Improvisation for Classical Musicians Eric Edberg’s commentary and resources for classicial musicians who improvise, or want to.

News flash!  Even non-musicians can express musical intentions with just one note.  At Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger describes a study:

A team led by Filippo Bonini Baraldi designed a musical task so easy that even an untrained individual could do it: Try to musically represent eight different “expressive intentions,” as described by three adjectives (like slashing, impetuous, resolute or tender, sweet, simple). There was just one limitation: the volunteer participants could only use one musical note on an electronic keyboard for each expressive intention.

The “non-musicians” did as well as the “musicians.”  It’s great to read about this.  My slightly sarcastic title for this post comes from the fact that for something like 25 years, Music for People has been promoting the idea that everyone can express him or her self through music, regardless of musical experience.  And, of course, the study is rooted in a very Western dualistic paradigm in which there are musicians and non-musicians. My commitment, as is the case with everyone who has embraced the MfP philosophy, is that everyone can make music and that there are no “non-musicians.”  (There are also, in my world, no non-dancers, no non-actors, no non-painters, etc.  There are plenty of people who don’t make music or dance or act or paint, of course;  but we each have the inborn ability to creatively express ourselves.)

To express emotion, all you have to do is feel emotion and make a sound that expresses that emotion.  Each of us can do that, at any time.  To do that it a particular musical language can take a LOT of work, of course, but the ability to express is, I assert, clearly part of every human being.

When I’m guiding people in exploring their ability to improvise, I often start with one-note activities.  My workshops, when I do them at universities other than where I teach, are called “Expressing Yourself Through Sound: Music Improvisation for Everyone.”

Great to see this phenomenon documented in another way, and a tip of the hat to my colleague Scott Spiegelberg for pointing it out.

Pamela J. Marshall discusses leading her first improv workshop for classical musicians, and captures well the different ideas that can arise, and descirbes how the creative input of various members of the ensemble make a difference.  “My workshops are open to anyone who is interested in classical free improv. We try various styles: modal & melodic, aleatoric, with rhythmic accompaniment or not, full group and small subsets.” she writes.  And that’s one of the things that make this work, not bound to a particular idiom, so exciting.  It can go in any direction.  Classical musicians have been exposed to so many styles, so many languages, that “free,” or what I sometimes call “polyidiomatic” (in which different idioms can be combined, or shifted between)  improvisation, can come quite naturally.

Derek Bailey coined the term “idiomatic improvisation,” I believe, meaning improvisation in a particular musical idiom such as jazz, Baroque musc, Indiana music, Bulgarian music, etc.. He uses the term extensively in his book Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music.  He contrasts it with what he called “nonidiomatic” improvisation.  What I’ve heard of Bailey’s free, non-idiomatic improvisation seems an idiom all it’s own–freely atonal, lots of sound effects and exploration, sort of an anti-idiom.

What I like about improvising with people who have a classical background is how were not bound to, say, a Baroque style;  tonal, modal, aleatoric, atonal, etc. styles are all available.  And we don’t make a point of avoiding something.

The other side of the coin is that we may not have gone through the rigorous process of becoming adept in any particular idiom, especially those that thake so much study and practice to become fluent in.

That’s a long tangent.  Pamela’s article captures much of what is so great about free improvisation.  And she also mentions my much admired friend Jeff Agrell, the horn teacher at the University of Iowa who has assembled the most all-encompassing, Sears-catalog size compendium of improvisation games, one I recommend to everyone.

Here’s a great video (well, it’s a talking-head segment with great content), titled “Improvisation and Canon inWestern Music” in which musicologist Susan McClary discusses the decline of improvisation during the nineteenth century as the canon of “great works” grew.  It’s from ArtistHouse Music, which turns out to have lot of improvisation videos (as well as a wealth of videos on other music and music-career related subjects).  If there’s a way to embed ArtistHouse videos, I wasn’t able to figure it out in the 30 seconds I tried.

Search results for “improvisation” at ArtistHouse are here.

I was delighted to see that today’s Wall Street Journal feature article on the return of improvisation to classical music performance and the training of classical musicians features what my DePauw University improvisation students are doing.  Several photos of DePauw students in action, and video footage from DePauw, are included in the online version.

If you found your way here from the WSJ article, weclome!

I’ll be posting more about what we do at DePauw soon, and we’re working to get our most recent Improvised Chamber Music concert up on YouTube. Some of my own free improvisations can be downloaded from my website/blog.

The profound influence of David Darling and Music for People on my work didn’t make it into the article (although I certainly went on and on about it with Alexandra Alter, the article’s author). My page about MfP is in a link above.

