There is no type of music that does not require improvisation on some level. The classical musician playing off the printed page must put some sort of invention into his performance, even if it is only slight alterations of volume that he uses to give dimension to the notes specified by the composer. Music is always a personal statement, and always contains an expression of the immediate.
Improvisation is mystical and difficult to pin down. It is such a basic idea that definitions evaporate into thin air as soon as they begin to approach its essence. Like Schrodinger's cat, it is only possible to define in terms of an incomplete state - when we open the box, improvisation has an apparent form, but the form we see is a result, not the process itself. When the black box is closed - when improvisation is happening - it is changing so quickly that we can't define it without limiting it.
The process of improvisation is so fundamental that it falls deep into the most unconscious part of the mind. When we are born, we begin to react spontaneously to the world, and this process never stops until we die. I walk down the street, and without more than a cursory glance I decide to step over the pothole, around the puddle, to the left of the pole. The person walking behind me steps around the pothole, through the puddle, and to the right of the pole. We are all reacting spontaneously like this all the time, choosing between sets of variables, making a single path out of an infinite variety of possible paths. When I apply this process to music, I come up with a single path through the possible paths of notes, phrasing, and dynamics on my instrument. How I do this depends on who I am, where I am, where I just came from . . . the variables never end. Perhaps a start at a definition of improvisation could be that by improvising, I am expressing the flux of variables.
When musicians tell me they can't or won't improvise, I am flabbergasted. How is it possible not to improvise? The line is so fine between varying the phrasing of notes and varying the notes themselves that it seems a joke that some players (usually those with a classical music background) claim they-can't do it. Because of this stubborn belief, some talented musicians are kept from a musical expression so basic that even non-musicians, tin ears, and the alleged "tone deaf" can do it with ease.
One of my favorite party activities is to hand out instruments
and have people begin to play together. No musical skill is required,
and I often ask that skilled players take an instrument with which
they are unfamiliar, or which they are inept at playing. Amazing
things happen in the relationship between sounds, things that
have to do with the relationships between people in the room,
and between the sounds produced by the instruments. Sometimes
the rules of traditional western music theory emerge spontaneously
from the chaos. Other times non-western relationships evolve,
rooted in drones or textures. Anytime people play together, patterns
will evolve, no matter how hard they try to be chaotic. The deepest
parts of our psyches incorporate structures and forms and paradigms
for all aspects of life, and those structures will express themselves
spontaneously, with or without our conscious effort.
While I scoff at the idea that a musician cannot improvise, I accept the idea that they might not understand what they're doing when they do improvise. The need to impose and understand conscious structure is strong in our culture. Playing music without knowing beforehand what the structure will be can be threatening. Still, to learn the structures and theory of music is not learning how to improvise. Playing methods and systems for improvisation exist, but none of them touch on this problem, or bring forth the fact that they are not teaching improvisation. They are teaching structure and theory. Consciousness of this fact is helpful. Learning a scale method of jazz improvisation, for example, gives no clues to the nature of improvisation. What it does is to narrow the field of variables, to say "when the music calls for this chord, these notes will sound good against it." Further exploration of the structure of the piece in question will provide further insight as to what notes to rest on, which notes to use when passing from one chord to another, and why these notes are appropriate.
The excuse "I don't know how to improvise" usually stems
from the belief that improvisation is contained in these harmonic
rules. What they are saying is "I don't know anything about
this music." What they are lacking is knowledge about a certain
branch or level of music theory. Improvisation itself can't be
learned. It is something ingrained that you open yourself to.
You get used to the feeling, but you never fully control it. You
can learn the rules of harmonic theory that guide you into certain
channels and certain musical styles, but fundamentally, improvisation
is about spontaneous expression, not style or theory or tradition.
There is an emotion that is stirred sometimes during improvisation that seems akin to stage fright, though it is more like embarrassment than fear. To lay yourself open in improvisation can feel almost confessional. You are letting out a part of you that you are not used to letting other people see. For people who know little about music, the fact of playing so freely is embarrassing because they don't want to admit that they can do it. Because they don't understand what they are doing, they can't believe there is any value to it.
The ego wants to be able to claim responsibility for the music, but can't because it doesn't understand what is going on. The music that is coming through is expressed by the deeper, erotic levels of the self. The effect is a feeling as if something or somebody else were using your body. I think this is one of the main reasons for people to refuse to improvise music - their ego feels the need to control their actions, and so rejects improvisation because it is something that requires them to relinquish a certain amount of conscious control. So, embarrassment, in keeping with the etymological root of the word(1), serves to hold a musician back from improvising.
To fully open yourself to improvisation, to be able to play spontaneously, you need to abandon all your ideas about what is right or wrong. People think it is harder to improvise with melodic instruments than it is to improvise with percussive instruments, but this is only because traditional ideas of tonality are so deeply ingrained. We grow up in a tradition where certain pitch relationships have value, and others do not. We shy away from the note combinations that sound bad, and we rush to the safety of combinations that sound good. However, in the spectrum of sound, there is a use for every one of these combinations. To begin with preconceptions about "rightness" is to limit your expression to a set of cultural values that may not contain all the ingredients you need to give form to your particular flux of variables. Later, once you have learned to open yourself to the experience of spontaneous expression, you can begin to structure your improvisations to fit traditional molds, or to create molds of your own. When you do this, you are choosing from a whole spectrum of possibilities, rather than playing one thing because it is right, and avoiding something else because it is wrong.
