2+ players. The Music Teachers’ Association of California has made an outstanding effort to bring improvisation into school curricula. We haven’t purchased them yet ($32 each), but we are very curious about their Improvisation Syllabus and Guide and Improvisation Games and Activities.

One of their ideas is to illustrate local or state history musically. The procedure is to pick a historically or geographically important topic and then decide on possible musical resources needed to invent a piece about it.

Topics about California that they suggest include dinosaurs and prehistoric animals, farming, cattle ranching, the gold rush, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Native peoples and their activities, pioneers, and many more.

Why not improvise music that depicts or evokes the history of your area? Poughkeepsie needs music, too!

While the language [of improvised speech] itself may lack the precision of an edited reply, the value lies in its freshness and authenticity. We all know what a canned lecture sounds like. Real speech (improvised speech) will always be more interesting, attention-getting, and persuasive than its scripted sister.

– Patricia Ryan Madson, Improv Wisdom

I am sitting at the dining room table of ace cellist and improviser Gil Selinger. Gil is one third of our classical improv trio, Duende, along with me on horn and Evan Mazunik on piano. We gave a concert in the city last Wednesday. You had something of an introduction to his background in the last interview; I wanted to take this chance to continue to interview Gil about all things improv.

JA: Let’s start your thoughts about the concert.

Gil: It was an interesting mix. The Duende CD ["Mosaic"] had a lot of structured arrangements. In concert we worked in a freer manner. We left it a lot more wide open. We only had one day [before the concert] to “rehearse,” so it worked well. One of the underlying premises of this Interzone series of concerts was to present not just the whole group, but also solos, duos, etc. This is what we did here: trio, horn and cello, cello and piano, solo piano, piano and horn. We also used ideas from each of us. We did different kinds of improv ‘games’. We used some audience participation. It was very successful – I was a little nervous about it – Evan and you have more experience in it. But it worked well. NY is a tricky place – there are so many different kinds of events competing for your attend. We came up with something that no one else has done – territory that no one else has done (to my knowledge) – we’re exploring new ground.

JA: How would you characterize this kind of music or improvisation? For people who don’t know what improvised classical music can sound like.

Gil: Ideally, it should sound like good music. It’s fascinating for us as musicians to make music like this; it’s a hugely different skill than re-creating music. For the audience we want them to take something away from it. I see my role as giving the audience insight into the realities of existence that can be both pleasant and unpleasant but which will ultimately leave them enriched. Improvisation is one of our main tools that we use in our creation process. I find this to be the most interesting and compelling ways to do this and that’s why I do it.

JA: Can you tell us about working with (pianist) Evan Mazunik as a duo?

Gil: Evan is a musical kindred spirit for me. We’ve spent a lot of time rehearsing, talking. When we sit down to play we can finish each other’s musical sentences. It’s an unbelievable luxury to rely on someone to understand where you are and where you’re going next. But we’ve spent a lot of time getting to that point both on and off the instrument. We have a CD – White Barn Duets – that was a fantastic recording to make in a professional studio owned by a friend of mine so that we could take as much time as we needed to record. We could record without any time pressure – a very rare luxury for a musician to be able to record like this. Usually it’s just the most successful rock band that can do that. We’re very proud of the music on it, but we have now progressed beyond what we were doing at the time. We’re looking towards making a new recording soon. Our rehearsal technique is very much about the “why” of what’s happening in the music. Why did you do this or that? Trying to understand each other’s musical choices. We also work in traditional classical forms. We base improvisation on, say, sonata form, or a collection of short movements, or a fugue. We draw from traditional classical music concepts. Lately, we’ve been working for using more tonality in our improvisations – a tricky subject for an improviser. I’m really interested in walking that line between clear tonality and open free-form playing. Working toward late Romantic styles where keys are somewhat blurred for a while. Like Mahler.

JA: Are you in other groups?

