Do you improvise?

[lisztisforkids]

Yes? No? Are you good? How long have you been improvising for? For me improvising is a large part of my playing the piano. I have been improvising for about 3 years now, and its starting to devolop, but still got a long way to go. Funfunfunfun!. 

[crazy for ivan moravec]

yup. before i even started to play classical pieces i was already improvising on my own. i started to play (improvise) at 8 but only took classical training at 14 already.

for me, it has helped in the sense that i would try to capture the feeling of improvising for my classical pieces, not only during performance but during practice as well.

i wouldn't say im good though. i've seen a lot better improvisers than me. whoa! i concentrated on my classical then... but i do improvisation every now and then. hahaha, people would go crazy when i play them a song after i hear it only once.

yes it is fun. especially when the time comes when the skill is needed badly.

[ted]

These days, improvisation is at least 90% of what music is all about for me. Whether or not I am "good" has long since ceased to either concern or interest me. The imperative of spontaneous creation is now well beyond any conscious restraint. As long as I am able and breathing I must do it. I do record much of it now, so it isn't quite as transient an activity as it used to be.

I was a laggard in that I do not consider I experienced any real improvisational power until I was almost thirty. In my teens I was very lucky in having a teacher who kept me at it and insisted I had something to say. He was right, but it took ten years of work. Even then, it wasn't until middle-age that I really found my own voice at the instrument.

[stevie]

primarily piglet

[cfortunato]

Yes, I improvise constantly, and in some ways, I use my improvisational ability (which is supposedly considerable) badly, and let it make me lazy. "Oh, don't worry about the space for transition music, I'll just blather out something."  I do that a lot, and use it as excuse not to prepare, because I'm lazy.

[BoliverAllmon]

don't improvise. I tried a couple times and sucked royally.

[arensky]

don't improvise. I tried a couple times and sucked royally.

Try try again. You'll evantually come up with something worthwhile. Don't have any preconceptions...


I've always improvised. In my first few months of piano lessons I was already reharmonizing Kabalevsky pieces a la Burt Bacharach and writing little pieces. Before I had lessons I had taught myself how to read Jazz chord symbols, with a little help from my dad, who was my first teacher. It was fortunate that my first teachers (after my dad, a once professional and still amateur jazz pianist) did not supress this although they didn't improvise themselves. My first college teacher did not approve, but Boris Berman felt it was a good thing, he is also an improviser. It evantually led to a falling out with my grad school teacher, one of those liberal modern people who professes to be open minded about everything but is actually a fascist in sheep's clothing. But at this point I was making considerable $$$ in Jazz and would soon be touring and performing with well known bands. So I dropped out of grad school for 3 years, and enjoyed mah bad self. 

Many teachers feel that improvisation is a bad thing, it leads to faulty technique/bad habits/ etc. .
I would point out to these pedagouges that MOST of the great composers  before 1900 and quite a few after were skilled improvisers. It was a required skill and was taught in all conservatories as part of the required curriculum. I'm not sure why but it disappeared in classical music around 1900, and for much of the 20th Century only survived in Jazz in Western music. However since 1945 Western cul;ture and thought have undergone radical changes, and improvisation is now accepted by the public as legitimate music. There are still naysayers and cranks in academia who scream heresey but they are dying off, and since they are in academia their influence on music outside of academia is practically nil. Take "New Age" music, a largely improvised genre. A lot of this music is poor, some of it's good, but it is making headway with the public, and points a way to something new. Hopefully it will evolve into something more substansial or merge with other styles and genres. Right now it is, uh, ephemeral. 

Anyway I think everyone should try it (improvisation, not nessacarily New Age, but if that floats your boat) because it can only help a classical pianist's understanding and appreciation of a finished composition by someone else, because improvisation is just spontaneous composition. And if it's good enough for Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelsohn, Liszt, Chopin, Brahms and Debussy it's good enough for everyone, besides being enjoyable and cathartic it can be a fountainhead of creativity and self expression and a wellspring of ideas and new music.

[dinosaurtales]

I wish like hell I could improvise  but sadly I can't   

I am truly amazed by the folks who can!