Those of us trained in the traditional, improvisation-phobic classical musical culture often don’t realize that improvisation played a key role in the way people made music, even much of what we now think of as classical music, through the nineteenth century.  While most (but not all) of my own improvising is in non-performance situations, in which I’m improvising for a cathartic emotional release, or as a creative way of practicing and exploring, improvisation exists (and existed) as part of the performance art of many genres of classical music, particularly music before the early nineteenth-century development of the the concept of the fully-notated, independent, “great work,” which gave birth to the concepts of Werktreue (being true to the work) and Texttreue (being true to the text.”

“The most impressive part of the music we play is the art of improvisation,” early-music guru Jordi Savall is quoted in this article. “He says improvisation is always risky, because of its very nature. “It needs to be organised to prevent chaos,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you do what you like. You have to follow the structure and work out which instruments will be involved before you go on stage.”

That might be better put as, “it doesn’t mean you do only what you like,” in the sense of not being aware of a particular musical language, the language of a particular musical idiom, or not being aware of a particular structure (such as improvising variations over a simple ground bass–that’s a bass line, not a ground-up string bass).  If you’re improvising, even withing strict idiomatic limits, the improvisation part is “what you like,” or as I like to say, what comes to you.  (Where does it come from?  Who is the “you”?  Let’s not go there now.)

In the more stylistically free and eclectic improvisations I’ve performed and that I coach my DePauw students in, there are usually decisions made in advance for performd pieces: instrumentation, basic structure, use of ostinatos (repeated figures) or drones, etc.  Sometimes, though, it works to just go out with two or three people and improvise “freely.”

In a free (i.e., unplanned) ensemble improvisation, at least in the way I encourage, someone initiates an idea;  that idea is met with a response.  There’s dialogue and interraction.  It’s not just simultaneous playing or singing in which the music makers act independently of each other.  It’s a conversation, a battle, an embrace, a game of ping pong.  It’s listening and being aware of each other and one’s own ideas, “saying yes” to it all.

An invitation to explore self-expressive “free” improvisation, in which, as we say in Music for People, “there are no wrong notes.” (I blogged about the comedy of errors I experiened making these videos here.) These videos are cross-posted with my other blog.

Priming the pump of the creative imagination by improvising just one note at a time.

Cresting an extended improvisation (longer than one note, anyway!), listening inside yourself for the first note, then the next and the next.

Throughout the United States (and the rest of the world), an increasing number of classical musicians are finding themselves drawn to improvisation.  Sometimes we’re forced in the improvisation direction, especially those of us who are educators.  The National Association of Schools of Music accreditation standards and the National Standards developed by MENC mandate that improvisation (and composition) be included in music curricula.

I’m Eric Edberg, the cello professor at the DePauw University School of Music.  I’ve been improvising and involving students in improvisation activities for about fifteen years.  For several years, I’ve had an Improvisation and the Classical Musician blog, including a number of essays that are drafts for a book I’m writing, hosted at blogspot.

I’ve decided to move the blog to the Wordpress platform, and to make it a web portal/directory for information about improvisation, especially for those of us coming from the classical tradition.  Please feel free to contact me if you’d like to write a guest post, and if you have links, videos, and other resources to share.  My email is ericedberg AT gmail.com.

Cross-posting with my other blog:

I see that Greg Sandow gave Jeff Agrell’s book a great mention last April, calling it ” a complete delight, radiating both love and deep understanding of music from every word.” I wrote my own review of Jeff’s wonderful book last February for Connections, the Music for People newsletter. But I neglected to post it here!

Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians: 500+ Non-Jazz Games for Performers, Educators, and Everyone Else by Jeffrey Agrell
Chicago: GIA Publications (2008). ISBN 978-1-57999-682-6

Jeff Agrell is one of the few classical music professors in the country who actively improvises, who passionately advocates for improvisation, who encourages and nurtures the improvisational spirit in his students, and who has succeeded at the often challenging task obtaining institutional support for a non-jazz improvisation course. After 25 years in a professional orchestra, Agrell became the French horn professor at the University of Iowa, and like many other classical musicians at midlife, was ready for a creative change. Having improvised and composed on the guitar since his teenage years, he finally began improvising on the horn. Most of us reading this article had a similar experience and found ourselves drawn to David Darling and Music for People. As he explains in the Preface to his recently released Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians: 500+ Non-jazz Games for Performers, Educators, and Everyone Else, published by GIA, Agrell found his musical guide and collaborator right at home, in the pianist Evan Mazunik, then a junior piano major at Iowa. For both it seems to have been a “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” with the ironic twist of their formal roles in the university. The two began improving together, and that work blossomed into concerts, recordings, and workshops, and the “Introduction to Improvisation” course Agrell offers regularly at Iowa (Mazunik now lives in New York).

