Improvisation: Responding to "The Bulletproof Musician"

The Bulletproof Musician [hereafter, TBM], one of those music-blogs that I've enjoyed reading over the last year or so, today came out with a post encouraging classical musicians to experiment with improvisation. Although TBM's articles are usually very stimulating, I felt that there were some gaps in this one. I've never been entirely comfortable publishing comments on other blogs, but today I decided to make an exception: classical improvisation is a topic that I've engaged with for many hours over many years, and I'd like to contribute a bit to the discussion.

First off, I have some philosophical differences with TBM. As a serious classical improviser myself, I don't agree that brain scans and memory lapses should be motivating factors in starting to improvise. (I know, I know, the memory-lapse discussion may be light comedy -- but the brain scans are a central part of TBM's article.)

The variations in brain activity between improvisers and non-improvisers is all very interesting, but far more important is the variation in musical, rather than mental, activity, both for performers and listeners. Our classical-music culture is saturated with performers who depend entirely on the printed page. To draw a comparison with language, imagine a world in which people could only recite sentences that they spent months practicing and repeating, but were unable to formulate any coherent, grammatically-correct (read: harmonically-sensible) thoughts on their own. This would not be considered a healthy environment: conversation topics would be severely limited, and people would get very bored very quickly. Yet this is the environment that we've fostered in classical music. In fact, I would go even farther: speakers who cannot spontaneously create a correct, if short, sentence, are not considered to be fluent in the language. Similarly, I think it's fair, if pessimistic, to claim that most classical musicians are not really "fluent" in the language of classical music.

Brain scans aside, improvisation liberates those musicians who do it, and engages those audience members who are there to witness it. As Robert Levin points out in the video that TBM cites, when an audience watches an improvising performer, they know that they are hearing something unique, something that belongs only to them, and something whose memory they'll cherish. They know that they won't be able to look it up on iTunes or Spotify the next day, and, accordingly, they'll listen differently. Performers in this situation benefit as well: huge portions of the music-related self-help material I've read involves ways to keep repertoire from going stale, or to keep performers from getting bored with pieces they've been playing. Well, those techniques are all fine, but if the performer is a habitual improviser, he may never come up against the problem of staleness or boredom in the first place. Improvising, whether cadenzas and ornaments or entire fantasies, keeps repertoire feeling new, and increases the risk and excitement of performing. This, too, benefits those on both sides of the stage.

Second, TBM's "Take Action" suggestion of doing some free improvisation is admirable, but ultimately, I think, off-the-mark. The great improvisers, from Bach and Mozart to Chopin (and Robert Levin!) don't improvise by playing random notes. Likewise, if we want to learn to do it, and do it meaningfully, riffing thoughtlessly on a scale isn't going to get us very far. To continue the comparison with language: David Foster Wallace pointed out that anybody who knows enough words can come up with a sentence like "Did you seen the car keys of me?", but that this is neither beautiful nor elegant. In music, of course, we need our sentences to be beautiful. A musician improvising a structureless melody may experience some illusion of improvisatory freedom, but, as scales, arpeggios and etudes teach us, true freedom in any pursuit comes only with technique and structure. I suspect that one of the reasons so few classical musicians improvise is that they believe improvising to be random -- that is, they think that the next note is a matter of intuition and emotion, and that if they don't "feel it", they must not "have it". Nothing could be further from the truth, though. As my old teacher once told me: "Improvising is easy, just like singing an opera, tuning a piano, or playing the violin; someone just needs to tell you how to do it."

