three different mental states for improvisation

[Derek]

I've been thinking about this a lot and I think I'm learning something about improvisation. There are three states (categories really, and with anything lines can be blurred) that an improviser's mind can be in:

1) self-hypnotic. This is the simplest form of improvisation, in form and content. Little to no creative energy is being used, it is purely for the joy of sounds and its function is often therapeutic.

2) Style absorption/instant composition: This takes more mental energy and some creative energy, but the focus is on emulating someone else's music or an entire style (e.g. blues, romantic, baroque, etc.). This can be satisfying when one feels that one has absorbed more of someone else's language. (that's the goal).

3) creative spontaneous improvisation:  This takes the most creative/mental energy of the three. There is no emphasis on imitation of others, and self hypnotism is discouraged.

Personally I find #3 the most challenging; but there are times when 1) and 2) are enjoyable. Almost as foils against 3), perhaps because I lack the energy to always be doing 3).

[keyofc]

Hi Derek,

I find your post interesting -

What constitutes the difference for you in self hypnotic - playing for the sheer joy
and the last style you mentioned.

I think maybe you are referring to being in the zone more in the first one.  And creative energy would most likely, imho, be used a lot - but it could be so smooth - that you don't feel yourself trying.

[zolaxi]

The was an interesting radio program on improvisation on the ABC Radio National just a few days ago. ABC being the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Transcript and audio available. Have a look at:

 https://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2011/3238562.htm

[ted]

Thanks for posting the link to this interesting discussion, which I have put on a CD to hear at leisure. I shall comment later on.

[ted]

I listened twice to the discussion. While anything to do with improvisation is always interesting, I doubt it would be very useful to anybody wanting to know how to improvise. If anything, it would probably inflate the already unnecessary mystique surrounding the process. To a certain extent this is cultivated by players who enjoy thinking of themselves as special and therefore pretend that they improvise by making thousands of conscious decisions a second, which ability is denied ordinary players. Well of course it is, because nobody improvises like that; it just doesn't happen that way.

The pianist in the recording succeeded in confusing matters in at least two respects. He seemed curiously reluctant to admit that he sometimes did not hear exactly what he was about to play. Why anyone would want to know everything that was going to happen in an improvisation beats me; it would defeat the whole point of improvising in the first place. Secondly, and possibly more destructively, the examples he played, together with his comments, reinforced the grossly misleading notion that improvisation is always about harmony and fiddling with chord sequences.

While exceedingly interesting from a scientific point of view, the neuroscientist's explanation of which parts of the brain work during improvisation tells us absolutely nothing about how an individual might actually develop the experience subjectively known as improvisation, or why it is worth cultivating at all.

These reservations aside, any emphasis on improvisation is very welcome. I just wish more good improvisers would strip away all arcane pretence and mystique, and just make the effort to explain what they do in simple everyday language. They seem to think the magic of their music would evaporate upon explanation, like a stage magician's trick when the mechanism is revealed. That isn't going to happen.  

[keyofc]

I really think improvisation is a way of lifestyle.

Some people are planners; some people aren't.

If you're a planner - you memorize.

If you're an on-the-spot person you spontaneously play.
Both are unconscious decisions based on how their brains work.  Once you
memorize - it's there too.

Does this make sense?

[pankrpec]

I don't understand what you mean by 3), after first reading I thought you meant something like instant composition, but that does not seem to be the case.
I understand 1), because that is where the bulk of my improvisations lie. I attempt 2) from time to time, with sufficiently disastrous results to discourage me from trying for a while (But I will not give up! I will play a Derek-like improvisation one day!).
Can you try to elaborate on the third one to a greater extent?