As you grow as a musician, you are always learning new things,
and refining the knowledge you already have. As you learn more
about structure, you can apply it to your improvisational skills,
knowing that nothing you play is wrong as long as it is a genuine
expression of yourself.
Wherever improvisation exists, structures evolve to contain it. Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach were all gifted improvisers, working within the structures of European classical music. There is gypsy music from eastern Europe, Flamenco from Andalusia, the highly structured music of India, and American jazz with its roots in aboriginal cultures of Africa. These structures exist not to fuel the improvisation, but to limit it, to narrow the spectrum of choices to create a stylized music that expresses the cultural values that gave it form. Where many musician get blocked in their ability to improvise is in the assumption that the structure is an absolute, that they must remain inside the boundaries of the local music theory. Rather than risk stepping across the line, being "wrong," they elect not to open up the Pandora's box of creative impulse at all, thereby cutting themselves off from the spirit of music.
There is value in these structures. They give a sense of identity to a culture's music that reflects the state and essence of its community. As such, it cannot let itself stagnate. As the culture moves and grows, so must the music.- Musicians must always be challenging and testing the boundaries of their music in order to keep it fresh.
I once heard a music professor tell a student that he could learn
an improvised solo that had been played by a great jazz player
and reproduce it as an improvisation of his own. I was aghast.
There is a tradition in jazz that involves quoting a piece of
music during one's solo - a few notes or an entire line reproduced
out of context - but this is not a pre-planned event. Like the
other parts of his solo, it is a fancy of the moment, a spontaneous
choice of the performer. Improvisation is something that stales
if saved to use at a future time. Like the manna that fed the
Jews in their flight from Egypt, it spoils if not used at once.
The creative impulse must be used when it happens. If it returns,
it will be different, responding to the needs of the new situation.
My own approach to improvisation has always been direct - to listen to the music as it happens, hear the possible melodic lines that run through a particular chord progression. My technical practice is aimed at being able to reproduce the possibilities I hear. My highest aim is to be able to play exactly what I hear as I hear it, to give audible expression to the possible musical paths that open themselves to me from moment to moment.
To a certain extent, this is what all musicians do who improvise within a traditional structure. The chord progressions and stylistic elements are set by tradition, and the individual musician threads his way through those chords with melodies and harmonies and expressive elements of his own.
Many of these traditional elements are so ingrained that we are not aware of any other way. For the rest of this chapter, I want to examine some of the assumptions we use in western music that can be used to generate improvisational structures, and to touch on some assumptions of other cultures that are different from our own.
In some ways, the twelve-tone system we use is quite arbitrary. Many other tuning systems have been developed, which divide the octave into as few as five or as many as fifty or more tones. Each system has its own internal logic. Any combination of tones can be devised. The spectrum of pitch is continuous, so in many ways our system of dividing the octave into twelve equal segments is quite limiting.
The system is based on the assumption that pitch relationships should be based on certain natural properties of vibrating objects. A string, for example, vibrates simultaneously at several different pitches. The strongest of these tones, apart from the string's natural tone, are the octave and the fifth. These two pitches, and the relationship between them, rule western music with an iron fist.
The twelve tone system is built on a circle of fifths. To demonstrate this, imagine an instrument with twelve strings. The first string is tuned to a low pitch. The second string is tuned to a pitch a fifth above the first string, a pitch that happens to be one and one half times the frequency of the first. The third string is tuned to the fifth of the second, and so forth. Each time, we get a different pitch. However, when we reach the thirteenth pitch, it sounds like the pitch we started with, only seven octaves above. The pitch is actually slightly sharp, but it is close enough to the octave that our ear hears the same note, and we are compelled to round off the pitch to make it a perfect octave. When all twelve different tones are arranged together within the same octave, they become the twelve tones that we are used to hearing.
The next tone in the series of harmonics on a plucked string (after a second octave) is the major third, which together with the fundamental tone and the fifth create a major chord or triad. As we will see, the major triads built on the root and the fifth of any key become in modern western music the most important chords in that key.
As you progress further along in the harmonic series, you encounter notes that are out of tune with the scale produced through the circle of fifths. For example, the seventh harmonic falls somewhere between A and A sharp, on a string tuned to C. The eleventh harmonic falls somewhere between F and F sharp. If our musical forebears had thought to base their music on the harmonic series rather than on the circle of fifths, we might have evolved a completely different tonal system than we are using today. The Indonesian scale Slendro, used in Gamelan, splits the octave into five equal tones which bear little relationship to our scale, each note being approximately 1 1/4 tones from the last. Indian musicians recognize 22 srutis, or pitches, within the octave.
Working with a fixed range of pitches narrows down the variables. Now the question is what do you do with those twelve pitches? The possibilities are nearly endless, but I would narrow down the variables even further by setting three parameters or qualifications that the music should try to address. These are: Tension and resolution, Continuity, and Contrast.