Gil: I’ve lately concentrated on fewer things, trying not to get involved in too many projects. In NYC it’s easy to do too much. I’m working with composers on solo cello pieces. I keep a connection to the downtown free improv scene – I sit in on many projects, but I’m not a regular member. I’m also involved teaching and playing Soundpainting and composing. I’m also working a book on compositional approach to classical improvisation. I’m in a transitional stage right now.

JA: What are your thoughts on the future?

Gil: I hope that this budding movement in this kind of improv continues to grow and that more and more musicians start creating rather than just re-creating. It seems that more young musicians coming out of school or more interested in this. It makes me more optimistic for the future of classical music. The old way of doing things in classical music is just not making it – it is quite stale. There needs to be an evolution of performers and composers in this direcitons and I am looking forward to being part of it.

Duende is an unusual trio: horn, cello, and piano, made up of me, Gil Selinger, and Evan Mazunik. We made a terrific CD (“Mosaic“) some years back (available from www.msrcd.com) where we took medieval and Renaissance music and used it as source material for improvisation. It came about thusly: Evan and I had been working together as a duo for about four years at the University of Iowa, giving improv workshops, concerts, and we made a CD (“Repercussions” – available from www.cdbaby.com). Then Evan left school and moved to New York, where he met improvising cellist Gil Selinger. Evan and I had already worked up some of this early music repertoire during a creative residency we spent at The Centrum (in Port Townsend, WA, on the grounds where they filmed “Officer and a Gentleman” with Richard Gere and Debra Winger). Gil brought some ideas and we had the material for “Mosaic.”

Well, those two went back to NYC, and, although I still worked with Evan doing concerts and workshops now and then, Duende was on ice.

Until this week. The band is back together! I flew into the Big Apple yesterday. We had a sort of “rehearsal” today, where we got to play together and tentatively set up what we will do at the concert tomorrow night. We’re going to do one number from “Mosaic”, – Esta Montaña Enfrente – a medieval Spanish Sephardic tune, but we’re doing it quite different from the CD version (surprise!). We’re also doing a version of my “September Elegy”, which was originally written about 9/11 for Natural horn in Eb and piano; we’re adding cello and changing a few things. Gil’s expressive cello works wonderfully on this moving piece.

The concert will be at the:

WMP Concert Hall
31 East 28th Street
Between Park Ave. and Madison Ave.
NY, NY

Start time: 7:30 pm. Join us if you’re in the neighborhood!

It’s been great hanging out with Evan and Gil. We talk nonstop about improv, music education, and a hundred other things. I am filling giant mental bins with ideas and inspiration. I thought it would be good to harness some of this for the blog. I thought that it would be good to improvise a running interview with them and pass it on to you. The interview below is a bit loose; I asked some questions, they talked and I typed as fast as I could on the laptop to transcribe as much as possible. Note that these are not verbatim transcriptions – it’s just what I was able to get down; I couldn’t get it all. But at least the gist of it for your consumption. I will try to add more in coming days (I fly back next Monday).

Jeff: How did you start improvising?

Gil: By accident. It was a combination of forces. One was a sense that I just wanted to see what kind of different sounds I could come up with.  I wanted to explore the instrument. I was very young. I was often dissatisfied with the pieces I was playing [in the beginner method books, etc]. I was searching for the note my ear wanted rather than the note that was written. It led me to extrapolating. There was also a laziness factor. I might not have practiced it [the written pieces], enough so I came up with an alternate version that I could play better. I did this early on.

Evan: I started on Suzuki piano. Suzuki has an emphasis on oral training. I had cassette tapes of the repertoire I was supposed to learn. I listened to the music I should play by ear, but I imagined a story to go along with the music (program music!) In my earliest musical memories I was comfortable playing by ear. But it was not until I was playing trumpet in junior high that I started really improvising – I wanted to sound like Clifford Brown and Miles Davis. I transcribed them and realized that I like to make up my own music. Braces killed my trumpet career. I had a lot of facilty on piano an applied it to piano. I started learning Thelonius Monk, and started playing with garage bands. It wasn’t until college that I found out that all my heros, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin – were all master improvisers! No one ever told me that you can improvise in classical music! Then everything was fair game. It was actually other instruments that got me into improvising. In high school my choir teacher invited Ken Medema, blind pianist, singer, songwriter. In the middle of the concert he would ask for suggestions from the audience and create pieces, on piano, even