[coconuts]

        I think its all about number 1, at least for me. What else is there then the enjoyment of sound? I also agree with ted a lot, I think improvisation has much more mystique then it should. To me, improvisation is best explained as being like the phenomena of very dim stars. If you look directly at them, you can't seem them. However, if you look away you can see them out of the corner of your eye. For me, that's improvisation. If you sit down at the piano and say "I am going to start improvising now", and you follow what your hands are doing like a hawk it kills your creativity. You have sit down at the piano and forget why its even there. When you do start playing, its about listening but not too closely. You have to listen (and thus consciously influence your playing) out of the "corner of your ear". Its a difficult balancing act, but inherently a simple one.

[Derek]

The three states I wrote in the original post are kind of simplistic categories (and they are personal thoughts, I don't consider myself an expert as there is no such thing in improvisation, except for specific styles); of course one may or may not be in any of the states at any given time or a combination of them. They're purely for discussion really. I think the thing with 2) and 3) is they take more "penetration" or thinking hard about how music works. Typically with 2) this is surface absorption of various harmonic idioms from the common practice era, with a minimum of absorption of rhythmic or motivic idiom. With 3), one is not absorbing anything but rather engaging in a very complex creation of melody, harmony and rhythm all at once, paying attention only to how one feels affected by the sound from moment to moment, and responding to it somehow. I find this the most challenging because it is the only way one can find a path to one's musical voice. On the other hand, it may be the easiest because it does not require study in an academic sense. It is,I think, the most rewarding. Ted calls it "cellular improvisation." It obviously can intersect with 1), but it involves "caching" what you've just played and modifying it so that it grabs the brain's attention more than purely hypnotic improvisation.

[Derek]

In short the three states I was trying to describe are roughly:

1) Stick with what you know, or for a given session stick to a very small subset of figures/ideas. can be relaxing but perhaps not very interesting or stimulating.

2) Learn how someone else's music works. Rewarding but perhaps not as self revealing musically. This is probably the most difficult form of improvisation in terms of sheer academic learning and trial and error is concerned. That doesn't make it better, or even the most challenging, though, paradoxically.

3) Learn how *your* music works. This is at the same time the easiest and the hardest form of improvisation. It is easy because you do not need to academically study someone else's music. It is hard because for many, to jump off a cliff into the abyss of the unknown musically is almost as frightening as the real thing. But it is very rewarding when you take the plunge.

[lostinidlewonder]

I love this "categorizing of thinking" talk!

1) self-hypnotic....

This is an interesting way to consider it and it is a state I find myself falling into eventually when I freely improvise without any real consideration of what I am doing, however the creative energy is vast although you are not consciously aware of it. Usually after about 20 minutes or so of free improv I fall into a state where I actually play something beautiful, like a rose between the enormous thorns! I am not aware of doing it while I am doing it, but on inspecting countless recordings over the years I have found that this occurs quite often. It is almost like a hypnotic state, when you play free improvisation without restricting yourself to any style or form sometimes there is a subconscious musical mind constantly getting stimulated. You reach a certain climax and it is almost like an out of body experience, a detachment from your body and sound takes over.

It is a very strange mind state, it is almost like a semi sleep state you have when trying to fall asleep. If you catch yourself thinking about something you will wake yourself up. I feel it is very similar when you reach a hypnotic state of improvisation. If you try to consciously wake yourself up you lose that dream state of playing and things change. I have learned over the years to slump into the feeling and close off my mind, but if I catch myself thinking about the chord or note I used or whatever, it wakes up my mind and the hypnotic state shakes.

2) Style absorption/instant composition....

I think this type of improvisation also improves the better you are at playing compositions. You generally understand the decision making and fill ins of the given styles the more pieces you learn. I think however it is quite difficult to produce convincing improv in this style immediately, easy to sound formulated and boring and much greater risk in wrong decision making. I think this type of improv is a fast and fantastic approach to sketching out compositions, just get all the ideas out then go back, edit and improve, technology these days makes this so much easier.

3) creative spontaneous improvisation...

I feel that this is the good product of the 1st mind state. The 1st state of playing is like a huge junkyard and then now and then you get these wonderful treasures state 3). I use to think that this third way of playing was just luck, that eventually after rambling on and on you have to eventually create something right and interesting. But after looking back on the recordings there is just too much going on for it to be luck, thus it must be a state of the mind!

