Improvised encore

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Although I've improvised quite a few times on the famous Barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffmann, I've never settled upon any formal version and all the improvisations have been different in various ways. This is from a public recital and was fairly spontaneous, not least in the sense that I found myself needing to play an encore and not having prepared one, so (re-)improvising on a familiar theme seemed like quite a good idea...

I wrote it out by ear a few days ago to make a sheet music video and possibly to get closer to making it into a finished paraphrase.

[ted]

That sounds splendid Andrew. Few players are so naturally and sufficiently immersed in any past idiom that they can create spontaneously and convincingly in it. With you, it has always seemed to me, the fluency goes beyond clever imitation and has become your personal aesthetic, your means of artistic expression. I know only too well the difficulty of notating any sort of communicable visual approximation to an improvisation. Unless the idea is conceived in rhythms of notation at the outset, and mine hardly ever is, I've more or less given up trying, so more power to you on that count.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Thanks.. in this specific case, as I'm improvising around a pre-defined theme, it's easy enough to keep the rhythmic aspects clear, so this was pretty easy to notate as the framework is already in place in that regard.