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.

GEORGS SONNTAG exhibits Phase A activity

Handel's Lessons for Princess Anne

recorded on April 21st, 2015:

Dealing with counterpoint is one of the significant challenges when improvising in the context of nineteenth-century piano music. My very limited abilities to be able to create music on the spot with a contrapuntal texture were put to a test when I was asked by Rudolf Lutz to perform a piece called Georgs Sonntag in front of a small gathering of people in April 2015. Georgs Sonntag was supposed to represent Georg's life on any particular Sunday, including attending the local church service. As well as providing the title, I was also asked to play a contrapuntal piece of music in C Major. I chose to use the chorale melody Ein feste Burg ist Unser Gott in a contrapuntal setting.

A notated transcription of Georgs Sonntag, written down after the performance, can be seen here to the right. Other attempts to improve my ability to deal with contrapuntal textures are displayed below: two attempts to set the melody Ein feste Burg ist Unser Gott in a contrapuntal manner and then my realizations of Handel's fugue exercises in his Lessons for Princess Anne.

How necessary is the ability to extemporaneously perform strictly contrapuntal music when considering this project's main research question? Schumann's own interest in counterpoint (his lessons with Heinrich Dorn in Leipzig in the early 1830's combined with his life-long interest in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier) provide one example of how important studying counterpoint is for composing and improvising music in performance.

I chose to pursue the exercises from Handel's Lesson for Princess Anne for two reasons: they transition seamlessly from figured-bass to counterpoint exercises, and his examples are intended to be realized at the piano. Because I was initially unsuccessful at realizing them in performance, I pursued a more rigorous solution through notation, and then I practiced playing them in performance without reading from my notation but rather from Handel's original.

an attempt, away from the piano, to write a contrapuntal piece using the choral theme Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott:

A transcription of Georgs Sonntag:

an attempt to superimpose the choral theme Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott onto the harmonic scheme from Bach's first fugue in C Major in the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1:

I copied out Handel's examples in my own handwriting as well.

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