[ted]

I agree with everything lostinidlewonder says here, although semantics, as usual, can lead us to talk about one state while apparently meaning another. The act of spontaneous creation is a wonderfully ecstatic process, and produces the subjective feeling that we, as players, are observers, conduits, of an infinite stream of beautiful events coming from outside ourselves. Listening to what must amount to thousands of recordings I have made over a lifetime, I can confirm that this is the state which produces the "best" music - best in the sense that I would wish to repeatedly hear it and put it onto CDs. Curiously, it also leads to my completely forgetting what I have played immediately afterwards; again, very like a dream, which takes great effort to recall later in the day.

My teacher was supremely accomplished at the consciously calculated type of improvisation, which he could produce at any time, on demand, in almost any known style. Practitioners of this sort of improvisation often possess very strong natural musical gifts - perhaps absolute pitch, perfect short term memory, immense harmonic knowledge - that sort of thing. I found my teacher very intimidating for many years, as I could have worked at it for a century and never come close to doing the things I heard him do. But then, over the next couple of decades (I was a pathetically slow thinker - still am) I began to realise that, once the initial awe of skill had abated, his sounds rarely moved and transported me in the way my own recordings did. As lostinidlewonder says, it is frequently formulated and boring after the initial impression of brilliance subsides.

These days, working at the creative habit over five decades has more or less enabled me to enter the transported state very quickly, although even now, most of my recordings present, at least to my own ears, about ten minutes of "taxiing prior to take-off".

I have described my personal analogy of the chaotic feedback loop elsewhere so I shan't repeat it here, but until somebody tells me of a better theory I'll continue to nurture it as it serves my musical purpose.

Where I think good improvisers could direct more conscious effort is in discovering more processes of improvisational form. It seems to me that the forms of improvisation are necessarily dynamic and organic, whereas those of composition are architectural and static. It's like the difference between a fine cathedral and a living organism or plant. Both can be beautiful, the difference is not in beauty but in the mode of creation. You wouldn't breed roses to imitate cathedrals so why push improvisation into the static confines of sonatas and fugues, or for that matter rags, blues or sixteen bar phrases ?

Improvisers do not talk anywhere near enough about these things, and virtually never discuss them in everyday language listeners and beginners can understand. This is a pity. Preserving mystique might bolster egos but does precious little for the right of everybody to create in sound at an instrument. I think in this respect we are pretty lucky on this forum; the improvisers here are down to earth and helpful.  

 

[Derek]

Is it possible for all three states to happen at once? In other words, are they independent? Can one be instantly composing in an old style, in a trancelike state, create an infinite transporting variety of beautiful ideas? I think so. Ted, is it possible your teacher just wasn't that good at imitating old styles? In other words, maybe he could do it on the surface but failed to make the music interesting. I don't doubt his technical brilliance but I feel at least in my own music I've found some of my greatest satisfaction in imitation (though no music is 100% imitation, it is too combinatorially vast for that to be possible, except when playing a piece note for note verbatim), though I wouldn't call my own work of that kind "brilliant" by any means as it has taken quite a bit of trial and error. None of it came easy!

*edit* let me qualify this by emphasizing "some." I would also say "most" of my satisfaction has come from the total freedom side of playing...

[ted]

Ted, is it possible your teacher just wasn't that good at imitating old styles? In other words, maybe he could do it on the surface but failed to make the music interesting.

Could be. As a professional, appearance, style and impression, what other people thought, mattered a great deal to him. To me these things matter very little. Put another way, he was probably more concerned with how he and his abilities, rather than the music itself, were perceived by the listener. It is a mystery to me how or why he let me inside the massive, ego driven public persona he cultivated for everybody else.

Nonetheless, he was very kind to me in many ways, and perhaps I am still inclined to view his music as being more accomplished than it actually was. It's an understandable failing, but in the interest of truth I must be aware of it.