[quantum]

Early on in my piano studies, I would doodle every so often during practice time and try to come up with some wierd sounding unconventional chords - maybe sometimes try to reharmonize a melody with them too.  This carried on, without me really conciously think of it as improvisation.  It evolved into giving such harmoies more defined rhythmic patterns and even employing licks from Chopin or Beethoven (or whatever composer's piece I was learning at the moment). 

In third year university I decided to take a break from piano lessons and try out some different courses to fill my elective requirments (at the time I didn't consider studying improvisation).  Piano was becoming quite boring for me.  At home the deploring state of my upright piano inspired me to play some more radical approaches to the instrument - as it was verry difficult for me to fully express pre-composed classical pieces on that piano.  I got interested in harsh and objectionable sounds, and tried to produce them on my instrument.  Needless to say, the piano suffered even more with regular occurances of broken strings, keys, and other parts.  I really didn't think anyone would like to listen to such "noise" and never bothered to demonstrate to anyone ouside of my family. 

I then discoved a gathering at my university where people would improvise for each other.  I played a bit, at first mostly tonal and nothing like what I played at home.  In time as I listened to others, I realized that there is really no "wrong" way to improvise and everyone has their own particuar sound.  I felt more compelled to share my more wild improvisations, in small doeses.  The more I played, the more I would get comments on my style and how people liked these different sounds and strange ways of playing piano. 

Well I guess this is where I am now.  I've taken to recording my more recent improvisations (some of which are in the audition room).  It's insteresting to hear improv's from a few years ago and see how my style changes and grows with the music I am exposed to.  Maybe I should post some of my "historic" first recorded improv's here too. 

[infectedmushroom]

I've been practising to improvise and I'm improving. Mostly it's not that difficult what I play, but it sounds nice and that's what it's all about.

Improvising keeps you interested in an instrument imo, improvising is endless....

[lisztisforkids]

I am coming to the beleif that Improvising is a absolute nessecity to become a good pianist and musician. If you look back at the years, you can see that all of the great musicians improvised, in fact in the olden days improvising was an extremely important. Orginally Cadenzas were improvised.  Every major artist has been an improvisor. In the Barouqe period, you had to improvise-or nothing.Liszt is perhaps the most famouse Improvisor, and he held the idea that imrpovising was also very important, and many of his compositons stemmed directly from his Improvisations.

Improvising gives us a chance to find our own personal flavor, devolop, and flex our raw technique at the piano. Why isnt Improvising mainstream anymore?

[cfortunato]

Beethoven was a tremendous improviser.

[BoliverAllmon]

as was Bach and Mozart.

[arensky]

  In time as I listened to others, I realized that there is really no "wrong" way to improvise and everyone has their own particuar sound.   Maybe I should post some of my "historic" first recorded improv's here too. 

That's right and that's what makes this interesting. If everyhing was the same, the way a lot of teachers nowadays want it (or so it seems to me) there would be no point to playing, the next logical step would be to replace us with MIDI files. I would love to hear your ealy improvs, post 'em! 

[edouard]

The fun thing is when you get to the point when you can try to hide mistakes by improvising. I find this really fun when playing for a non musical audience. My experience (playing in a bar) is that people do not notice if its done with taste. There are moments for everything in my opinion. Moments for being extremely precise and obeying all the composer"s indications. But also moments of "profanation" where one should try to filter a piece through one"s own sensitivity and see what the outcome is. It often is unexpected! Finally, and this is a point which truly mystifies me, is that my technique is always much better when I play music straight out of my head rather than music I will have learnt previously. I guess the reason is quite simple, my fingers find their way more naturally and I automatically taylor the playing to my hands (and not whoever else's hand several hundred years ago ! :-) That is what I find interesting when I look at several transcriptions of the same piece. They say a lot about the technique / physionomy of the transcriber. For example, Liszt's Danse Macabre is full of (IMO unnecessary) octave technique and rather uneasy set ups, Horowitz's is full of other things etc etc
With the strict copyright laws these days and the romantic idea of compositions that are "untoucheable" (and ultimately original), I believe we are somewhat distancing ourselves from the thoughts of those very composers we are interpreting.
best,
Edouard

[cfortunato]

A true story.  Many years, when I was a young'un, I played Beethoven's Bagatelle in Gm for a recital.  I knew the piece well and played it well.  But when I got to the last section (where it goes staccato), I suddenly drew a dead blank and did not remember it at ALL.  And since I hadn't been looking at the sheet music, I couldn't find it.

