Improvisation in Music - What is it?

I’m a questioner, always have been, probably always will be, but I’m not really looking for answers. I’m also not just trying to be contrary, but there are times when answers do not have that so-called ring of truth for me—do not leave me satisfied.

And so, I sometimes end up stopping others in the course of their explanations to question one or another of the assumptions upon which their explanations are constructed.

A good example is the numerous assumptions about what constitutes improvisation in music. The general thinking is that most classical music is not improvised and that most jazz and blues is.

Fair enough, until we dig a little deeper. Yes, classical music is written down and classical players play what is written. Jazz, on the other hand, is often based upon a form—a harmonic or melodic progression, or a tune—upon which the player is free to, so to speak, change it up and find places within the forms to create their own mini-creations—like solos.

Again, all well and good, but only until we begin to ask some of  those inconvenient questions like—is a classical musician just some kind of machine, like a CD player, that reads the information on the disk—in this case the musical notation or the music played from memorization—and then, via the body, convey that information into sound?

Studies have shown that different areas of the brain are activated when musicians are asked to play a scale or a melody from memory and then asked to improvise on that scale or melody. Specifically, an area of the brain involved with the process of self-monitoring is deactivated during improvisation. But my own experience of playing memorized music and improvising shows me that the situation is not quite so simple—not quite so black and white.

 What I observe is that when I play a piece of music, whether I am improvising or playing from memory, the music never comes out the same way twice. When I’m playing well and I'm in control of the piece, it comes out differently depending on my mood, the acoustics of the room, the instrument I am playing, and also what music and musicians I have been listening to recently.

So the question is this, if I really know the music and am not thinking about how to play it, but what I want to hear, and in the here and now of the moment I am intentionally projecting my vision, am I not improvising?

 But perhaps the answer depends on one’s definition of improvisation. If you think improvisation is only that which creates new melodies, chords, and chord progressions—new notes and different rhythm—then what I am describing is not improvisation. Again, all well and good, but personally, I am not satisfied.

Why not? Because I begin to question what is this new stuff that the improviser is improvising? Where does it come from? How did it get there?  And is the improviser channeling something beyond himself—something from the Universal Mind, or God or the cosmos?

Most jazz musicians will tell you that what comes out in an improvisation is what is already inside of them—is stuff that they have in their minds and have already programed into their bodies—the so-called muscle memory. How it comes out, when it comes out, and why it comes out is sometimes a mystery, but there does always appear to be some cause and effect at work in the process. Elements that I described that impact my expression of classical music seem remarkably like the elements that influence the improvisation of a jazz or blues musician—elements like the musician's mood, the room, the energy of the room, etc.  

In other words, it is my experience that when classical musicians play a piece of music that they have fully internalized and when jazz musicians improvise, there is not as much difference as is sometimes assumed. Of course, the deeper question for me still remains—how does either of them do it in the first place? Where is the line between musician and machine, or is the inconvenient truth that there is really no distinction all? Without the machine of the body and the impressions stored in the mind, neither the classical musician nor the jazz musician could play their music.

And so, I wonder, is the musician—is man—really a kind of sophisticated cyborg—not just in music, but on the whole vast field of life itself, running and being run by their impressions—their physical and mental programing?

My coffee cup sits near me next to my computer; I reach for the cup and take a sip. What just happened? Mind, monitoring my senses, becomes aware of the cup and desiring the experience of the coffee commands the body to do my mind’s will. The body is programed for the task of picking something up and moving it, in this case, to my lips to taste—to experience—the coffee.

But where am I in all of this? Who am I in all of this? And am I ever even here at all? One thing I know for sure, it is in the act of playing music that these questions are raised to a level beyond the theoretical and the abstract and in their contemplation I experience a unique joy and happiness—and can I ever ask for more?

                                                                                              

                                                     © copyright Michael Kovitz 2016

"What the world does not need is another guitar player."

I am helping one of my guitar students prepare for her college auditions.
I was struck by the wording of two of the requirements,
“two pieces, one of which is technical and the other melodic.”

The meaning is not unclear; they require one piece that demonstrates
the performer’s technical proficiency and another piece that demonstrates
feeling and expressiveness.

