Some exercises-improvisations Part 2

I shall reply to both your posts here. Firstly, I find that the most attractive thing about your playing is its clarity. If that is your natural technique then baroque and minimalism are two excellent ways of employing it. Both the baroque and the romantic ones contain some beautiful moments.

The following is not so much criticism as an expression of my personal view, which is very different from most people's at the best of times.

The baroque idiom does not tolerate rhythmic stumbling well. You can bend the metre but the whole impression has to be one of absolute sureness of phrasing. I think you could mix your keys up a bit more to good effect. Just because real baroque stays close to one key doesn't mean we have to these days. There are many good effects to be obtained through allowing more harmonic freedom within the baroque rhythmic sense.

In the romantic style, how you develop depends on the desired end result. If you want to restrict yourself to the harmonies and rhythms of the early romantics then there's nothing wrong with that and you're setting out to do it very well.

I enjoy improvising in what amounts to a minimalist derived idiom myself sometimes. I usually find it necessary to vary the cells from the strictly periodic. "Almost periodic" cells, it seems to me, are much more vital than perfectly periodic cells. Also, I am increasingly wary of any internal uniformity of metre within the body of a cell. To start with, I don't particularly like repetition in any music - that's just me - but also, the possibilities of cell transition are multiplied by non-uniformity within the body of the cell itself.

I could go into enormous detail about this, as it is one of my personal creative directions at the moment, but I doubt it would interest anybody and it is too complicated to explain in a few paragraphs. One or two things though. Why treat this stuff as mere exercises ? It has the potential to be a major creative force in your improvisation and your future musical development. Why play these arpeggios in just one or two ways ? I have a private theory that for any musical idea to possess interest it has to contain TWO (possibly three) perceptibly different elements. In other words, no contrast, no life. So instead of going up and down in the same finger patterns on one chord , for instance, why not combine two different chords using differing finger patterns, perhaps not coincident with the underlying metre. Stuff in a few arbitrary accents - doesn't matter particularly where.

In a sense, I do not believe in exercises, in that I am always improvising full on or not at all. I do not enter a pseudo-creative state called "practice" which is somehow not producing "real" music. Whether this constitutes an insight or a personal problem I haven't yet decided.