Cellular transition in double notes

[ted]

We seem to spend years getting fluency in double note technique only to end up using it in the same few hackneyed ways in the same few pieces everybody plays. I am trying to change that, at least in my own improvisation.

 

 

[Karli]

Ted, hee hee, thank you for posting this.  I am listening now for my second time.  It is a fun contrast to listen through to the end of this and then have it loop around back to the beginning.  What an interesting listen !

I find myself listening for particular transformations even more now on the second time through than on the first -- and I want to know how it got from where it started to where it ended.  I want to listen for these transitions.  But before I know it, I find myself just in the currents of listening and listening without trying to figure, as though I am an observer or so, or perhaps a passenger . 

I am always so interested in your articulations, which seem to play a key role in your style (I suppose it's difficult to truly separate articulation from "style" anyway, but there is something about your articulation that is very unique to you and your improvisations, in my opinion).  And, I think that part of it is you knowing this particular instrument so well.

In any event, I listen on with great interest !  Thanks.

[ted]

Yes Karli, that's how I feel too while improvising, as if I am an observer or passenger. I don't really like beginnings and endings in music any more, especially endings. That's why most of my improvisations last forty-five minutes, one side of a tape. Some are interrupted by people on the phone or at the door, or by household events, but that's all right. The articulation is probably a result of being taught next to no technique and having a teacher who insisted that legato and more than a bare minimum of pedal were "mushy" and that anything played on the beat was "trotty". Just how much in our playing is truly original and how much absorbed from admired sources is difficult to tell, and in the end probably not worth worrying about.

I am pleased you enjoy it.

[thierry13]

The playing was okay but there was some amazing music in there. Congratulations on that.

[ted]

I'm pleased you enjoy it, Thierry. I often wonder how I would have turned out had I had a normal education in music and piano. I would probably now be a much better pianist, much better common practice musician but much less of a Ted creatively. I almost certainly would not now be experiencing this wonderful retarded adolescence of creation and producing hundreds of hours of ecstatic recorded improvisation. All in all I feel very lucky that things turned out this way. 

[thierry13]

I'm pleased you enjoy it, Thierry. I often wonder how I would have turned out had I had a normal education in music and piano. I would probably now be a much better pianist, much better common practice musician but much less of a Ted creatively. I almost certainly would not now be experiencing this wonderful retarded adolescence of creation and producing hundreds of hours of ecstatic recorded improvisation. All in all I feel very lucky that things turned out this way. 

You can allways work your technique and sound without loosing creativity.

[ted]

Yes, of course you are right, and I am trying to do exactly that. I just have to be a bit more careful physically at sixty than I was at twenty. I think the trick as you get older is to avoid sudden change in technique and work any new mechanisms in slowly over many weeks.

[thierry13]

Yup. At any age, the trick with learning new movements or speeding things up and keeping a good sound quality and musical definition is to do it gradually.

[arensky]

This is extraordinary. Tension, hyperactivity, perpetual motion. I should be screaming but it's soothing and relaxing.  I hear a few recurring ideas but I don't think that form is what's important here. Wonderful stuff. 


Oh, and your double notes are very good! 

[ted]

I am pleased this little improvisation has brought enjoyment to people. What I do is very general, very simple and therefore best explained in simple English instead of musical teminology, which latter I do not properly understand anyway. Anybody can do it at any level of playing ability or experience. I repeat an idea (cell) a few times, but rarely exactly. "Almost periodic" is much more interesting than exactly periodic. Because of the inexact, dynamic nature of the playing, some musical feature of the cell strikes me, often unintentionally, and becomes the "seed" as it were, of the next cell. The nature, musical style and length of a cell are completely arbitrary, and the germinal feature can be any musical aspect - melodic, harmonic, rhythmic or a combination of several.

Over the last few years I have come to think that improvisation needs its own forms, which must be dynamic and organic rather than architectural and static. For this to take place, the  "form" is not the resulting organism itself but (musical matter + DNA  instruction). Many different musical results, or organisms, can result from the initial combining of musical material and dynamic instruction.

I suppose this could be stated more succinctly as concentrating on processes rather than ends.

Four years ago, when I started seriously recording improvising in this way, I thought such a simple idea would soon lose interest and run out of creative steam. Thirty-three CDs and hundreds of playing hours later, I am now certain it will see me out before I have even scratched its surface.