Improvisation in the baroque style-Maksim Velichkin

[maksimp]

Please check out my piano improvisation in the baroque style

[ted]

You certainly have an exceptional assimilation of this particular idiom. Do you achieve this result by calculated conscious thought and mental arithmetic using theories and rules you have studied for many years, or is the process mostly intuitive and aural, using purely personal guidelines and lots of listening, unrelated to theory ? As an obsessive improviser, I am very interested in the precise mechanism, not least because those who can do it never talk about it in order to preserve their enigma, and those who cannot do it imagine all sorts of totally impossible things are going on. Neither of these extremes is of the least help to somebody wanting to start improvising.

I have always had the private idea that this sort of music gets most of its effect, not through harmony at all, as everybody would suggest, but through phrase and rhythm. In other words, beyond a broad overall conception, changes in harmony matter far less than changes in movement and phrasing. For instance in your B1, at around 1:15, what gives it life, it seems to me, are those sequential, imitative phrases. You could play it in two keys at once, or without key at all, and the effect would still be good, the harmony produced being in the nature of surface colouring.

Have you experimented with asynchronous baroque at all, where the parts are not restricted to the clockwork and coincidence of notational rhythm ?  In what direction do you intend to develop your baroque improvisation beyond the imitative ?

In any case, I enjoyed B1 and B2 and look forward to hearing more.

[maksimp]

Thank you!