Not too long ago, I showed up to a gig that was supposed to be a trio gig for four hours. The other two musicians I was going to be working with worked together a lot. I had bags of music, but when I pulled it out, they both peered at it and muttering things about the light and their glasses, proceeded to name a piece I had never heard of and start to play. With no music. The evening continued in this manner. They played songs that, for the most part I was not familiar with, with no parts, by ear. As a classically trained flutist, there was a time when I would have been totally lost. Now, though, I was able to keep up and play along with what they were doing. The four hours passed relatively quickly and while I was working harder than if I had been reading trio parts, I enjoyed the challenge. We were even complimented several times on our playing!
When I mentioned this job to a friend of mine who plays classical music, she looked at me and said “I could never have done that!” Unfortunately this attitude is all too common among classically trained payers. How did this happen? There was a time when improvisation was not considered out of the ordinary. Indeed in the Classical and Baroque periods, it was just something that musicians did. Now it has become the territory of the jazz or pop player, and classical musicians are frequently too afraid to try or they are not interested in the technique.
That last word is important. Technique. Improvisation is not some amazing talent that one is just born with, although of course there are people who may have more of an aptitude than others. Nevertheless, improvisation is a skill, a technique that can be learned and cultivated. Let’s compare music to language. For that is what it is at it’s heart, a language used to communicate. And what is it that music excels in communicating? Well not facts and figures. It is emotions that music communicates best. Music can communicate feelings and ideas that spoken or written language have difficulty in expressing. And how does it do that? With the elements or components of music, rhythm, pitch, harmony etc..
When a musician reads a piece of music, it is the same in many ways, as an actor reading from a script. The idea (script/piece) originated with the author/composer. All the emotional content is added by the actor. An actor can read a script deadpan, with just the words, or they can add their interpretation of the words to create a unique, individual performance. This is what most classical musicians do. They create a unique, individual work of art by adding their interpretation of the content. In many cases, though, this emotional content has been prescribed to be a certain way for so long, due to “ accepted performance practices” that the opportunity for true creative expression is somewhat limited. Ever since the Romantic period, when composers started notating every nuance of a piece, the opportunity for individual creativity for the classical musician has been somewhat restricted. Even in Baroque and Classical music, where improvisation was an accepted practice in those periods, improvisation is not expected. In many cases, the desire to perform the piece as correct for the period has made it almost impossible to improvise. It is time to incorporate improvisation back into the musical curriculum for ALL music students.
Why is it important to improvise? Let’s revisit the idea that music is a language. If the only way that someone can speak a language is to read it from a prepared script, no one would consider that person fluent in the language. Yet this is accepted by many musicians as standard practice. While it is not necessary that all musicians be able to improvise in the jazz or pop style, the ability to be expressive on one’s instrument with one’s own ideas should be a goal of every musician. An actor may never improvise on stage, yet they “improvise” every day when they talk to people. Perhaps a classically trained musician may never improvise in public, but to be able to just play ideas that come into his/her own head in the privacy of a practice room, or when sitting with other likeminded musicians will only improve one’s ability to be expressive with other types of music. Conversely, there are jazz musicians who do not read music and are stumped when they are given a part. The same case can be made for learning to read music. To be able to read and understand another musician’s musical ideas is also an arguably necessary component of musical fluency! On a purely practical note, musicians who improvise are less likely to encounter PRI’s (Playing Related Injuries) caused by physical tension. Improvisation is recommended as preventive to PRI’s and is also used as a therapy for some PRI’s .