For classical musicians who want to explore improvisation, there are a number of very useful resources, which I suggest perusing in the following order:

1. 1. A great starting point for anybody who plays a melody-instrument is the two-volume "Division Violin", available on IMSLP and also in a nice edition from Broude Brothers. These "divisions" are written-out improvisations over repeating ground basses (the classical equivalent to a jazzer's improvisation over a 12-bar blues), and they're very useful for developing freedom and a melodic vocabulary. These are important first-steps whether your ultimate goal is to improvise fugues, fantasias, or cadenzas. (They're also on 25% end-of-the-year sale from Broude Brothers right now!)
2. 2. From there, after using the "training wheels" of other peoples' written-out improvisations, those who can read German should try the excellent, very clear and complete, "Improvisation mit Ostinatobässen," published by Edition Walhall. This is a complete textbook for the beginning improviser. It offers suggestions for how to create mental frameworks for chord progressions, how to incorporate these frameworks into a variety of different forms, and how to start spinning out melodic figures from scratch. Sure, this book still focuses on repeating basslines, but this is an extremely useful way to build up an improvisatory vocabulary, and can then serve as a jumping-off point into other forms.
3. 3. Having worked through those ground basses, the next step is to free yourself from the repeating bassline pattern. If your intended destination is the classical cadenza, go straight to CPE Bach's "Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments". The final chapter contains many useful sample chord progressions, which serve as excellent models for fantasias and cadenzas of any length. And next to the extended chord progressions, he also shows many useful shorter progressions that go to very distant keys and back. These should be internalized, and are great for getting out of harmonic binds. (Note for violinists: there's another useful section, distilling some of the same information, in Baillot's Treatise.)
4. 4. Finally, for those who want to take the next step, Music in the Galant Style is an excellent resource. It is a compendium of partimenti -- stock phrases, chord progressions, melodic figures, etc. -- in a variety of styles, and in a variety of different contexts, from Bach's fugues to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. This text is great for making the leap from CPE Bach/Baillot into coherent, larger-scale improvisation, and for improvising with/in counterpoint.

Bach Explored: By and For Pisendel

"Shall I program wonderful, known, popular works, or something unknown that I think my audience will love?" While musicians may have asked this of themselves at any point over the last few centuries, I imagine that the question has never been as pertinent as it is now. Audiences have access to more music, both famous and obscure, than they ever did before, and -- thanks to digitized archives from around the world -- performers are able to rediscover entire libraries of unknown works without even leaving their homes. But, in fact, our focus on what the audience will hear, and what music the audience will or won't know, may actually mask another, equally important difference between (some of) the popular and obscure repertoires.

Specifically, it strikes me that much of today's known, popular early-music repertoire consists of works written by the composer for other people, while a lot (though not all) of the still-unknown music was written by composers for themselves. Of course, this isn't always the case, but the correlation seems pretty consistent: sonatas by Handel, Bach, and Telemann, still the most-frequently-played baroque violin works, were either written for other violinists or for publication. At the other extreme, a violinist-composer like Johann Georg Pisendel published nothing during his lifetime, and composed primarily for his personal use. As one might expect, his surviving manuscript works are quirky and idiosyncratic, designed to suit his own styles rather than those of anonymous consumers.

Aside from the obvious pleasures of reconstructing obscure repertoire, one of the wonderful things about practicing the music of Pisendel is that it offers us a tantalizing glimpse into the mechanics of his hands and mind. Spend enough time with his unique, recurring technical demands, and you begin to feel what sorts of things he was good at, and what he liked to do on the violin. He quickly becomes a living, breathing, violin-playing personality. In Pisendel's case, this musico-physical understanding is particularly enticing: as a student of Westhoff, Pisendel was firmly rooted in the 17th-century polyphonic violin traditions; at the same time, however, he influenced countless composers of his own generation, and was the recipient of dedications by Albinoni, Bach, Tartini, Telemann, and Vivaldi. And, most useful for my current purposes: his violin sonatas are extremely challenging. (Although some performers might find Pisendel's technical demands gratuitous, there's no better way to get an idea of his abilities than to try to learn his hardest music.)

