Improvisatory "warm-ups"

[ted]

I find it more conducive to fluency to warm up with improvisation rather than with pieces. I do it in several styles, not necessarily orthodox ones, and just wander through the twelve keys, not trying too hard for development of effective phrases. Here are a few from Sunday morning, interrupted as it happens by phone and door, but that seems my fate lately.

If there is one message I would like to get across it is that this sort of thing is not some mysterious, "out of the blue" event requiring special aptitude. It is the rightful possession of any pianist, classical or otherwise, and just becomes part of one's playing habit like any other aspect. There is nothing to lose except your inhibition.

[rachmaninov uk]

god i wish i could play like that. ted are you literally reading the music at the same time as playing at that speed? or have you memorized the pieces.

[quantum]

Ted, I feel the same way.  I find improvising much more effective in warming up the muscles and the brain, then playing scales or arpeggios and such. 

[JPRitchie]

Hello Ted,
    Here's what I heard:
1. Romantic-style improvisation - rapid and intricate lh & rh lines with complex
interaction between them - sometime supporting, sometime contrasting, but
always responding to one another.
2. Gershwin-style improvisation - blues, jazz, and classical elements and rapid
changes between them; appearance and disappearance of regular rhythms.
3. Brubeck-style improvisation - rh statements of a simple and changing
melodic line of largely single notes with lh support.

I don't mean to pidgeonhole the pieces and of course they're all uniquely your
style. The first one was particularly nice because improvisation is associated with
jazz, and yet this piece is quite complex and had a very classical character.

The only criticism I would mention isn't particular to these pieces, but holds for
most improvisations. It is that they lack a larger structure of some type. 
That larger structure could be anything, but for now, let me just call it an
absence of something that might be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Although
the pieces all do have a definite beginning.

It's really nice to be able to listen to original music - thanks for posting these.
Regards,
Jim

[donjuan]

wowwwww

I wish I could improvise like that!  Can you tell me some of your secrets??

[ted]

rachmaninov uk:

They are not pieces and there is no music. Many people do improvise using memorised structures but I prefer to follow Jarrett's philosophy and almost start music anew each time. Of course you can never do that really, because anything you play reflects everything you have ever played in a sense, but I think I know what he means.

quantum:

Yes, quite right. I have also found that if I am recording a piece and repeatedly failing to reach my standard, ten minutes of improvisation will often bring about a much better recording when I try again.

JPRitchie:

Absolutely right Jim - form is one big conundrum with improvisation. Should improvisation strive to imitate composition, with all its nuances of form and structure or should it simply be an organic flow ? Not that organic flow is formless, but you know what I mean. Many think so and many do not. My view is that there is plenty of room in music for both approaches. My teacher was a very accomplished improviser in strict conventional forms - amazing mental arithmetic - gave me an inferiority complex. That is what I was told to aim for when I was young. But then along came Jarrett - that was an eye-opener (or ear-opener) for me. Long waves within waves of undulating sound, each breaking and swelling in organic association with the next.

Perhaps an even handier solution is to say that composition has its forms and improvisation has its forms. I do not particularly like completely formless or random improvisation, aside from brief patches - some people do, and good luck to them - but tightly conventional structures are likely to inhibit spontaneity, and I don't want to risk that either.

Those three improvisations are, as posted, just warm-ups, with very slack organic form. How strange you mention Brubeck. I admire his music very much so the influence must be showing. He had at least two wonderful ideas. The first was the obvious one of compound metres, but the second is hardly ever mentioned. He was seemingly the first to see complex chords as combinations of two or more keys, which view he no doubt assimilated from his teacher, Milhaud.

donjuan:

There is nothing "secret", no flashes out of the blue, you do not need to be "gifted" to improvise. You need to have genuine musical feeling and an urgent desire to create and take joy in your creations. After that it is, like all things in piano playing, largely dependent on that nasty four-letter word, "work".

[JPRitchie]

Ted, the differing character of these improvisations evidences a larger stucture and it is what attracted my attention.
My technical background in music isn't sufficient to offer any more suggestions in that sphere. But perhaps an analogy with chemical physics will provide some insight.

Jazz and improvisation came into formal prominence about the same time as quantum mechanics (QM) became similarly accepted. The intellectual connection being that both incorporate non-deterministic elements not found in classical forerunners. For example, in a quantum system, it's no more possible to know exactly the future configuration of a system than it is to know which chord follows another in an improvisation; in contrast, classical physics more or less assumes the position and energy of particles can always be determined accurately and, as you mentioned, classical composition can be quite rigid. This element of chance in both music and physics was formally recognized, on the one hand, to pick one event, Gershwin publishing "Rhapsody in Blue" in 1924 and, on the other hand, Planck's Nobel prize for using quanta in 1918 and Dirac's prize for formalizing QM being awarded in 1933.

What has happened more recently in electron density work is that new kinds of objective structures have been discovered, largely by Bader. These new structures, called atomic interaction lines, recover some (but only some) of the classical ideas of chemical bonding from the mathematical machinery of QM. These lines were unknown before, but can be directly determined  experimentally or rigorously computed from theory. Although many important questions remain unanswered, this head-to-head comparison of theory and experiment verified both and has been performed in laboratories all over the world in ca. the last two decades.

The point I'm leading to is that although contemporary and accurate physical theories incorporate chance, this has not resulted in either the total loss of measurable, objective structure in electron distributions or the abandonment of all classical notions. It just required a highly mathematical definition of a new kind of structure and ways to determine it. These structures were in the electron distributions all along, but they couldn't be extracted cleanly without a new, rigorous mathematical procedure.

Whether this has any significance regarding larger structures in improvisations, I'll leave it to you to answer - musically, in part, I hope.

Regards,
Jim

[rachmaninov uk]

rachmaninov uk:

They are not pieces and there is no music. Many people do improvise using memorised structures but I prefer to follow Jarrett's philosophy and almost start music anew each time. Of course you can never do that really, because anything you play reflects everything you have ever played in a sense, but I think I know what he means.

Ah. You can tell how much i know. Very good anyway

[i_m_robot]

the finger tech is quite impressive

[ted]

Jim:

I am delighted that you sense the underlying form, even in these freer improvisations. I am also delighted with your analogy because one of the conscious forces influencing me in the development of my forms is mathematical chaos - and I do mean the word in its mathematical sense, not in the dictionary sense. It was an unfortunate choice of word they made thirty years ago but I guess we're all stuck with it now.

I think myself that chaos will turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century but time will tell. How a couple of simple rules and initial data can produce an unending sequence of non-random but unpredictable beauty fascinates me. Complex order can truly arise from randomness - but it isn't a concept the world is quite happy with yet. Lots of people have busily applied it to art and music but I think most of them go about it in entirely the wrong way - trying to force musical beauty from numerical calculation - I don't think that is possible.

"Ted, the differing character of these improvisations evidences a larger stucture and it is what attracted my attention."

How happy I am that you see this. That you should respond so without prompt astounds me. Perhaps, after all, I am not as mad as people here (where I live I mean, not the forum) think I am ! My coined name for it is cellular transition, and I intend to develop it to the best of my ability over the next decade - assuming I last that long !

Robot:

Thank you for the compliment, although that sort of fingerwork is actually a lot easier when you don't have to stick to a score !