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.

NACHTGESANG exhibits Phases B, C, and D activity

After having played the melody a few times, I started looking for voicings at the piano on April 21, 2015, to accompany the already notated bass and melody lines of Nachtgesang:

In an attempt to strengthen the quality of my melodic playing, I spent time away from the piano notating melodies. In a sketchbook dating from around December 2014, the first visible traces of Nachtgesang can be found – on the bottom stave of the page to the left and the top three staves of the page to the right (see below).

This manuscript of a through-composed version of Nachtgesang was written on the train from Bern, Switzerland, to Freiburg, Germany on May 10, 2015:

The efforts put into finding satisfying melodic content and appropriate accompanying material, made in many different stages both at and away from the piano, and both with and without pen and paper, produced a short moment of music-making that I consider to be compact and compelling.

a recording of Nachtgesang from June 2nd, 2015:

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