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.

LEFT HAND CELLO PRELUDE exhibits Phase A activity

This music is a result of having been asked to perform a movement from a "cello suite" by using exclusively my left hand. The rhythmic elements have the feeling of a dance, or even of a slow march, although it is sometimes hard to differentiate whether the music unfolds in a tertiary or a duple meter. Although the ambiguity in the meter makes this music hard to categorize, I include Left Hand Cello Prelude in the list of marches under Czerny's various classifications of genres in which one should be able to extemporize character pieces (see the main page of the chapter On My Improvisation Methods).

Left Hand Cello Prelude is one of many examples of Phase A piano playing exhibited in Playing Schumann Again for the First Time. These occasions of music-making were performed on the spot in front of a small audience, after having been asked to play music according to a certain character or other type of demand. I include numerous such examples in this project in order to convey to the reader-listener the importance of practicing extemporizing music in front of an audience.

recorded on September 29th, 2015:

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