Technique was so central to Pisendel's craft that it sometimes seems each of his sonatas is "about" a different technical challenge, as though he thought first of whatever technique he wanted to showcase, and then structured the music around it. The C-minor sonata (come back for the second Bach Explored concert, in January!) is all about thirds high up on the D and A strings; the unaccompanied sonata is all about contrary-motion double stops; the D-major sonata, on my music stand for early next month, is all about micro-sequences in which a single hand-shape moves up the fingerboard in small increments. This isn't exactly like the standard baroque practice of writing a melody and then repeating it sequentially; this happens on a tiny scale, perhaps five or six times within a single phrase.

He uses this technique all over the sonata, but its most vivid manifestation comes during the last movement's cadenza: the performer strikes an exceedingly awkward left-hand pose and then takes it on a stepwise tour up and down the fingerboard:

In Pisendel's hands (as it were), mere mechanics can thus take on real musical importance.

If he was indeed the violinist for whom Bach wrote the Sonatas and Partitas, as popular legend holds, then it's tempting to view a passage like this -- from the C-major fugue -- as having been designed with Pisendel in mind. Note the similar incremental rise and fall:

Of course, in the pre-chinrest era, everybody was shifting in steps. Pisendel may have inspired parts of the C-major fugue, but ultimately we have no idea what was actually on Bach's mind when he came up with the above passage. Still, aside from the Sonatas and Partitas, in only one other violin work is Bach so obsessively sequential on such a small scale -- and, in this case, the manuscript (of BWV 1023) survives in Pisendel's own collection, so we can be quite sure that he played it. One particularly sequential passage in the first movement hardly requires any left-hand finger adjustment -- just Pisendel-style micro shifts:

After becoming acquainted with all of Pisendel's violin sonatas, however, one begins to wonder whether he would have been very good at the rather sophisticated bowing technique required for this passage. If we can judge by his surviving works (can we?), his brilliant left-hand technique far outstripped that of his bow arm…but that's a musing for a different post.

Bach Explored: Westhoff's Continuo Sonatas

I had originally intended to profile Bach's forebears in chronological order; however, I've altered my plans slightly. For previously-discussed reasons, Johann Paul Westhoff has recently been on my mind a lot. And, despite the fact that only 14 of his works survive, he seems to show up on my concert programs and talks with a greater consistency than most other composers. (If memory and forecasting are both accurate, he will have been on my music stand every month of 2014 except for April and December.)

My persistent interest in programming and talking about him comes not only from the high quality of his output, but from his formal, structural, and technical imagination. Looking back as we do with the privilege of our 21st-century vantage point, we've become inured to the rhetoric of "musical innovators", since most of the composers we play were "revolutionary" in some way or other. In Westhoff's case, however, the terms are justified. He was the first violinist-composer to write down multi-movement unaccompanied works; moreover, his approach to polyphony therein is uniquely rigorous, in that his voice-leading and chord-spacing make no concessions to the inherent limitations of four-strings-tuned-in-fifths. (As an aside: he also developed a logical but frustrating notation system for his unaccompanied works: on the plus side, two different clefs and an eight-line staff allow him to show the voice-leading as clearly as possible. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to read, especially under pressure. My colleague and "Bach Explored" partner Paul Cienniwa has written a blog entry on the virtues of performing from memory. Well, Paul, here's another point to support your argument!)

(A page from the 3rd unaccompanied partita. The first note is B-flat)

And many of his other works are equally innovative. At a time when music imitating nature was all the rage, Westhoff went a step farther, depicting a battle in one sonata and, in another, the overtones of pealing churchbells. Audience members who attended my May 2014 gallery talks will remember that his remarkable A-major Suite features a three-voice melody in which, through various special effects and distortions, Westhoff is able to blur the polyphonic texture and show us two vastly different ways of hearing musical foreground and background -- all in the space of 16 bars. (Fortunately, these contrapuntal and violinistic abilities did not die with Westhoff: it was his student, the young Johann Georg Pisendel, for whom Bach probably composed the Sonatas and Partitas.)

