IMPROVISATION
- its uses within a classical instrumental education.
A guide to greater expressivity and
confidence in performance.
by Melinda Maxwell
Principal Oboe,
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group & Endymion,
Consultant in Woodwind Studies RNCM
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group & Endymion,
Consultant in Woodwind Studies RNCM
Teacher: Ok, here’s the moment at
the end of the slow movement in this baroque sonata to invent a phrase of your
own, so, have a go.
Student: I can’t do that!
I have heard this reply often and
it applies to so many moments in our music making whether playing by ear or
inventing ornamentation or cadenzas or even singing, that I get genuinely upset
at the level of, I suppose, fear and misunderstanding.
Let us start at the beginning.
Improvisation is an enormous subject but I’d like in a few paragraphs to shine
some light on thinking about it in different ways. One of the comments one hears quite often,
particularly when related to jazz, is “Oh if you improvise you can play
anything you want. Who’s going to know what’s right or wrong”. And the answer is: “It makes no difference if
the music is free, structured, diatonic or atonal. Improvisation is a skill
that has to be learnt and practiced like any other skill and whether right or
wrong does not come into it”. This may sound confusing but no true improviser
enters the moment without having thought about, practiced and explored the parameters
first. Why is this? Because there are millions and millions of
ways of saying the same thing, and this very process is what makes improvising
so very special and exciting. If you know the route you may take you can
exploit your ideas to their full capacity.
Over the years I have discovered
that this very thought - that there are many ways of saying the same thing -
has made me rethink how I perform and practice. Invention is a powerful
imaginary tool and when you apply it to patterns and phrases you find other
ways of playing something just as powerful and meaningful.
Let’s start with practicing. What I’m about to talk about can apply not
only to students at music college but also to younger players. We all know that to master your instrument you
have to spend hours and hours sorting out and improving many different
techniques that span, for instance and to put it simply, soft, slow legato
playing to loud, fast, clean articulation. These constitute what might be
called the basics of playing that need to be practiced on a daily basis. Even
if a player has thirty years experience they always return to the basics
because they form the roots of all technical control. The point is that the art
of playing changes as you develop. You improve slowly over time and as you
improve so your exercises need to be tailored to suit. Here enters the first
stage of invention. You may notice that while reading (although even if not
reading) certain exercises that they have been digested and your mind starts to
wander because it becomes boring. At this point invent an additional idea like
a change in dynamic shape, how and when to add vibrato or change the
articulation and emphasis, and this can enrich ways of hearing what you do.
Ways of hearing and listening are of course paramount to exploring how to
improve what you do. Reading exercises
gradually becomes unnecessary because you have naturally memorised and
internalised them. Once memorised you can shift and shape them to suit you
every day depending on what you need to achieve. The improvising happens when you think while
playing of changing the direction because it feels right. This instinctive
feeling gives you confidence in what you are trying to achieve. Playing scales
can feel like a real dirge but as we know they are essential for tuning, tone,
developing key sense and learning fingerings. There are millions of ways of
playing scales, the obvious being to change the patterns of articulation and
dynamic shape and of course tempo. What if you didn’t start on the tonic and
began on a different note in the scale? This would do two things. You would
learn to hear them differently and you would discover modes. You would also
really learn how they sound. This might develop playing in cycles of fifths and
here we start thinking harmonically which deepens our understanding of
modulation and harmony. You may say, but
this is not improvising per se. To which
I would retort, it’s the start of taking control of how you play and this then
determines what you play, this being the first premise of thinking freely and
improvising with your thoughts.
The next stage is to experiment
with melody and here the fun starts. You may feel you know Ab major and its
colour. If you improvise a melodic shape in this key with a beginning, middle
and end, and it could be as short or as long as you like to work effectively,
this process activates your imagination and allows you to find out what’s in
your inner musical ear. Once you start tapping into this enormous space the
possibilities of expression are infinite. This does many things. It nourishes
your instinct which in turn feeds into your confidence which then filters into
your standard repertoire whether it’s orchestral excerpts or recital pieces. You
may also very well find that you begin not to need to read the music and
gradually, step by step, start to memorise. Playing from memory is an extremely
useful tool because it makes you listen harder which will naturally improve the
way you play.
Which brings me to the first
exhortation “I can’t do that!” Well now by this stage having attempted some of
the above you can begin. In a lot of baroque sonatas there are moments with
pauses usually at the end of movements that need a little phrase from the
performer that offers their thoughts on the movement they’ve just played. This
musical comment in a lot of cases need only be a breath length. If you have
already started to play with your instinct in your practicing as described
above, this procedure is not daunting at all. In fact it can be of enormous
pleasure. To find the right phrase needs a bit of time and thought, and exploring
what it could be through improvising, is the key. It encourages you to think
about the material in the movement, to understand the style, and to achieve the
right kind of expression. This then leads into styles of ornamentation, not
only baroque, but classical. This will also inform your listening of great
players that you aspire to, doing the same thing.
The next step in improvising could
be your classical concertos that will need little cadenzas, and by this stage
you may very well have thoughts on how to modulate from key to key using
dominant and diminished sevenths, how to design a form, and how to improvise
using the classical patterns in your concerto. I have written three cadenzas for each of the movements
of the Mozart Oboe Concerto and I did this by improvising around the material
until my ear was satisfied with how they should sound.
Following on from this you may
find that you invent something that goes in a completely different direction.
You may take a theme from any piece of music and start moulding, fiddling,
playing, and improvising with it. This is the beginning of exploring your
musical mind that then empowers your musical imagination and confidence.
I’d like to return to an earlier
point I mentioned about the millions of different ways there are of playing the
same thing. In performance we take a lot of effort in preparing “the perfect”
interpretation. Yes there is a sort of ideal way of playing something, but I
believe there is no such thing as a perfect performance. Music is a living art
and in performance little things may not go in quite the direction that you
intended. This can be due to intangible things out of your control like the
light, atmosphere or certain conditions. This can be off-putting and
frustrating and there is a sort of feeling of resigning to a negative or
insincere delivery because how you wanted it to go has not happened. If on the
other hand you have internalised the music and prepared many versions that may
differ in small details of how you think it should sound then this approach is
a much more musical, enjoyable and of course daring way of performing. You can
tailor the performance to suit the moment. It also gives the music energy, spontaneity,
drive and commitment. This way of gently improvising as you go brings you much
closer to what performing is really about.
Needless to say this is now
getting very advanced and the one thing to remember is that there should always
be ample and regular time to explore all these stages. These processes cannot
be learnt quickly. It takes time and patience and can go on for the rest of
your playing life. The wonderful thing about it is that it gives you the
freedom to find out what is your artistic voice and after all, this is the
beauty of learning an instrument. It mirrors your personality and who you are.
Improvising gives your musicianship integrity by furnishing your musical mind
with tools that will enhance your listening and your performing.
MELINDA MAXWELL
published by Emerson Edition
for oboe & drone
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