Hank Roberts

Gil: it took me a long time to think of myself as an improviser. I was just a classical cellist who %&@#$!s around on the cello. I saw Hank Roberts at Ithaca – a jazz cellist soloing on the cello and singing at the same time. It blew my mind. He played with Tim Burns and Bill Frizzell. That was it. That popped the doors wide open on improv. Up until then it was just something I did with friends, but not something I worked on. Normal classical work was scales and arpeggios and concertos. I started having lessons with him 3X a week for a couple years. Very laid bck lessons.  He had studied with Janos Starker at Indiana. Didn’t like classical cello. Then with Gary Burton at at Berklee. I brought in classical stuff and he showed me how to improvise over it – chord structure, playing over changes. He had a pizzicato technique where he could sound like a bass and guitar at the same time. We worked on jazz, third stream, avant garde. It wasn’t the direction I wanted to go, but I stuck with it. I got Band in a Box [accompaniment software program]. I started composing with it. I started playing with musicians around town. I continued studying for many years, searching for technical mastery and musical advancement.

J: When did you get into Soundpainting?

G: In 1998 at the New Directions Cello Festival. It was an orchestra of cellos – 50  cellists! Walter Thompson [inventor of Soundpainting] came and did a workshop. After that I went to him and asked to join his summer residency at Woodstock. We worked together a lot, made CDs (Haydn Cello Concerto).

E: I was at the library and read an article on Walter Thompson – Sara Weaver interviewd him for Jazz Changes magazine. The article changed my life. This is what I wanted to do! I wrote Sara an email to get Walter’s contact info. I wrote him. And he called me up in my dorm room! Asked me all about what I was interested in. I was taken aback how he reached out to me. He was going to be in Ann Arbor over spring break. So I took a 14 hour bus ride to Ann Arbor and sat in on his workshop. It was a conducting workshop. There was jazz stuff. Walter got up and scanned [Soundpainting gesture - move arm over the group and people respond with improv] the group and my jaw dropped. He invited me to come out to a workshop at Woodstock, New York in the summer. That was the summer of 2000 – I spent a month there learning Soundpainting. It was all movement-based – which was not what I wanted to do – no instrument. But I stuck it out and had some amazing experiences. It was a magical month. It was so invigorating and exhausting. I could feel my brain throbbing in my skull. I was 20 years old. Workshop all day, jamming all night. Total immersion. At week 3 my body shut down with complete exhaustion – I was in bed for two days. Then I was back at it. I was completely changed by it.

When I got back to Iowa I started a Soundpainting group, Gamut. Started small – sometimes it was only me. But I kept at it and the group grew. We took the group to Ann Arbor to work with Sara’s group and record with them. Gamut made a CD, too, Countermeasures (there may be 5 left in existence). I kept up the group, then moved to NYC in 2005. Walter had started up the New York Soundpainting Orchestra that year. I started working as his assistant. I met several people I wanted to work with. In 2006 I started my own Soundpainting Orch, ZAHA and we started giving shows. First show: Addtract. Theme of human bowling. I stood at one end on a box. Everyone was standing in a diamond like tenpins. I made a gesture and they would fall (wihtout instruments). We did some guerilla performances; we did our first CD in 2007. We did a tour last spring. The “Sedge and the Bee” was our last, most recent CD.

JA: What do you see for Soundpainting in the future?

Evan: It’s become a language that people are developing and adding to. It’s fascinating to watch it grow and change. SP or something like it is going to revolutionize how music is taught.

I am a classical musician. Classical musicians are acutely concerned with pitch. Don’t miss a note! Don’t make a mistake! Performing classical music is a stressful occupation because the notes are prescribed, already known and we spend huge amounts of time being able to deliver those notes. And – if we know what’s good for us – we spend a lot of time trying to sweet talk our nervous and endocrine systems through this fight or flight experience. Although we’ve all had times when it was tremendous fun and/or “flow”, the most common experience of good feelings is afterwards – glad that’s over! Shirt is soaked – we wonder how can you sit in a chair, hardly moving, and be drenched?