But if one looks a little more closely at these requirements, the distinctions between technical and musical
are not as obvious as they first seem and even seem to promote, perhaps at a subliminal level, a duality in music that is most unmusical.

Technique is, or always should be, the servant of the music.
Technique is the wings that allow musical vision to soar into the angelic realms
of the miraculous.

Though he was not speaking directly about music, I think this statement by

Meher Baba hits the nail right on the head:

“Mind and heart must work together.
Mind without heart is like a river bed without water—lifeless and dry.
Heart without mind is like a river without banks—the water having nowhere
to flow, becomes a swamp. Mind and heart working together is a beautifully flowing river,
lovely to behold.”

Paraphrased, the statement becomes:

Music without heart is like a river bed without water—lifeless and dry.
Music without mind is like a river without banks—the music having nowhere to flow,
becomes like a swamp. Music that has heart and mind working together is a beautifully
flowing river, lovely to hear.

Andres Segovia once said, “There are no technical problems—only musical problems.”

What this means to me is that a musician can only teach her hands to do what her mind conceives of—no more, no less. This is not to say that different bodies don’t have different capacities, but whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the body, somehow a good musician finds a way. Take for example the legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt who made incredible guitar music with only two functional fingers on his left hand, or George Allen whose fingers were so thick that he was unable to fret a string without holding down another.

In other words, if the mind accepts a buzz or a wrong note, the body will create wrong notes and buzzes and this will establish a technique predisposed to wrong notes and buzzes. On the other hand, if a musician does not accept wrong notes and buzzes, she will create a physical technique that tends to keep them from creeping into her playing. As my old teacher Jack Cecchini used to tell me, “A good musician gets it right, even if he needs to play it with his nose.”

So, what was my student or I to make of this requirement? Did a ‘technical’ piece mean that it needed to be fast, or complicated, or really stretchy? And did a melodic piece mean a piece with a tune-like melody—like a song? Really, I could name many pieces that are slow and do not sound ‘difficult’ yet demand great control—a balance of head and heart—like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or Leo Brower’s Un Dia De Noviembre. And also, are there not many pieces that sound really ‘difficult’ that are in fact relatively easy to learn and to play?

In conclusion, I think that the requirements and pedagogy of many music schools and many teachers are promoting and sending the wrong message. With regard to the very wording of my student’s requirements they seem to be fostering a separation of the head and the heart rather than a harmonious union of the two. Again to quote Meher Baba, “There should be a balance between the head and the heart, but should one err, it should be on the side of the heart.”

Or finally, as Andres Segovia once said, “What the world does not need is another guitar player; what the world does need are musicians and artists who also play the guitar.”

Structure and Function in Bookshelves and the Music of Phil Spector

What do bookshelves and Phil Spector’s music have in common? The answer is structure, but you can’t talk about structure for very long without talking about function.

For example, you decide to build some bookshelves because you need a way to store your books and yet keep them accessible.  Storing books and accessibility is about function; how that is accomplished is about structure. But first, some questions need to be asked and answered:

   

    1. How many books are we talking about?

    2. What are the sizes of the books?

3  3. Where will the bookshelves go?

We need to make sure that we build shelves that are roomy enough to accommodate the books and that the space between the shelves is sufficient to accommodate our larger books.

Will the bookshelves have to fit under a window? Then the shelves need to be long and not very tall. If, on the other hand, the space is limited but the ceiling is high, then the bookshelves can be tall and narrow.

Now we need to consider some other things with regard to ability:

1.      How much are we willing, and able, to spend on materials and necessary tools?

2.      How much time are we willing to commit to the project?

3.      And, realistically, is our skill level and knowledge up to the realities of the project we envision?

Makes sense, but how does this all apply to music? With music as with carpentry, no one just begins to build something without reason and motivation and without some idea of what that something is going to be. Creativity is not the exercise of the infinite freedom of possibilities; creativity is the process of the limitation of possibilities. One needs to start with an idea, and, no doubt, the idea can develop and change as the project progresses, but one does need to start somewhere—with some idea.

Do I envision a song, a motet, a sonata, or a symphony? Do I have the tools and skills to succeed at the project?

Before the beginning there was nothing and that nothing held infinite possibilities. After something emerged, the very nature of something eliminated the state of anything. The first something became the cause and what followed was the effect, and that effect, became a further cause.