If you were an author writing a story, you would be expected to create some sort of conflict - a war to be fought, a maiden to be rescued, a killer to be found - and resolve that conflict by the end of the story. The conflict provides interest for the reader, who wants to see the conflict resolved. Western music holds the same aesthetic. To improvise music that satisfies western ears, you need to set up a musical tension, which is then resolved during the piece. The history of our classical music is largely comprised of the search for ways to extend and delay this resolution so as to keep the listener interested through the end of the piece. The final resolution, or cadence, should give a feeling of closure that signals the end of the music.
The most common way to set up and resolve this tension is through
what is known as the tonic-dominant relationship. The tonic, or
root, is the first note of the major scale. The dominant is the
fifth note of the same scale. If we build a natural seventh chord
on each of these two notes in the key of C, we get a C major seventh
chord, and a G dominant seventh chord.
The key to the tension-resolution set up in this pair of chords
has to do with pairs of notes hidden in each chord. The intervals
between these note pairs are the major third (between the C and
the E of the CMaj7) and the diminished fifth, or tritone (between
the B and F in the G7).
The tritone has long been regarded as one of the most unpleasant note combinations in western music, perhaps the most unpleasant, for the minor second, its close competition, can be inverted to give the major seventh, which is far more appealing (2). The inversion of the tritone is another tritone, since this interval splits the octave neatly in half. It has been called the devils interval, and many composers avoid it in its exposed form.
The major third, on the other hand, is commonly regarded as the sweetest sounding interval in music. Singers harmonizing with each other generally do so in thirds. This is interesting, considering that neither in the circle of fifths or the harmonic series is the third a close relative of the root. Nevertheless, the western ear would rather hear the major third than any other interval, including the octave. It is certainly true that our ears would rather hear the major third than the tritone.
Playing the two intervals side by side, you will notice that the
two notes in the tritone (B & F) are each only a half step
away from the two notes in the major third (C & E). So close
harmonically, yet so far to the ear. Playing these pairs of notes
alternately, you will hear the same tension and resolution that
you heard when playing the full chords. The same is true of the
inverted intervals (Tritone F - B resolves to Minor sixth E -
C). Also note that the tritone 7-B will resolve to another major
third, F#-A#, implying the tonic-dominant relationship between
the chords C#7 and F#Maj7.(3)
Another way of creating and resolving tension is through the use of a drone. The drone is a note that sounds continuously, which all the other notes are played against. Tension is created or relieved as the melody gets further from or closer to the drone note (root or tonic) or its first three overtones (octave, fifth, octave).
Other methods of creating and relieving tension have to do with rhythmic variation, dynamics, tempo. Experimenting with each variable will give you valuable insight on how it can be used during improvisation.
Equally important in your musical story is the element of continuity, that is, the clues you give that connect one part of the piece with another. Each piece should have identifying features that set it apart from the other music that you play, and that link its various sections with one another. This could be as simple as a recurring theme or chorus between parts, or a tempo and rhythmic pulse that remains the same, or as complex as a subtle set of harmonic rules that provide an inner logic to the progression of the piece. A piece without continuity stops and starts, the parts have little to do with one another, an idea presented at the beginning of the piece is left aside and never developed. Part of the key to developing continuity in improvisation is to be aware of structure as it evolves, and to keep to that structure, or vary it in conscious ways. Most important, you need to simply be aware of what you are playing, whether or not you understand it musically. If you are paying attention, continuity will almost happen all by itself.
More subtle, but no less important is the need for contrast. In some senses, contrast is the opposite of continuity: where continuity implies having parts that are recognizably similar, contrast stipulates parts that are recognizably different. It is largely the balance between these two principles that make an improvisation successful. Contrast means providing enough differences between parts of the music to set each apart and make it recognizable. This can mean following a loud moment with a quiet one, or a set of flowing lines with a series of staccato notes or chords. It could mean setting an incisive, penetrating instrument like a solo violin against a soothing, enveloping instrument like a classical guitar. A jazz combo can make a simple tune sound complex and exciting by adding a double-time section between statements of a theme, even if the notes and tempo remain the same. Differing textures - block chords changing to arpeggios, or the double-time idea just mentioned - are another way to create contrast without sacrificing continuity.
As you collect and refine your tools and techniques, you will find that improvisation is very closely related to composition. The difference is in the spontaneous expression of improvisation, and the possibility of creating musical moods and textures that your conscious mind would not have devised on its open without the creative input from the deeper self in response to the performing situation.
An admirable goal is the blurring of the distinctions between composition and improvisation. Every piece I compose should be as natural and spontaneous as an improvisation, while every improvisation should be as varied and compelling as a well thought-out composition. When the audience cannot tell the difference (and enjoys the music) I feel I have accomplished something truly musical.
The following exercises will help you to practice using these
three principles - Tension-Resolution, Continuity, and Contrast
- in simple ways to stretch your improvisational muscles. The
following chapter will explore some improvisational structures
that I have used in performance, and explain how they were interpreted
and performed.