Anyone who has been to a Music for People workshop would find Agrell’s teaching studio in Iowa surprisingly familiar, as I did one Saturday afternoon last November; it’s cluttered with the djembes and assorted small percussion instruments so rarely found in the offices of classical French horn professors yet so common in the MfP world. I sat down with him, two of his colleagues, a student or two, and the saxophonist George Wolfe from Ball State University, and we began improvising. “One of the great joys of being an improviser,” as Agrell quotes cellist Matthew Barley, “is that I can play with practically any musician in the world. It is like being fluent in dozens of languages.” And that was our experience; it was the magic of free improvisation as the University of Iowa School of Music’s 2007 Contemporary Improvisation Festival (at which I was one of the guest performer/clinicians) began.

Although the National Association of Schools of Music, which grants accreditation to college-level music programs, mandates that all music students have experience in improvisation, most institutions pay lip service to the requirement without truly embracing it. Classical music professors, unless they specialize in early music, tend to ignore improv, seeing it as something irrelevant to their mission, and many jazz professors look askance at improvisation which isn’t jazz. So it’s often a lonely mission for people like Agrell, who really gets the value of improvisation for music students, who truly grasps how the process of creating music ties everything together.

I’ve met many former classical musicians who got burned out and turned to improvising as an alternative, healing mode of making music. How many of us in the MfP culture have said at one time or another that we are “in recovery” from our classical training? We find ourselves improvising instead of playing classical music, and it’s a wonderful, liberating, and healing new era of life. It’s release! It’s an explosion of self-expression and creativity and connection with other people. Classical music, for some of us, becomes a former lover with whom we were once intensely but toxically involved, and from whom we’ve had to move on. Our new, passionate love, improvisation has taken its place, but enough hurt remains that it’s hard to “still be friends” with classical music.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why it’s rare to find people who regularly perform on a high professional level as both classical and eclectic (i.e., non-jazz) improvisers. Jeff Agrell has managed to integrate the two into his musical and teaching life. He clearly understands the central role improvisation played in what we now call classical music until the late 19th century, and he sees that improvisation can and should be part of the central, core experience of classical musicians.

All this is articulated extremely well in Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians. At 354 pages, including several indexes, the book is both a manifesto making the case for improvisation in the training of classical musicians, and an wide-ranging encyclopedia of starting points for improvisation. He makes an excellent distinction between the notation-based, “literate” approach of the traditional classical musician and the “aural” approach of the improviser working without notation. “The two approaches—literate and aural—are complimentary, not mutually exclusive. They balance each other, develop musicianship skills, and promote health and sanity. To achieve the comprehensive musicianship so vital to a contemporary musician, both approaches need to be cultivated to the highest level possible.”

Agrell uses the term “games,” he explains, because of fear of mistakes which blocks the creativity of so many classical music students. I’ve had a copy for several weeks now; as I plan the sessions for the improvisation ensemble at DePauw University, where I teach, I find it a valuable resource, although I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Agrell’s suggestions for structuring a college-level improvisation course are excellent, and will be of great value to colleagues at other institutions. And there are so many ideas for structuring improvisations! Warm-Up Games, Rhythm Games, Accent Games, Dynamics Games, Melody Games, Form Games, Harmony Games, etc., etc. The list of chapters goes on and on. What did they call the old Sears catalog? The “wish book?” It’s like that, an improviser’s wish book, except you don’t have to spend money (once you’ve bought the book), just creativity. There are so many games included that I find myself overwhelmed if I try to read too much in one sitting; it’s an encyclopedic desk reference that I’ll be working through for months to come.

Many of the game descriptions are brief, and I find it sometimes takes me a while to work out in my imagination what he’s suggesting. Clearly Agrell has worked to include as many games as possible, so brevity has been a priority. And he’s obviously avoided overly defining, and thus limiting, what are meant to be improvisations. So be warned: using this book requires the reader’s patience, thought and imagination. But the rewards are many.

Without a working knowledge of classical music terminology, much of the book might be hard to follow. But for classical musicians interested in improvisation, especially those of us who lead workshops and teach courses, it’s an excellent, welcome new reference, which makes an excellent compliment to classics like Return to Child, The Listening Book, and Free Play.