I was ten years old when I first went to summer camp in Hayward, Wisconsin. I think I went to that camp for three or four consecutive summers. It was called, Camp Big Chief, if anyone is interested.  Hayward Wisconsin was about 500 miles from Chicago—where I lived. We travelled by train in Pullman cars—you know, the ones where the seats convert into bunk-beds at night. Our train was always a milk train that stopped at every stop along the way.

I liked the lower bunks because they had windows, and I liked to look out the windows at night while I listened on my little transistor radio to whatever rock and roll station I could find. We’re talking somewhere between the mid and the late fifties here. “Sh-boom, sh-boom, life could be a dream sweetheart.”  And life definitely was a dream for this little kid—come to think of it, it still is…

It was an interesting time for pop music—a time of change. Influences were changing from white to black—or maybe white to blues—and then a new white emerged—maybe something more grey—and then a new black—and then there was Elvis who absorbed and reflected all the influences from pop and blues to gospel and  jazz and what eventually emerged was called Rock and Roll—and I loved it!

It spoke to me; it was my life; and I still listen to it, still love it, still respect it, and I still learn from it. In fact now, I feel that I am only beginning to really understand and appreciate the music of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

And Phil Spector; was he a musical genius or what? Consider his famous Wall of Sound.  I know we’ve jumped into the early sixties, but the sixties were the natural emotional and spiritual evolution of the new music of the late fifties. Everything is connected, nothing just comes and goes by itself—could there have been an Elvis without first an Ellington? Did Miles, or Monk, or Coltrane, just emerge from thin air?

Anyway, Phil Spector was a master of structure and function. When he worked with a song he knew what he wanted, and he was very particular—very demanding—in the recording studio. The Wall of Sound was something more than just filling all the space on the sound stage with sound. Sound without structure would just be noise. Putting shelves just anywhere in any way in our bookshelves would satisfy neither the demands of function or structure. And remember, that every sound takes time, and so sound is not just about pitch it is also about rhythm.

Sound has to respect and support the underlying structure of the music. Take for example, and we really could take any one of dozens of Phil Spector productions as an example, the 1963 mega-hit, Then He Kissed Me…

He asks her to dance, he walks her home under shining stars, they kiss, eventually fall in love, and one day he proposes marriage. “I felt so happy that I almost cried, and then he kissed me.” – sung wonderfully by the Crystals.

Not a complicated song; 4/4 time, key of E Major, pretty much a lot of I-V-I-IV, etc., but the arrangement is very intelligent and fully respects and highlights the structure of the song.

The song begins with an instrumental guitar lick—dum da de dum, dum da de dum, etc. —between the I and IV chords.  That same lick, joined by an organ, and later strings, colors the empty white space of the sound stage with a kind of gray under-painting.  It stays with us to the end of the song, also filling the space between the vocal phrases.  

That little lick catches your attention, no doubt, but really what grabs you are the drums—that tambourine on the high hat—is that not the coolest little titillating rhythm? It gallops all the way through the song. And then there is, in the lower frequencies, the thundering drums and bass. Phil Spector really knew to use drums for both tone and rhythm.

Oh yea, and then there is the saxophone which moves to the front of the sound plane to underscore the verse’s change to the sun-dominant IV chord.

And we can’t overlook the use of the strings and upper range of the organ during the bridge section. Listen to it with good head-phones; these are in your face sounds that all but scream at you and are perfectly placed to heighten the climactic moment  of the song, musically and lyrically, that comes at the end of the bridge.

Contrast this use of strings with the instrumental interlude between the last verse and the repeat of the last verse. This is the verse where he asks her to marry him. It is not the climax of the song, more the anti-climax, that which begins to bring the energy down enough to give the song a satisfying ending—like beginning to apply the brakes to your car  in order to stop without going through the windshield.. Here the strings have quite a different feeling than they did in the bridge. They don’t scream; they express a sweet, soft, melody, which enables a subtle lessening of the energy in the repeat of that last verse.

Again, consider how important the repeat of the last verse is. Without it, the song would not have had such a smooth ending, and even so, the last line had to be repeated three times to bring it to a close.

