Piano Improvisation. The analytical brain vs. the creative brain

[mdecks]

The two worlds we need to balance when improvising.

[ted]

Surely the pair form a feedback loop during improvisation, one of a large number of feedback loops in what seems to be an extremely complex brain activity.

I watched your video about how many scales exist on the piano. Is there not a much simpler approach ? Any note combination, chord or scale, disregarding pitch and voicing, can be viewed as a partition of twelve. Application of the Polya Burnside theorem to the cyclic group of order twelve gives all 352 note combinations (counting a silence) in one operation. I published it in the New Zealand Mathematical Magazine forty years ago (Vol 16 No 2) because no music publication seemed to know what I was talking about.

I have found that, aside from using it as a means of keyboard vocabulary building when young, this sort of analysis has had very little bearing on the quality of my improvisation. In fact, I suggest that harmony in general is of far lesser importance than phrase and rhythm. But I am a bit different at the best of times.