The Other Place (conclusion)

[ted]

Recorded about two years ago I think.

[ranjit]

I really like this improvisation of yours! If I may ask, is there any particular reason for the title? It makes me imagine an undiscovered city in the sky Did you have something in mind while improvising the piece?

[ted]

I really like this improvisation of yours! If I may ask, is there any particular reason for the title? It makes me imagine an undiscovered city in the sky Did you have something in mind while improvising the piece?

Thanks for listening.

Most of my titles, while not always nonsense, are usually just labels so I remember their musical content, else it is hard to find a particular piece among a heap of several hundred. Actually that one does have a meaningful association. When my teacher was a choirboy at Llandaff Cathedral he was befriended by Elgar who, impressed by the boy’s improvising, spent time with him whenever he conducted the choir. According to my teacher, Elgar had some sort of mystical idea that music was all around us but in “another place”. I have no idea if that part is true or just a nice story.

[j_tour]

Thank you, Tim.

That really helps put a name with where you're at in music.

I've only heard this piece once, so I'm not going to give my interpretation of the harmonies, but the pushing of the beat pretty consistently, as well as using some idiomatic pianistic techniques (octaves in the RH, and so forth — obviously, you know better than me what you did, so you don't need me to recite all those).

I particularly liked about half-way through the piece the way you started to use the lower register of the keyboard with some spot-on rhythmic and motivic "breakdown."  And that sound continued through the rest of the piece.

Coherent, impressionistic, pianistic, and you seem to be pretty damned good at using vertical harmonic resources on the fly.

You just made my list, man!

Now I've got to catch up and hear the rest of your music.

[ted]

Thanks for listening, j_tour, and for your perceptive reactions. I have more fun doing this sort of thing than I ever had with classical or jazz. I don't pretend it's anything special except to my own ears, I just play whatever sounds come to mind without too much regard for the "shoulds" and "ought tos" of convention. I rarely know in advance what is going to happen and I like each session to compel me to venture into a new musical landscape. I suppose the process is roughly parallel to the stream of consciousness technique in writing.

While I have to plead guilty to a certain facility with rhythm and phrase, harmony in any common practice sense is a complete mystery. My teacher was a noted professional pianist and composer and he did his best to teach me functional harmony, poor man, but he eventually gave up. I am not helpless at creating in traditional ways, especially ragtime and romantic idioms, but the trouble is that I always end up sounding like the composers I admire most. I can go through the motions at the intellectual level but it isn't my native language, put it that way.

[j_tour]

While I have to plead guilty to a certain facility with rhythm and phrase, harmony in any common practice sense is a complete mystery. My teacher was a noted professional pianist and composer and he did his best to teach me functional harmony, poor man, but he eventually gave up. I am not helpless at creating in traditional ways, especially ragtime and romantic idioms, but the trouble is that I always end up sounding like the composers I admire most. I can go through the motions at the intellectual level but it isn't my native language, put it that way.

That's quite a bit of self-awareness, in the best sense of the term.

Oh, sorry, about calling you "Tim" instead of ted — my mistake.  I don't actually know anybody named Tim.  Senior moment, I guess/

You know, I didn't want to say so at first, but unless my ears had gone mental for a while, I was hearing in the harmonies that space between voice-leading and strictly vertical harmonies (the type susceptible to roman-numeral analysis), that, notably, Debussy and others used so well.

For me, your improvisation is a good lesson in how to occupy and fill that space with something that is much better than a mere pastiche of copying somebody's style.

There is going to be influences, of course, but well, I'd call it a gumbo in the best sense of the word.  A very sophisticated gumbo, with a mix of the elegant and the raw.

[ted]

..I'd call it a gumbo in the best sense of the word.  A very sophisticated gumbo, with a mix of the elegant and the raw.

...Coherent, impressionistic, pianistic...

"Sophisticated, coherent, impressionistic, pianistic gumbo", an accurate description indeed, and a splendid compliment well worth remembering.