And what do we hear at the very end of the song? Yep, that same little lick we started with:

                                           dum da-de dum,

dum da-de dum,

dum.

Oh, and by the way, all that I described, and more that I haven’t,  actually takes place in a mere two minutes and thirty two seconds!                                      

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Meet Charles Ives

So did you ever just sat still for a while and quietly observe the workings of your mind? I mean, does it not just go anywhere and everywhere—on its own—right? Thoughts about the past; thoughts about the present; thoughts about the future… Inspired thoughts; thoughts you might be embarrassed to share with anyone… But no, this is a music blog, not a blog about meditation.

Now imagine that you can spontaneously write down all these thoughts—like James Joyce writing in what came to be called train of thought.

Further, imagine that these thoughts  you are thinking, observing, and writing down—these thoughts which are images and feelings—are being heard by you as music—as melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, and that your skill is such that you can orchestrate them in any way and any compositional style that please you.  Well, if you can imagine all that, then meet Charles Ives.

Charles Ives, the illustrious American composer, was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, long before the age of computers, sampling, and digital recording techniques. He was the son of George Ives, a talented and far-thinking church organist, who encouraged his son to hear and play different melodies in different keys and different meters—all at the same time. It is told that George Ives even arranged for different bands to march around the Danbury town square playing different pieces of music so that his son could experience the effects of the changing relationships of the sound sources on his musical ear.

Add to this musical background the fact that Charles Ives considered himself a Transcendentalist in the fashion of the great American thinker and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Transcendentalists shared many philosophical views with followers of the Masonic traditions of the time. These are the same teachings that inspired such great composers as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. What did they believe? In this brief quote from an 1842 lecture at a Masonic Temple in Boston, Emerson said the following:

“The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own.” – copied from the American Transcendentalism Web http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/essays/transcendentalist.html

The Transcendentalists set themselves apart from what they called the Materialists. Simply put, a Materialist believes in the supremacy of the material universe. To the Materialist, the material universe is reality—a reality that to the Transcendentalist proves itself to be passing, transitory, and ultimately inferior to the eternal realm of higher consciousness, inspiration, and ecstasy.

I speak of this transcendental perspective because I find it in the music of Charles Ives.
I am not satisfied with the idea that it just a description, or even an exploration, of life he experienced in his world of Danbury, Connecticut, or even  that world seen through the eyes of a modern classical composer exploring new musical realms and pushing old musical boundaries. I believe that Ives grappled with the tensions that exist between the consciousness of the Transcendentalist and the consciousness of the Materialist. I believe that this grappling can be heard to one degree or another in all of Ives’ music.

Familiar tunes, often spirituals and church hymns momentarily establish themselves only to fragment and ultimately drown in other tunes and harmonies. In other words, nothing lasts for very long in Ives’ music. Things come and go, sometimes many things come and go at once; is this not a valid description of life? Religious hymns and spirituals, popular songs, music quoted from other composers, all entwine, vie for one’s attention, and ultimately go—disappear— swallowed up—lost in time.

A most interesting piece of music by Charles Ives is his, The Unanswered Question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkaOz48cq2g

I suggest this link because it shows the notation, but is a rather short version.  The one I most enjoy is the 7 plus minute version by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. Please listen to the piece on the best sound system possible or, at least, through really good headphones.

There is a continuous backdrop of shifting consonant harmonies in the strings sounded sans regular rhythm and definitive phrases. The music just flows on like a gentle unimpeded stream. Does it represent the eternal, the transcendental?

At measure 16, a little over a minute into the piece, a five note motif is sounded by a horn against the strings.  Beginning with a descending diminished 7^th, the sound is dissonant and unsettled and lasts no more than a few seconds. Is this the question? What it is? And who is asking it?

The harmony of the strings—could it represent Pythagoras’ Harmony of the Spheres?—seems unmoved, unaffected by the question. The piece goes on like that. The constant strings, the persistent, sometimes disturbed, questioning of the horn, until in the end, the strings win out—or at least, are the last to be heard. Is the question resolved in the eternal harmony of the spheres? Or unlike the music by which Ives represents it, is there really any end to the ‘real’ Unanswered Question that Ives represents?—And what, if anything, does it all mean?