Ah, I’m overwhelmed.

Ah, I’m happy.

Ah, my crazy mother drives me crazy.

Ah, the craziness of my mother is a delight.

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Love and hate.

Self-love and self hate.

Too much to get done today.

Only that which gets done today needs to get done.

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I long for the cello

I enjoy being free from the cello.

And no matter what, it feels good to move and interact.

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William Croft’s comment on my previous post prompted me to write something, anything, here.  Without the energy of other people, without being part of a conversation, without interacting, what’s the point.  I haven’t found one.

It has been a long time since I’ve posted here.  Since setting up this site and getting the posts transferred from the old blog, there have been a ton of family issues that preoccupied me.  And I went through some dark periods of depression and listlessness, something I’ve struggled with all my life.

Now I’m on sabbatical for a year, and it’s going on two months since classes ended. I’m starting to feel human and energetic again.  Now I’m not trying to say that I’ve been totally unproductive, including before the sabbatical started.  It’s just that I couldn’t get myself focused, couldn’t get myself geared up, to do much of anything that I didn’t have to do.  As a matter of fact, since my father died in January and I became the sole caretaker for my mother with dementia, spending 20-30 hours a week with her and sometimes more, it was the act of teaching (as well as rehearsing and performing and even practicing) that would bring me out of myself and back to life.  Interaction with other human beings is so important.

Sabbaticals, even ones in their beginning stages like mine, give a person time not just to reflect but rest, recover (and listen, anyone who has taught in a private liberal-arts focused university where it seems that everyone’s hobby is arguing in circles and trying to kill ideas with negative energy needs to get away from the dark side once in a while) and relax but also to let things simmer and present themselves when they are ready.

Rumi teaches (I can’t fine the reference[s] right now but I will) that we are chickpeas boiling in the pot, simmering and gaining flavor to be pleasing to God.  (I mean God in a metaphorical but powerful way.)

Well, as I’m feeling more in touch with my humanity, soul, and, yes, ambition, one thing I’m clear about is that part of my mission in life is introducing and encouraging musicians working and studying in the Western classical tradition to improvise.  We need to bring creativity, spontaneity, imagination, spirituality, and the deep human authenticity back into our art form(s) and into our speaking about what we do.

So I’m back here.  And there’s work to be done.  Lots more writing, lots more vlogging, more resources to create.  And fixing this site–which looks awful in Safari, I’ve learned.  I liked the template when i set it up but now the red looks like blood to me.  So some redesign as well.  It will be an adventure!

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.

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.

Search results for “improvisation” at ArtistHouse are here.

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.

“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.