improvisation and technique

[Derek]

I came back to piano improvisation (last couple of months) after a relatively dormant hiatus for almost a year. I found that there are some things which are a bit rusty. Musically, I'm fine and seem to have improved despite my physical technique. But in terms of physical technique...definitely rusty. Particularly difficult things like runs of thirds (not so bad), and broken arpeggios (worse).

I made the observation that most of my improvisations involve very few hand position changes. In other words, at any given time both of my hands are probably hovering over one area of a scale rather than whizzing up and down.

I find that the best melodies, harmonic changes, etc. Seem to occur when the hand is mostly stationary. (for me). In other words, there is maximum flexibility because I'm in a comfortable position and the only decisions I must make are when I hit various notes and in what order---in other words, musical decisions. When physical decisions take too much focus---the music goes away.

I guess I was wondering is---for the more virtuosic of our "regulars" such as quantum, furtwaengler, etc. do you find this is also the case? In other words, do you find that musical content in improvisation is enhanced by ease of execution? Or am I just realizing once and for all I am an amateur without the time necessary to become virtuosic? (which I'm fine with, I've never striven particularly hard to become virtuosic, and it seems to have little to do with how much I enjoy my playing)

[pianowolfi]

That's an interesting but difficult question for me. First, yes I think it's possible that a hiatus can bring you some musical progress, even very significantly, but you may get rusty technique-wise. So you might need a few days/weeks catching up to be able to express your new musical ideas. On the other hand, a hiatus can also improve your technique, and after a few days/weeks of catch-up you might notice a significant technical progress.

Thirdly, yes I also think very much that the music can go away (or hide in the background waiting) if your whole attention is momentarily captured by physical decisions.

The last point: "do you find that musical content in improvisation is enhanced by ease of execution?" I'd answer clearly with "no" for myself. Because that thing which I firstly thought of as being improvisation turned out to be more, it turned out that there was a musical content coming to me and use my technical skills to manifest itself, plus that this wasn't really only musical but a sort of "universal" content. And it also turned out that this "content" enlarged my technical abilities, and that I could all of a sudden do things that I never did before. But perhaps in this context "technical abilities" might be understood more in a compositorial sense, in my case.

[Derek]

I think what I meant originally was a very limited definition of technique, namely that of difficult, long, flashy "licks" such as you might hear in a Liszt or Chopin etude. I.e. long runs of thirds, block chords, fast, large leaps, anything that is physically complex and very difficult to execute. I'm personally finding that in general, such techniques typically must "stand on their own," they cannot seem to participate in improvisation except as a sort of exclamation point or something like that. In other words, true musical content involves melody, rhythm and harmony, spun out in much more comfortable positions between the hands. From what I've observed, most improvisers take advantage of comfortable positions to a large degree. I'd be interested to hear quantum's take on this, since his playing is very impressively virtuosic while at the same time very musical.

Put it another way---as the physical complexity, difficulty and speed of any given passage increases, the plausibility of it being improvised decreases. These can be used *within* an improvisation, but the variability of them is small. They are rigid because to execute them requires fine, practiced motor memory.  Fast movements in comfortable positions on the other hand can be played anywhere during an improvisation.

[Derek]

Another thought occurred to me today. There are of course dozens of ways to improvise, which would be very difficult for a performer to reproduce. That involves, as Ted has often pointed out for his own music, free rhythm, but it can perhaps also include highly virtuosic movement which does not necessarily happen "the same way" every time. I suspect some of quantum's and perhaps furtwaengler's technique to be something like this perhaps.  If any of these sorts of improvisations were written out, to execute them verbatim would be nearly impossible, I think.

So it seems to be one of these paradoxical things. Something improvised may be difficult to perform, something difficult to perform may be difficult to improvise (or rather, the plausibility of a specific composition to have been improvised may be doubtful). It's really complex isn't it? Probably not worth talking about much longer =D

*edit* I'm wondering if the simple truth is---improvisation emphasizes change, performance of compositions emphasizes no change at all. Therefore--if you introduce anything static and unchanging into improvisation, it will become less of an improvisation, and the challenges of performing a composition will be introduced into something which has challenges all of its own. Write down an improvisation on the other hand...you're bound to challenge any performer unless the improvisation is consciously restricted to be easy or slow etc.

[ted]

Speaking for myself, I improvise nothing which is not easy for me, at least in the moment it occurs. But this has to be qualified by saying that, at my age, my present state of musical creation, I do not feel musical content to be inhibited by any lack of purely physical technique. Were I to perceive, perhaps in listening to recordings, improvisational failures which were clearly due to physical inadequacy, then I might work on it. As it is I play five minutes night and morning on my Virgil Practice Clavier and that has been my technical practice for many years now.

The inadequacies, if we can call them that, and they do exist, which I do perceive in my recorded improvisation, have nothing to do with physical technique. That is true, probably without exception. They concern music and the mind.

In connection with the general issue Derek has raised here, I have always considered the range of physical movements which has evolved in most piano playing, classical or jazz, to be very narrow. Some special areas, special movements, have been done to death for centuries and accorded what amounts to an unfathomable importance, while an infinite range of other playing forms, on the face of it equally musically meaningful, are simply never heard. Improvisation is the perfect vehicle to explore these latter to the limit. One improvisation of half an hour can embed hundreds of them. For me it is a question of variety rather than difficulty of execution.