Then we wander over to a jazz club to celebrate having survived another concert. While we are sipping some Bavarian Nerve Tonic, we watch the jazzers and perhaps (more likely: not) think: these guys are playing ridiculously hard stuff. They are totally into it, technically and musically. And they seem completely calm as they deliver this astounding, imaginative stuff. What are we missing?

The answer to that is both very short and very long. The short answer is: creativity. Having something to say about what we say musically. Creation and Re-creation. They’re not mutually exclusive, as much as conventional music wisdom would like us to believe. They’re both good, two halves of our musical selves.

The long answer has a lot to do with music education. Most current music education starting almost right away, is based on some very deep assumptions:

1. Knowledge is a prerequisite to the experience and understanding of music.

2. Music that can notated is superior to music that is purely aural (i.e. not notated or notated exactly).

3. To make music, you may only recreate music that someone else has created.

4. To make music with others, you need to be directed by someone with specialized education in music.

5. To learn an instrument, you need a book that tells you (in notation + text) exact what you may play. You will be graded on how well you do it. Mistakes (missed pitches are to be avoid at all costs).

Boil it down: what’s missing is the chance to learn by trying stuff out. Experimenting. Exploring. Listening. Imitating. Having a mentor say, “Hey, try some of this and see what happens.” Or: I’ll play a couple notes. You play them back to me. Okay, now your turn.” Stuff like that.

Making up stuff is very easy for absolute beginners. The longer players are kept away from  expressing themselves or exploring, the harder it gets, like learning a foreign language.

By the time they get to university age students (music and otherwise) have long since had a creative lobotomy. They want to be told the answer to memorize and spit back and gimme my A and what’s next? Having to search on their own for the answers is terrifying. I see only a tiny percentage of the school of music in my improv class, and these are the brave ones who dare to take the class. And they are still scared (at first. After a week or so, it’s hard to get them to stop playing).

The best way for anyone to start creating music at any age is with rhythm. Pitch problem solved! No pitches! Thinking exclusively rhythmically is pretty unfamiliar to most, so it’s a good idea to work on some domain skills first, like learning to tap/slap/rap palms on your lap in steady 8ths. Then add accents. Duple. Triple. Odd meter. Then (always alternating hands), try adding some basic rhythms: bom tiddy bom tiddy = Long Short Short = LSS. Also: SSL and SLS.

Then: take a solo, using spontaneous combinations of accents and rhythms. Also add triplets. Then, graduate from slapping your lap to a percussion instrument, even if homemade (e.g. spoons and bowl). See if you can make up stuff for 5 minutes straight! Even better: get together with one or two others and make it rhythmic chamber music. You will inspire each other. Trade ideas! Call and response! Try new timbres (i.e. anything you can hit with your spoon). Watch the video (or go to YouTube and watch Stomp) and gather ideas and inspiration. Rhythm is our native musical language, deeply encoded in our DNA. We should have all been issued little drums at birth – after all, we just got done grooving to the heartbeat of our mothers for 9 months. No wonder babies cry – someone took away the rhythm track! Dancing is just feeling rhythm in the whole body. The best way to play any piece of music is to dance it. OK, you might have to be a little subtle about it, but instead of being frozen in place as you battle the pitches, gently move and sway. Dance the tune, don’t battle against it. Pitch hunting doesn’t have to mean become a statue. On the contrary, to really make – feel! – music, you have to ‘dance’ it. Rhythm is the mother of all. Feel it, go with it. You may never do any or much improvising on your instrument if you are the average classical player, but you can and should treat yourself to as much rhythm making as you can work in. The good news is that 1) it’s really fun 2) it helps what you do on the instrument and 3) you can create rhythms anywhere, any time, with anything that’s laying around.

