Playing Schumann Again for the First Time

Bobby Mitchell

How can one learn to improvise convincingly within the context of the nineteenth-century piano repertoire? And why is it important to improvise on this repertoire in the twenty-first century? Taking the music of Robert Schumann (1810−56) as a departure point, Playing Schumann Again for the First Time proposes an answer to these questions through methods towards a pianistic practice that is driven by experimentation and strives to continually find more layers where improvisation can take place, both in sounding musical practice and in notation. These practice-based methods are contextualized by a discussion of the presence of improvisation in Western classical musical practice in the nineteenth century. They are then substantiated by an argument to use improvisation as a tool for rethinking the current performance practice of nineteenth-century music. Improvisation itself and the concepts driving this term will also be addressed: improvisation in musical performance will be described as a process guided by a feedback loop between mimesis and morphosis with which the practitioner engages using his or her individual cognitive and embodied approach to listening, forgetting, and conceptualizing; the results of which bear his or her own sonic signature. The knowledge gained in this project lies within the realm of what will be described as improvisation as practice, a category of improvisational behavior that circumvents the need to be presented as art and is rather intended for the development of one’s own music-making.

WALDSZENEN exhibits Phase B activity

recorded live in Basel, Switzerland on June 3, 2014 with an extemporized middle section from [0:37–2:08]

recorded live in Ghent, Belgium on May 22, 2014 with an extemporized middle section from [0:38–1:56]

Both performances continue in the same vein as Schumann's original first and last bars of the piece. While the first flows more naturally and contains fewer harmonic ambiguities than the second, the second contains two structural moments that give the music more of a sense of structure: a relatively clear cadence to G minor at [1:19] and a cadential pedal point passage from [1:35–2:08].

These recordings were made at a time when I was consciously working on conveying a clearer sense of structure in my extemporaneous playing by finding closure in one section and then creating a contrasting musical episode. In both cases, I was unsuccessful in the sense that I was not able to initially continue in the manner of Schumann's first eight bars, find a cadential point, and then create clearly contrasting music.

Here is a recording of one of my performances of Schumann's score from May 22, 2014:

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