Our first "Bach Explored" concert features one of Westhoff's sonatas for violin with continuo. If his unaccompanied suites are a string of rustic, tuneful dances that happen to be technically complicated, his continuo sonatas are simultaneously more interesting and more challenging. Gone are the pretty tunes; gone are the major keys. Instead, performers and listeners are faced with unrelenting gravity, modal counterpoint, and endlessly repetitive fugues. Since my previous post on them, however, I've performed the D-minor Sonata, and the question, "is it good?", has received the unequivocal answer, "yes."

Exploring Bach: An Introduction

With just a month and a half left before the launch of Bach Explored, I've been spending increasing amounts of time with the various composers who feature in the series's opening concert. Although I've performed most of these works before, I've never put them all together in a single program. About a week ago, I mused on the early-music-induced question of whether certain lesser-known pieces really are good enough -- whether they're worth the countless hours we musicians will spend learning them, and whether they ultimately deserve the audience's time and attention. Well, in putting together "Bach Explored", I've had to revisit these thoughts over and over again. It may seem, ultimately, that the question is rhetorical: indeed, if I'm actually asking whether an hour and a half of unknown music is worth reviving, then surely the answer can be found, in abbreviated form, behind the very title of the series. It is Bach we want to Explore, and it is Bach's gravitational pull around which Walther, Westhoff, Pisendel, and countless others merely orbit. Right?

Well, one rhetorical question often hides another. "Exploring Bach" is not so much about Bach's music itself as it is about the riches on which he built. Bach, of all baroque composers, had an exceptionally well-developed sense of music's value and enduring artistic importance, and he combined this with a deep pride in his German cultural heritage. It is not by coincidence that he based his cantatas and chorales on traditional Lutheran melodies, or that he wove German folk-music into many of his works: he saw himself as The Great German Musician of his age.

This sense of heritage is as present in his violin works as it is in his sacred music. His Sonatas and Partitas are the earliest unaccompanied violin works to have entered the standard repertoire; however, when he penned them, Bach was joining a tradition of polyphonic violin writing that had thrived in Germany for two generations before his birth. Nor was his debt only to the virtuoso violinists who revolutionized technique in the 17th century: baroque musical composition was a pragmatic art, and he must have been equally motivated by the brilliant technique of the friends and colleagues with whom he performed. These violinists, ranging from the vaguely-familiar Pisendel to a number of long-forgotten anonymous masters, are the inspiration for the present series. Without their innovations, Bach's violin music could not have been written. To Explore Bach is to perform them.

In the coming weeks before the opening concert, I'll be writing about each of the sonatas that make up the first program. I hope you'll join me as I investigate these forgotten greats -- and, ultimately, I hope you'll join me for the performances!

The Devil Reads Treatises

On a transatlantic flight I recently found myself revisiting "The Devil Wears Prada" (I know, I know…). I had last watched this film as an undergraduate, and back then I assumed that its sole purpose was to show us Anne Hathaway wearing designer outfits. Well, as ever, I'm happy to be proven wrong: upon seeing it again, I wondered whether the whole thing wasn't just a large-scale, thinly-veiled critique of the Early Music industry. Consider the following quote, spoken by the Prada-clad Demon herself:

"You think [fashion] has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis: it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then Yves Saint Laurent showed cerulean military jackets… And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers; then it filtered down through the department stores and trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room."

This sounds suspiciously like a sentiment that's been voiced about, in, and around the early-music movement. (We all know Taruskin, Butt and Haynes; now a newer book has joined the ranks!) It's also an issue that strikes me as one of the most important facing young performers on both period and modern instruments. The value of treatises is a topic of almost constant debate among my colleagues. Many musicians of my generation are rebelling against the sources, instead building their sound, style, and approach around the recordings and teachings of their elders.

This may seem prima facie okay. But consider the fact that our entire picture of the way early music sounds was, in fact, an invention of these elders. Of course, they read their sources and did their homework, but the sources are not oracles. In the current state of early music, we under-30s are like Anne Hathaway: playing in a style that was selected for us by musicians in the '60s and '70s. (And, as an aside, what do we really think of the older interpretations now? Often we find their playing somehow lacking -- as we should, because tastes change -- yet we continue to take many of their stylistic assumptions for granted.)

