Classical Improvisations

Classical Improvisations

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Erik Satie — Sarabande No. 1 Explorations

Conversations with Composers

John Beaulieu ©2009

Few people today realize that improvisation was once an important part of Western classical music. Long before the emergence of jazz, composers and performers improvised cadenzas, preludes, fantasies, variations, and entire performances. Over time, as classical training became increasingly centered on written notation and note perfect performances, improvisation became a lost art within classical performance.

My approach to both classical and pop improvisation is begins by listening for what I experience as the essential emotional rhythm of the composition. My piano teacher, Sophia Rosoff, described emotional rhythm as an unending pulse that can stretch but never break. It is a pulse that transcends tempo and time. It stretches and twists space into different shapes and dimensions as it moves through an improvisation. When merge with the emotional rhythm the music flows like a stream.

I experience being in flow as a conversation with the composer. I begin with the composer’s music, but I do not know where the stream will take me. A phrase may open into another phrase that the composer never wrote. A harmony may remain suspended, transform, disappear, or lead somewhere unexpected. I may return to the original composition or simply “go off” for a while before finding my way back. I never know what to expect.

One of my disciplines is to wake up in the morning and play the music of a composer to whom I feel drawn. I may not know why I am drawn to that particular composer or composition. At other times, especially during significant periods in my life, I have experienced dreamlike encounters or communications with a composer. When this happens, I go to the piano and enter into their music. Often times I have the intuitive feeling I am communicating with the composer.

I have come to think of music written by composer who were pianists, in part, as record of gesture of the composer’s hands”. I try to shape my hands to the gestures contained within the notation. Gesture becomes a carrier of something that cannot be completely contained by notation or explained intellectually. Fingers moved toward and away from one another. A hand opened to form an interval, contracted to form another, crossed over the other hand, struck, released, lingered, reached, and rested. Breath, emotion, thought, and physical movement became musical gesture, and some trace of that gesture remains encoded in the notation.

When classically improvising I first enter deeply into the composer’s notated gestures and open to the emergence of emotional rhythm. Eventually I may feel the music beginning to move beyond what is written. A phrase opens. My hands continue. Something unexpected appears. At times I have the intuitive experience that the composer is participating in the conversation; at other times I recognize that I sharing my own musical reality with the composer, and sometimes I wonder off into a new musical space. listening tells me where to go.

The score becomes a doorway. The composer’s gestures bring my hands to the doorway. Improvisation begins when I walk through it. Listening tells me where to go.

In this sense, my classical improvisation method is very different from my work with Emergent Improvisation. In Emergent Improvisation I seek structures that help me move beyond what I already know. In classical improvisation I enter as deeply as possible into something known until an opening into the unknown appears. There is also symmetry between your two approaches:

In Classical improvisation I shape my hands to the known gesture until something unknown emerges. In Emergent improvisation I interrupt my known gestures so that something unknown can emerge. In both cases, the destination is not-knowing, however I enter through opposite doors.

John Beaulieu’s Three Improvisation Processes

Classical Improvisation — entering the composer’s emotional rhythm and gesture deeply enough that a conversation can emerge.

Pop Improvisation — entering a culturally familiar song and exploring the memories, emotions, associations, and elemental qualities that have accumulated around it.

Emergent Improvisation — deliberately reducing predetermination and entering Tangerine Space, where neither the musical language nor the destination is known beforehand.

What connects all three is listening and entering into relationship with sounds.