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.

D-Maj F#-Dom⁷ G-Maj G#-dim b-min / f# F#-Dom⁷ G Maj G#-dim⁷ D-Maj⁺⁶ / A g#-dim⁷ A-Maj⁺⁴ A-Dom⁷ D-Maj

a second attempt, made immediately after the first attempt, to recreate the music I played while warming up (without listening back to the recording):

while warming up on June 2nd, 2015:

IMPROMPTU exhibits Phases A and B activity

Both performances exhibit the ability to play a functioning cadential scheme in D Major; however, I was unable to exactly re-create the music that I had just played a minute before. The progression in the first recording first heads toward the relative minor (B minor) and then to the subdominant (G Major), whereas these actions are reversed in the second. An hour or so later, I made two attempts in front of a small audience to turn the initial warm-up fragment into a stand-alone character piece called Impromptu:

D-Maj F#-Dom⁷ b-min D-Dom⁷ / A G-Maj g#-dim⁷ D-Maj / A A-Dom⁷ D-Maj

Just after turning on the recording device, I sat down at the piano and played these 18 seconds of music. A basic harmonic analysis could be as follows, containing nine separate harmonies:

This attempt, while similar, did not unfold in exactly the same way. See its respective harmonic analysis:

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