This state of affairs is especially dangerous now, for two reasons. For one thing, the generation of pioneers is in its senescence, and new creative, innovative, thinking leaders must be ready to carry the torch. More important, Early Music's place in the larger classical-music world is changing. In the UK, even the most respected baroque orchestras seem to be struggling, while some adventurous modern groups are successfully incorporating into their concerts baroque works that were once the sole domain of period performers.

The Early Music Movement's success has created a breed of highly-informed modern musicians who can play very stylish Handel one night and technically-assured Berio the next (or, in some cases, both in the same night) -- and do it all in tune. From an audience's perspective, why shouldn't that be preferable to the technical clumsiness we hear in some of the less-polished period performances?

Early Music will face many challenges in the coming years, but one thing that my generation can do to further its cause is to return to the 17th- and 18th-century sources. Re-invent the sound of early music for the 2010s, re-examine the assumptions underlying the way we play, and challenge the habits of our musical forebears. Rather than "wearing a sweater that was selected for us" 40-50 years ago, we can use the sources to update authenticity. This would give listeners another new way to hear music, and would also keep period performers unique -- not impoverished copies of our modern-instrument colleagues.

Is it good?

"Is it good?" I imagine that, in the last century's days of innocence, musicians and listeners rarely had to ask this question. "It may not be to everyone's taste, but of course it's good; that's why we're playing it," the musical canon replied in the past. Since then, Early Music has complicated things: archives have been explored, long-lost works have been revived, and suddenly a wealth of great music has (re)entered the repertoire. Many of these discoveries really are wonderful: composers like Becker, Strungk and Walther absolutely do deserve to be played and heard. Occasionally, however, one suspects that the thrill of discovery (or, let's be honest, the attention we hope to get when we make premiere recordings) has led us to spend a lot of time with music that just isn't worth it.

I've recently found myself facing this question again. The opening concert of "Bach Explored," my soon-to-begin series, will feature one of Johann Paul Westhoff's sonatas for violin and continuo. Unlike Westhoff's brilliant unaccompanied partitas, these works have not yet made it into the mainstream baroque repertoire, and I think it's clear why. Suffice it to say that this sonata is dark, dense, long, serious, and repetitive -- the kind of piece that hugely challenges both the player and the listener.

Although I've been happily practicing this Westhoff since June, I didn't realize until a few days ago that others might not enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoy playing it. Ultimately, how can one really know until one tries it in public? Even so, some of the friends and colleagues who have played through it with me suggest that I either take it off the program, or at least cut it a bit, and thus make it easier to listen to. In this case, though, I think I'll do neither.

So much successful, thought-provoking classical music is dark and difficult, and this Westhoff is no exception. Of course, crucially, it must achieve its expressive heights (and depths) by different means than those used in later music -- his harmonic and melodic language is, after all, of the 1690s. Here, we encounter obsessive repetition, almost constant slow movements, and a seeming-inability to leave D minor. In some sense, these spell disaster; at the same time, though, one does wonder whether Westhoff was pursuing a deeper aesthetic goal, or maybe even producing a spiritual essay set in music (a notion bolstered by the "Imitation of Churchbells" at the work's center). We can observe the opening’s slow, heavenward ascent, and the downward spiral that follows; the liturgical call-and-response of the Largo with its modal, antique counterpoint and tangled repetitions; the stately, yearning, pathos-ridden Adagio. One possibility is that this work dramatizes the ars moriendi: the soul’s initial struggles, the last rites, the pealing of churchbells, the Adagio of death, and then, finally, jubilation. Yet another is that the violin and accompaniment, constantly playing in opposing dialogue, may represent the soul and body, the heavenly and earthly, even a conversation between the soul and Christ (a common trope in German sacred music -- just think of the soprano-bass duets in Bach's cantatas). Of course, we will never know whether the work really "means" anything -- but we can only gain by listening to it.