Historically Inspired Improvisation - Improvising on basis of 19th-century music making

Bert Mooiman

The average modern classical musician, the performer of music from the common practice era, tends to perform from scores only, and to treat a score like a text that should be converted into sound as precisely as possible. This is usually a one way process: without a score there will be no music. As a result of this attitude the musical languages of the common practice period have become dead languages, more or less like Latin and Ancient Greek, which are (with very few exceptions) no longer spoken actively but only translated into modern languages. More and more musicians become aware of the artistic limitations of this approach. In order to become, like musicians from the past, creative performers who are able to enter into a living relationship with the music, learning how to improvise seems to be a valuable means. The Royal Conservatoire in The Hague (The Netherlands) invests in ‘classical’ improvisation. An environment has been created which fosters the idea that improvisation is important for classical musicians, and a lot of experience has been gathered in teaching improvisation to those students. But what precisely do we mean with the word improvisation? And how exactly do we argue that improvisation is important for the new generations of conservatoire students? Improvisation by classical musicians is often referred to as ‘classical improvisation’ or ‘improvisation in a classical style’. These terms are not without problems, though. I would like to propose the notion of ‘historically inspired improvisation’ instead, indicating improvisation which uses thorough knowledge about music making in the past as a source of inspiration. ‘H.I.I.’ doesn’t necessarily aim for style imitations; rather, it works the other way around: integrating what we can use from historical music practices into our own creative music making. In this way, improvisation has the potential to fertilize all our ‘musicking’ (Chr. Small) – even when we play from scores. In my essay, a recorded student improvisation will be taken as a starting point. I will analyse and comment upon this recording, developing the idea of musical ‘loci communes’ which enables us to connect improvisation with the interpretation of a score. It is interesting to compare such insights with original treatises on improvisation, especially Carl Czerny’s Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829). Czerny turns out to presume skills that are no longer self-evident to musicians of today, while on the other hand issues which are nowadays important are not addressed in his text at all. Drawing upon the theory of loci communes, I will work out an example of how I think Czerny’s book can still be a valuable source of inspiration today.

First experiences with the Catalogue of Ornamental Patterns

The catalogue was offered to selected piano students at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, all of them technically advanced. None of these students practises technical exercises on a frequent basis. The confrontation of the students with the catalogue did not happen within the framework of a specific didactic project; rather it took place as an addendum to their regular classes, and as a result of their interest in the topic. Therefore, the contact was open-ended: they were in no way obliged to work with the patterns.

Three of the students are classical pianists. Playing improvised preludes had been a subject of their improvisation classes earlier that year. These students were already quite capable of improvising a simple ‘Czerny-style’ prelude; the catalogue helped them to enlarge their repertoire of patterns to a certain degree.

The two other students are jazz-pianists, who are also very experienced in classical music. Their reactions were quite different from each other. One of them (with an Asian background) saw the catalogue mainly as a collection of exercises and used the word ‘boring’. The other one (European) showed a keen interest. Though this student was not really enthusiastic about improvising preludes as such, he managed to use the patterns for ornamentations in existing music, like the Nocturnes of John Field. This student had been provided with both an earlier and the latest versions of the catalogue. He made the very interesting remark that he actually preferred the earlier one, since this version (which consisted of examples of patterns, literally as they occurred in various pieces) made it easier for him to understand the context of a specific pattern.

These first experiences made me realize once more some old educational truths:

-Exploring a locus communis, in this case: early 19^th century ornamentations, only works when the student sympathizes with its musical possibilities. In other words: the motivation comes from real music. When I am exploring a locus communis for my own sake, this motivation comes unconsciously. When concept of a locus communis is used as a pedagogical tool for others, this motivational background should not be forgotten.

-The same process takes place on a smaller scale, namely in the presentation of a locus communis. As a researcher, one strives for abstraction in order to satisfy one’s desire to grasp the topic in its most essential form. In teaching, there is always the tendency to use this ‘deepest insight’ as a point of departure, so to speak in a deductive way. The same happened in much music theoretical teaching in the 20^th century: in the teaching of modal counterpoint after Knud Jeppesen, where the idea of cantus firmus became a quintessential melody rather than the practice-derived backbone of a polyphonic piece that the term originally indicated; in Hugo Riemann’s theory of harmonic functions, that originally tried to explain existing chord successions, but was widely used as a tool to write harmony (already by Riemann himself – though at his time the connection with the living music was probably still existing, resulting in an ‘unconscious motivation’); and also in the work of Riemann’s opposite Heinrich Schenker, for whom the Ursatz became a dogmatic criterion by which to judge both compositions and performances. This process is very much connected with the signalled reification (Verdinglichung) as described in paragraph 3.3 of the principal text.

To overcome the difficulties mentioned above, a method of teaching should be developed that addresses both the endless variations of the real music and the concepts that the teacher finds worth isolating from it. It is the inductive process that counts, because for a musician concepts are more useful as a view on music than as a reality as such.

Concretely this means that, rather than being the first material to provide the students with, the Catalogue of Ornamental Patterns should be a summary of a module that encompasses well-chosen pieces, accompanying texts and exercises.

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