Watch this:

Improvisation (Photo credit: Dave Kleinschmidt)

[Improvisation] training will develop the skills that separate a player who is outstanding from one who is merely good. Some musicians argue that there is no real need for improvisation training in the world of today’s classical musician, since most players are not called upon to improvise in a performance setting… Then again, most musicians don’t have to sight-sing every day, but is still required in most colleges and conservatories because we know that the learning process involved in this study makes out students better musicians.

–Nicole M. Brockmann, From Sight to Sound: Improvisational Games for Classical Musicians

The last concert of the improv class was a hoot, as they all are. Our amazing bassoonist (she of the intergalactic extended techniques) was absent (off taking a professional audition), but we were helped out by Laura G. (viola, voice), and Jim S. (trumpet & 39 mutes). We started off with everyone scattered around the hall. Alone on stage, I started a rhythm with brushes on a djembe. Then everyone came in antiphonally on a Coplandesque-wide-open-spaces sounding improv in (ca.) F. After a while, they moved slowly to the stage, finishing the piece in their chairs in a semi-circle in the middle of the stage. Then everyone moved (one by one) to the piano, segueing into the next part of the piece: everyone experimenting with extended techniques in the open grand piano just behind the chairs. Interesting sounds! After a while, the pianist (Matt) took over on the piano (using the ivories this time), very sparse, soft. Everyone else drifted back to their chairs, and accompanied Matt’s solo with various small percussion instruments. Then everyone gradually switched back to their instruments and finished with the same Coplandy-sounding music that began the concert.

Improv piece #2 was entitled “Everyday Suite” – we took suggestions for movements on everyday things. The three movements were 1. Breakfast (brass alone) 2. Diapers (flute, viola, piano) and 3. Traffic (everyone). Great fun. (The concert was recorded; I may post the recordings of some of the pieces, so you may get to hear this and others).

#3: A deconstruction of the melody and rhythms of “London Bridge Is Falling Down”

#4: Do It Yourself Opera

Solo: Don Giovanni (trumpet), the Cad, sits alone in a bar recalling his amorous conquests. The bartender (piano) listens and comments.

Solo/Duet/Trio: Woman Scorned (flute), i.e. Donna Elvira sits alone at the far other end of the bar, lamenting the behavior of the Cad. She is joined by Violetta (viola). Bartender listens and comments. Later, Don Giovanni shows up and has to sweet talk them into liking him again.

Duet: Brunnhilde (tuba) and Carmen (horn) sing a duet: “Who Needs Men?”

Duet: Lucia di Coralville (viola) does a Mad Scene. The Phantom of the Opera (trumpet) interrupts and tries to talk her out of it.

Duet: The Queen of the Night (flute) and Sweeney Todd (horn) complain about how hard it is to raise kids today.

Ensemble finale: Everyone!

All in all, great fun.

I may post the recordings of some of these – stay tuned!

(Photo credit: LibraryatNight)

You learn music by always playing what is given to you. But how do you learn to be an artist of you don’t practice that aspect of making up your own music?

–Noam Sivan of the Curtis Institute of Music – from the article “Classical Musicians Learn to Improvise” in the Wall Street Journal by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

1 player. Choose a simple familiar tune. Yankee Doodle, for instance. Figure out the notes by ear. Play it through again and again. Each time through, change something about it. Make it a small change. What you are doing is not so much making variations of the tune (which you are, for a while), but rather you are very gradually transforming the tune into something else, into a new tune. Make the tune very simple and familiar and the changes small so that you can remember what you did the last time through and change it only slightly each time. But keep it up; after a while the tune should be utterly transformed.

Ideas: Dynamics. Articulation. A note here and there. Rhythms (note values). Register. Graces notes. Turns. Glissandos. Fill in leaps. Add sharps and flats. Style. Add rests. Make major minor and vice-versa. Add extended techniques. See how long you can keep this up, either times through or time (duration). Make a note of it. Try again every day for a week. Send me an email with your best time.

Repeat in a new key.

Repeat with a new tune.

Add a partner now and then.

Keep doing this for many years.