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.

CLEMENTI WITH COUPLETS exhibits Phase B activity

a recording made of a rondo theme by Clementi with extemporized contrasting passages on September 29th, 2015:

Prior to performing the music heard in the recording above, I spent about an hour with Rudolf Lutz learning to play this Clementi Rondo in the manner presented as the first practice strategy proposed in the Practicing subchapter of this chapter – an exercise that inspires the player to find numerous plausible versions of how the music could continue while looking at a particular score for the first time. After looking at measures one and two, I found various plausible realizations of measures three and four. Then, after looking to see what Clementi composed in measures three and four, I searched for versions of measures five and six, etc. I continued this process, with Lutz present, until we reached the fermata in the second to last measure on Clementi's first page, here to the left.

This process, as well as reflecting my ability to create music in specific contexts, also helped me to quickly memorize enough of the score to later play the version heard above without using the score. Just prior to the performance heard in the recording, I was asked to play the Rondo and to extemporize my own contrasting sections.

Clementi with Couplets exhibits an attitude towards Clementi's notation that aligns itself with what violinist Pierre Baillot in his 1834 treatise L'art du Violon describes as "an older manner of writing where the notation is not complete in itself, where it is a skeleton that needs to be worked out by the musician" (quoted in Edin 2011, 165). Baillot then "depicts a contemporary style of notation where the composer has written the necessary embellishments into the score" (ibid.), which could more accurately describe Schumann's approach to music notation. A discussion of the differences between the way Mozart and Schumann notated scores and their impact on how the performer is invited to improvise while remaining compliant to a musical work in performance can be found in the chapter On Scales of Improvisation in the subchapter Improvisation₂.

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