So how does a musician who has never improvised find a way to do so? Well, the first thing is to rethink how we look at our art. Again, returning to the language idea, if we look at how people learn language, we see that children are quite fluent in their language long before they start to understand the structure of it. And children may come to school with certain language “habits” that may need to be corrected in the academic setting, but they are still usually able to communicate effectively even with these “habits”. How does this happen? Well of course, they have been listening to people talk since they first had ears. Musicians listen to music of course, but many of us, especially in the classical world, listen academically, analyzing, looking for mistakes, comparing one performance to another or to our own. Of course it is necessary to do this on one level, but in doing this we may miss the communicative aspect of a performance. As children learn a language, they just mimic what they hear, they don’t analyze. It is only after they mature that they develop their own voice and make conscious choices regarding their way of communicating. As adults we can’t return to this really, but sometimes it is good for us to just sit down and try to mimic someone’s playing. Then try to respond to it! Pick a performance that you like, preferably NOT on your own instrument, and try to copy what they do. Then listen to that same performance over and over, and start trying to respond to the performance. If jazz or popular music doesn’t interest you, then pick a slow movement in a concerto, (again not on YOUR instrument), and try to play the melody with the soloist. Try NOT to use the music. You may be surprised at how much of the melody you may be able anticipate, because if it is a classical or baroque concerto, the melody and harmony follow well-established rules of progression. After you feel comfortable playing the melody, or a section of the melody, try playing something OTHER than the melody. Try to play in the rests, or to do a “call and response” pattern with the melody. You will be surprised at how many ideas come to mind. All classical musicians have a huge “vocabulary” of musical ideas available to them, stored in their memory.
If one is interested in learning to improvise pop or jazz, there are many different methods and books, cds, videos, etc., to help one to learn to do this. But in spite of all these, the best way to learn is to listen, emulate then create. Whether you start out listening and trying to learn Miles Davis solos or Coltrane solos, the idea is the same: listen, copy then create. Many classical musicians rely on their eyes to tell them if they are playing correctly, and in the classical music world this is a necessary and valuable skill. If one is playing a 20th or 21st century piece that does not follow traditional methods of melody and harmony, you have to rely on your eyes because what you hear is so different. In improvisation, the opposite is true. We need to rely on our ears to tell us where to go. When you watch jazz players play, you may see that they close their eyes as they improvise. I know that in my case when I do this, it is to shut out the visual input so I can really concentrate on what I am hearing. Human beings are very visual. When we are trained as classical/orchestral musicians, we learn to rely on the visual at least as much as we rely on the auditory sense. When we improvise, we need to trust/improve our auditory skills so that we can use them not just for the details of the performance (i.e. tuning, dynamics etc.) but for directing the performance itself.
If you are an instructor and you want to help your students learn to improvise, first you must be able to do it yourself of course. After that, it is easy to introduce young students to improvisation. They are not as self conscious as older students might be. One easy way is to initiate a “conversation” with the student. Just play something, a simple phrase and ask them to copy it. Once they are able to do this with ease, have them “answer” your musical idea. They can answer with one note! Then try to get them to “answer” in longer more complex phrases. Anther way is to get them to play something and the instructor copies and then “answers”. By doing this the students develop a musical vocabulary which they can access without having to read. These simple techniques can help a student become confident in their ability to express themselves on their instrument. This will help students overcome their fear of playing without a part.
A class setting can be more challenging, as the students will frequently feel inhibited in front of their peers. In one setting with a flute choir, I was able to get every student to improvise by having all the other students playing the harmony. This was at the college level, so I was able to direct the students to play the root, third, fifth or 7th of the chord that was written, give them a rhythmic pattern to repeat, and then each student had 8 bars to improvise. We went around the room, and even the most reluctant student was able to come up with something to “say” for those 8 bars. For most of these students, this was the first time they had ever improvised. The fact that their peers were busy concentrating on the chord and the pattern made them less self-conscious. Working through the chords also gave the students practice in learning the harmonic progression.
After one has started to improvise, one may naturally become interested in the theory and all the technical aspects of the skill. If someone wants to pursue improvisation as a technique to be used in performance, it becomes necessary to expand the “vocabulary” and other technical aspects of the technique. There are many different ways to do this. But even if one never plans to improvise in public, the practice of improvisation in private will only enhance one’s expressive abilities in any other form of music.
