Romantic rhapsody

[ted]

Once in a while I pretend I am about twenty something again and try to play the way I did then.

[Derek]

This really took me on an adventure. Beautiful playing Ted!    

[m1469]

I like this very much, and love what I feel it unfolds into about 2/3 of the way through!

I'm afraid I'm also falling a bit into "study-mode" as of today, more than ever.  I really want to hear what you are doing.  I guess I hear that you are not afraid of harmony, and I mean that in the sense that it's like your creative ability can always do something with it.  But, you are not aware of a name you could call it, or what you are doing, in a conscious way?  I realize you are exploring a wide range of harmonies and maybe couldn't give the overall tonal concept a particular name, but there is not any thought process, at all?

Thank you for posting this, Ted!  Very much adding to my expanding inner sounds.  You know, I feel ever more for now that improv is indeed very, very important!



  

[ted]

This is complicated and I must not inadvertently mislead. What you say is true, m1469, not that I wish to imply ignorance is a good musical policy, as any knowledge can surely do no harm. I am in fact intimate with a huge and constantly expanding range of chords, harmony, scales, changes, voicings, patterns and grips. However, as I have had no orthodox theoretical training I mostly play and perceive them in a purely intuitive and spontaneous sense. This applies to both individual vertical combinations and sequences of combinations  (progressions ?). The simplest explanation is that I do not mentally process them by their "names", and especially not while in the spontaneous act of improvising. Do other improvisers actually think of "names" during improvisation ? I honestly don't know. I know that many players, especially jazz ones, say they do, and from the detail of their convoluted, serious discussions I am forced to agree that they must. Indeed, I personally met one very accomplished jazz pianist who showed me several shelves full of fat exercise books in which he had written nothing but thousands of sequences of chord symbols - not in the sense of harmonisations of tunes but just chord changes per se.

The only strictly conscious part of the above improvisation was that, earlier during the day, I had found a rather nice falling phrase C#,B,A,F# followed by a D augmented with an added E. See, I don't even know the right name for that simple harmony ! But I knew its sound and keyboard pattern before starting, and I knew I wanted it to form the main motif. Now beyond that, nothing else was certain. The several other contrasting ideas were completely spontaneous; they seemed to be just channelled through me. There's no way I am capable of doing mental arithmetic with names at that speed. Some people might be able to, again I don't know.

Another important aspect is the degree to which ideas are "chunked". If I am improvising a fairly slow little two-part invention almost every note is perceived at the conscious level and there is little chunking. However, with improvisation of any complexity and speed the conscious component can only work with chunks - groups of notes. A "group" of course could be a highly complex idea involving dozens of notes, rhythm, harmony, haptic movement, the lot - but the inner detail down to note level is unconscious.

I am convinced that the reason many listeners stand in awe of an improvisation is precisely because they do not understand this chunking process and the conscious/unconscious feedback loop. They really imagine that the player is consciously processing every single note in a titanic effort of mental arithmetic.

Improvisation is very complicated, what actually goes on in our brains must be hugely complicated. But it is not complicated in that specific, naive sense of conscious names and calculations - not for me at any rate.