More cocktail piano improvisation

[ronde_des_sylphes]

.. or something like that. Anyway, I was really only trying out a Bosendorfer, and got a bit carried away; it is somewhat self-indulgent but it felt natural at the time.. https://soundcloud.com/andrew-wright-35/cocktail-piano-improvisation-bosendorfer

[ted]

Is that really the sort of playing one usually hears to accompany drinking and talking where you are, or is the title tongue in cheek ? I don't think I'd be terribly interested in drinking and talking if I were at a social occasion and you started up with that sort of stuff. Anyway, titles are to some extent a prison for the listening mind.

I have never thought improvisation should imitate compositional structures, but is better when it creates its own form dynamically, after the manner of a mathematically chaotic feedback loop. Frequently, improvisation of this latter type tends to be about moments rather than a broad conception. Your main strength here is coherent, meaningful phrase articulation. It is easy, once we have a bit of technique and vocabulary, to pour forth cascades of sound which say very little, to play notes rather than music. A lot of famous players actually do this quite often, I think, but we shan't enter that argument here.

While listening to this, it struck me that the reason I hear music and not notes with you is your natural affinity for a certain type of romantic phrase. Regardless of overall form and broad considerations, the listener is keenly aware that phrases of cogent romantic meaning are being uttered. This is by no means the case with all improvisers and, dare I say it, with many classical players. A series of transporting moments, even syntactically unrelated ones, is a perfectly valid form, it seems to me.

You could possibly try making your passage work more heterogeneous by adding or subtracting notes, or grouping them in sections whose cycles are asynchronous with whatever else is going on. But then maybe not - you might end up sounding like me, and that wouldn't be your piano personality.

I enjoyed the patches of double notes; if you can play them well, why not ?

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Is that really the sort of playing one usually hears to accompany drinking and talking where you are, or is the title tongue in cheek ?

Probably not - possibly similar harmonically but with a hyperactive attitude to embellishment!

and a related point:

Your main strength here is coherent, meaningful phrase articulation. It is easy, once we have a bit of technique and vocabulary, to pour forth cascades of sound which say very little, to play notes rather than music. A lot of famous players actually do this quite often, I think, but we shan't enter that argument here.

I know what you mean. My embellishment is never intended to be intrusive: in my mind it's iusually a textural device to add background colour to the phrases which should always be foreground. I don't use scales much here, but I often use them as a mechanism of getting convincingly from note A to note B and when they are used as such I believe that you should make a point of the arrival at note B - whether via an accent or through playing the scale with a decel or an accel directed at the arrival point.

You could possibly try making your passage work more heterogeneous by adding or subtracting notes, or grouping them in sections whose cycles are asynchronous with whatever else is going on.

Similarly to my earlier comment, I (in this type of thing at least) view passagework as gestural, thus I'm disinclined to make a point of grouping them as collections of e.g. 4 demisemiquavers, rather as a broad sweep of notes which takes up x beats.

Thanks for listening and for your comments, which (as usual) are very much to the point.

[ted]

This is a very interesting point in all music - the tendency of established genres, old fashioned and modern, to ascribe one of precisely two states to a musical feature. It is either prominent - a melody, or in jazz a harmonic change - or it is embellishment. Either foreground or background, so to speak. For some years now I have tended to imagine a continuous spectrum of importance rather than two discrete states, because I found the former better feeds the DNA of idea flow. Personally, I also love ambivalence in the effect of music on the listening mind. As a boy, I remember listening to some Schumann and enjoying the perceived syncopations. Months later, looking at the score, I realised I had been listening with a displaced pulse. Then I found I could change it at will, much like looking at one of those optical illusions of cubes facing either inwards or outwards.

This discovery went very deep. I never forgot it, and the essential variability of perception has become critical to my whole musical world view, particularly in improvisation. The notion that only one way of perceiving a given sound is correct and invariant now seems hopelessly limiting. Yet it is still the precept of most musicians and musical education.

Could be I have just missed the bus, of course, but if so it has given me great joy over the years.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

I'm probably somewhat conditioned to the foreground/background distinction not least because I've played so many transcriptions where such things are fairly clear cut. Voice foreground, then accompaniment and embellishment as background issues - occasionally countermelodies to consider. The thing is, I believe, (except for cases like in bel canto where the embellishment performs an emotional function) embellishment should be subtly and deftly done, in the background - it's like in paintings you don't want the artist overtly demonstrating how dextrous his brushwork is, it's far better if it doesn't draw attention to itself by making a big statement. There's a poetic account from the 19th century of Liszt playing the ornamental rh figuration of his Rigoletto paraphrase and it's something along the lines of "pearls in the morning dew" - in the score he even writes the melody in normal notes and the ornamentation in smaller ones to make the point. That said there certainly can be merit in ambivalence but I'm fairly clear in my own mind as to my intended approach and if either embellishment or accompaniment is to become foreground it must be for a good reason.

[michael_sayers]

Hi ronde_des_sylphes,

This is very well done!  I think it is more than "cocktail" music, yet and nonetheless you could produce the album Cocktail Music by A.W.!


Mvh,
Michael

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Thanks. I think it's the sort of thing I'd play in hotel lobbies if I were left to my own devices! I wouldn't want to make an entire album out of stuff like this though: after a while I can get a bit harmonically same-ish.

[michael_sayers]

Thanks. I think it's the sort of thing I'd play in hotel lobbies if I were left to my own devices! I wouldn't want to make an entire album out of stuff like this though: after a while I can get a bit harmonically same-ish.

Hi Ronde_des_sylphes,

Then for contrast improvise a Serialist version of cocktail music!

I am not sure though how well it would go over in a hotel lobby.


Mvh,
Michael

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Then for contrast improvise a Serialist version of cocktail music!

Ha, I was once asked to construct a tone row and improvise on it. It didn't go terribly well, particularly as I was having trouble keeping the row in my head!

[michael_sayers]

Ha, I was once asked to construct a tone row and improvise on it. It didn't go terribly well, particularly as I was having trouble keeping the row in my head!

I guess there could be the "watered down" version of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern.

There is Serialism other than the 12-tone variety which could be explored for this purpose, and which might actually work as some sort of a humorous, improvised yet highly distortive pastiche of themes by Puccini, Mozart, Liszt, et al., in which a listener would hear some familiarity resonate through the Serial medium.

Still, though, it probably is not suited to a hotel lobby, except perhaps only in quite small doses.


Mvh,
Michael