So I made it up.  Twelve bars of faux-Beethoven, out of my head, cold. Then I fiinished with the correct Coda, which I remembered.

I got a standing ovation.  Nobody noticed, except my teacher.  And she was so pleased with the overall performance that she said: <Russian accent> "Don't worry about it.  It was wonderful."</Russian accent>

People always assume that whatever you are playing is what you are supposed to play.

[lostinidlewonder]

Improvisations are Musical Meditation, or soul music, something from deep within which is void of thought, just sound creation. It is like playing a piece you have known forever (but in this case never have played before) and you don't consider the physical nature of it just dwell within the sound of it.

I think improvisations play an important role in maintaining physical endurance as well since I play things sometimes you would never find in normal music, weird sounding chords and progressions, strange strings of notes, mashed notes etc. I think it also broadens your ear for sound if you learn to control the randomness that may exist in improvising.

I think bad improvising is stuff that all sounds the same and has logical continuous patterns. Good improvising should be organic, alive, unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable to listen to and sometimes even mind blowing beautiful, like real life. Yeah something like that.

[ted]

Lostinidlewonder has made one or two insightful observations here. Improvisation pushes the bounds of rhythm, in particular, far beyond composition. It has to, because notation cannot capture rhythm beyond a certain point at all.

The sort of highly structured, pattern based improvisation, largely dependent on very rapid mental arithmetic, used to be met with in many accomplished professionals. It still is in the jazz field. My teacher was a case in point. He was quite well known, knew many famous musicians, and had musical gifts which approached perfection. In private, he practised the organic, unconscious variety but in public and in lessons he demonstrated the formulated approach.

He would never let me hear his tapes wherein he really let himself go, but left instructions with his widow that I, and nobody else, was to hear them after his death. I couldn't make up my mind whether this instruction was funny or sad. They were, of course, far more vital and interesting than anything I had ever heard him play.

The silly part was that he was always instructing me to "let my mind run free" while maintaining a consciously calculated (but technically and harmonically formidable, I have to say) notation based stance himself. I think he must have worried that his famous friends would consider his private playing unseemly. With my being just the boy down the road, so to speak, it didn't matter and he could be himself, at least in terms of spoken opinion.

Thanks largely to the admirable public examples of Jarrett and others, there is no reason nowadays for anybody to inhibit the unconscious. It is now "legitimate".
Well ... still perhaps not quite, I fear.

[vovo]

Depends on my mood

[Derek]

If it were not for improvisation I wouldn't be playing the piano at all...all the piano lessons I had as a kid were utterly uninspiring. Once I started making up my own music I got obsessed and later got piano lessons to learn to play conventional pieces.

I'm not a music student so I still devote the majority of my time at the piano to improvising. I'm mostly obsessed with developing my own personality within the context of really old styles such as Baroque, Classical and Romantic, with perhaps a dash of impressionism. It would appear a large number of my peers and certainly all academics believe that composing in old styles is futile or pointless or unoriginal, but nobody can truly be serious that a tiny handful of men in the 19th century unearthed all possible sweepingly awesome Romantic melodies.  Hardly. Music is much too combinatorially vast for even the tiniest fraction of original sounding romantic compositions to have been written already.

Note that by original I mean in subtle details. If you think about it, the truly big differences between most composers of the common practice tonal period were quite superficial---the true individuality lay in an inexplicable, elusive, and overall style. To suggest that there is something profoundly new or different from composer to composer is to go down the path that says Romanticism is now a dead end. I refuse to accept this idea.

I've been improvising now for a wee bit over five years.

https://www.personal.psu.edu/dga112/music.html