During my lesson today I decided to ask my teacher the question of whether he improvises. His answer was quite simply ‘no’. I then asked him why not, to which he answered ‘I don’t know, I guess I was never taught’. Please bear in mind that I have the most amount of respect for my teacher so this definitely came as a huge blow. How does such a great musician not show the slightest bit of interest in doing this! The most part of my lesson was a discussion or more a rant on my behalf on why I think it is so necessary. I would like to look at the issues that he brought up because some of them are valid.
Firstly, the issue of not being taught to is a poor excuse because I don’t believe that on the basic levels of improvisation that you can’t do it on your own. I was lucky that on all the music courses I had been on that they had an improvisation teacher, which at the time I thought was ridiculous but now see how it trained my ears to follow the chords instinctively.
After this first point, I went on to say that I didn’t agree with the fact that in a way we are just living in a museum constantly playing things by dead white men. He agreed that it can look like this but that depends on how you play it. If you play a piece by Bach without any new ideas for example just like the recordings by Casals then that is boring because you have not put anything new into it. He compared it to what actors do – acting Shakespeare they don’t add things in. I argued that there are so many more things that can be changed in theatre because there is the set, the music and costume. However, fundamentally I agree with this point of his because if you play a Beethoven string quartet how you feel it and really invest with your interpretation this is not in my opinion living in a museum, it is a different art form.
Another point that he had when I asked why it only stopped being a tradition to improvise in music after the composer became so domineering during the mid.19th century, was that the musicians did not have as huge a repertoire to play as we do now. He said that until Mendelssohn brought back playing Bach, musicians would only focus on playing music of their time. Therefore, it has become increasingly difficult for musicians to learn how to improvise in a Romantic, Classical and Baroque style well and have enough time to really be specialized in each area. I think this is a bit of an excuse – when you play a piece from any time you, to really get a deeper understanding of the music you should be able to improvise at any given moment. I will try this with Bartok concerto, which is hugely influenced by Hungarian music. I don’t think it is a good enough excuse that classical musicians have too much repertoire to learn to do others. Why should jazz musicians have the freedom to improvise and classical musicians think it isn’t their job to do this. Of course this is not always the case. My teacher at the end of the conversation said that a great cellist friend of his was telling him how helpful she finds it to improvise. Barenboin sometimes improvises his cadenzas as do many other musicians. I hope I have helped to change his view a bit.
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