, we were forced to think about dialogue. We thought about tempo. We thought about dynamic. We needed to think about these things, because pitch was set for us.

In this simplicity, there was also infinite variation available to us.

That is what we need to remember as classical musicians. Even when the notes are predetermined, there is a unique spirit in all of us that can react. In a way, a limited set allows for more focused creativity when we allow for it instead of resigning ourselves to one take – what I call falling into the “notes on a page” mentality.

Where else does this show up in our lives?

We can think about our text – how the way we bring any given word out, even something as little as a consonant or the brightness of a vowel, changes the way that a listener interprets the line.

When we are working on staging something, we must think of more than just “move from point A to point B”. How does the character walk? What are they looking at as they walk? What does the atmosphere feel like – is it cold, is it hot? Do they smell anything? It is not about where we walk on the stage that effects the audience, but why we walk on the stage.

For the orchestral musician or choral singer, how does your line interact with others? Are you bringing out the melody, the countermelody, or something else? Would you play the same in a duet with the winds as you would the strings? What is special about your part – what would we be missing without you? Help us understand that with your phrasing and dynamics.

As a classical musician it can be difficult to stay inspired. It can feel like the director is making all of your staging choices, and the conductor is making your musical choices. Even the material stays the same! We must all develop a practice that lets us find joy in even the most restricted settings. To realize that these limitations are all just illusions of restriction, and that if we go look within ourselves we can find plenty of variety and originality in the way we approach our given directives, is both liberating and empowering.