To Improvise: A Musing From Blogger Steve Kirk
A solo. A guitar solo. A saxophone solo. A trumpet solo. Playing the amplified spokes of a bicycle with a toilet brush while silent Japanese animation loops play on a screen in the background. These are all variants of improvisation.
Each scenario has pre-set parameters for the improviser to respond to—perhaps the guitarist has a small band playing a 12 bar blues progression. Maybe the saxophonist is improvising over the chord progression of a jazz standard, or the trumpet player is creating their own cadenza, backed by an orchestra, in the middle of a concerto.
These are all different scenarios with a common thread. Each of these musicians is using the elements of their immediate environment and their acquired experience to create a spontaneous composition—the true meaning of improvisation in the pure sense.
Most musicians today—even the contemporary orchestral musician—are often experienced improvisers. After all, they probably grew up listening to jazz and rock and blues (etc.) as well as classical music. Although it can be highly structured, a very large percentage of rock and pop music allow for sections where soloists are required to improvise solos either in the studio or live in front of an audience. If this improvised solo occurs in the studio, or the live performance is recorded, this piece of improvisation becomes fixed in time. It is a composition, composed spontaneously—of the moment.
So where does structured composition end and improvisation begin? Or for that matter, where does improvisation end and structured composition begin? Because certainly it could, and does, go either way. Many composers are facile improvisers. Some, like Chopin, were often able to remember their improvisations note for note and transcribe them for others to perform—of the moment, set in time.
So then perhaps the skill of improvisation needs to be an active element in every stage of even the most structured of compositions.
Your favorite George Harrison solo might have been the tenth take in an effort to get just the right feel, each previous take maybe very similar in construction, finally settling on the series of notes and execution that creates the definitive statement for that place in time. It is still spontaneous composition, beginning with the requirement that this amount of space must be filled and conform in some way to these chords and rhythms. This form of improvisation is based on a structure much more conventional than the toilet brush / bicycle spokes / animated film thing (an equally valid form of expression).
When a musician improvises, he is attempting, on a conscious or subconscious level, to access all previous musical experiences that may be relevant to the immediate situation. Knowledge of scales, key signatures, rhythms, modulations, or the cool lick they worked out the other day when their student canceled all come into play. Also, para-musical experiences—channeling the angst they felt when their girl- / boyfriend left them, joy, sadness, sexuality—the list goes on and on and on. The fact is that everything you’ve ever experienced can and will affect they way you play and what you choose to play, one way or another.
It also stands to reason that the larger your musical skill-sets are and the more theoretical knowledge and technique you’ve accumulated, the more likely it is that you will be able to play whatever comes to mind. That being said, children are often the best of improvisers; there is less structure and experience there to get in the way. They are reacting more organically to the immediate moment. Sometimes all the scales and theory in the world will not help you squeeze out a valid musical idea, so when musicians discuss the idea of learning all the rules you can, and then discarding them, it is to nurture the idea of reacting to the moment in a way that has meaning.
This perhaps makes attitude and intent your most valuable resources when spontaneously composing, i.e. improvising.
Composer, guitarist and arranger Steve Kirk's music has been featured in film, video games and TV. This includes music for the Disney game version of "The Princess And The Frog", Microsoft Games "Voodoo Vince" , the FarmVille Theme for Zynga Games, and to be released in Spring 2011, Cantina music composed for the Star Wars MMOL game The Other Republic.
Steve teaches guitar, music theory and composition privately in Oakland, California, as well as Blue Bear School Of Music and Community Music Center- both located in San Francisco, California. He is also the guitarist for Club Foot Orchestra and Orchestra Nostalgico.
Hi Steve, friend of
Hi Steve, friend of Funcrunch's, followed a link here from her FB page.
Good commentary. Have you ever read the book "Free Play: Improvisation In Life And Art" by Stephen Nachmanovitch? You might like it.
I really like something I once heard about people's first impressions of jazz long ago: "It's music that you make up as you go along, like having a conversation." I think the comparison to language is apt. When you learn to think musically, you have a musical thought and you speak it by playing it, without filtering it through the intellect - just direct expression, contributing to an ongoing dialogue (or creating the dialogue.) And of course many, many great players have commented that what they try to do with their solos is make their guitar "speak". Guitar solos have cadence, points of emphasis and inflection, just like vocal speech. These subtleties are the key to havingyour own voice.
Likewise, every moment of music, whether improvised or written and re-edited a thousand times, is part of a dialogue that's been going on for centuries... As Lewis Thomas said in his short essay "The Music Of This Sphere" in his wonderful book "The Lives Of A Cell":
'The proof is not in [on the nature of whale songs], and until it is shown that these long, convoluted, insistent melodies, repeated by different singers with ornamentations of their own, are the means of sending through several hundred miles of undersea such ordinary information as "whale here," I shall believe otherwise. Now and again, in the intervals between songs, the whales have been seen to breach, leaping clear out of the sea and landing on their backs, awash in the turbulence of their beating flippers. Perhaps they are pleased by the way the piece went, or perhaps it is celebration at hearing one's own song returning after circumnavigation; whatever, it has the look of jubilation.
I suppose that an extraterrestrial Visitor might puzzle over my records in much the same way, on first listening. The 14th Quartet might, for him, be a communication announcing, "Beethoven here," answered, after passage through an undersea of time and submerged currents of human thought, by another long signal a century later, "Bartok here." '
(The full 'Lives Of A Cell' is available as a PDF at www.gyanpedia.in/Portals/0/Toys%20from%20Trash/Resources/books/cell.pdf)
By the way, if my opinions have inspired you at all, please check out my own playing on [plug] my YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/GuitaristInProgress - hopefully the things I've related here come across in my playing, you might like it.
Thanks
Thanks for your comments.
Classical Improv
I agree completely that improvisation should be a part of every musician's life. But while it's part and parcel of jazz, folk, and pop, classical players are always outside looking in and terrified of the thought of not having ink to play from, even though the biggest music icons - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, etc - were all improvisers. I played both jazz guitar and French horn for many years, but although I was comfortable improvising on guitar, I never dared to try it on horn. Part of the problem was thinking that jazz was the only definition of improvisation, and I didn't want to do jazz on the horn. Out of sheer boredom I finally gave (nonjazz) improv a try on horn and have never looked back. I ended up teaching semester course in it at the University of Iowa (and still do) - improv for classical musicians and it's been great fun. The course became a book - "Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians" (GIA, 2007) that now provides a way for classical players to get started in (nonjazz) improv. It's still tough to get classical players to try it, but when they do, they are amazed that it is easy and fun and they sit back and wonder how they missed out on all this fun all these years...
Improvisation
seems to me to be the natural state of being. Reacting skillfully to our environment, enjoying the arising situations, building on them another action - that is what we do with every breath we take.
To do it on a concious level without letting the mind get in the way - well that is a task for everyone to master :)
Thank you again for an inspiring article.
More Comments on Improvisation
Thanks to everyone for their insightful comments to this article. Improvisation covers an infinite amount of ground, from the simplest 12 bar blues pattern to completely free form. From conventional musical instruments, like guitars and horns to laptops with sound generators and beyond.
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I think you hit a bullsyee there fellas!
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