Why Don't Classical Musicians Improvise?

When you think about musical improvisation, the first thing that comes to mind may be jazz or blues, but the practice of improvisation is actually part of many musical traditions around the world. As a

classical

ly trained musician, I've been personally working on developing my improvisation skills over the past few years, as you can see in these charts detailing how I spend my practice hours today. Classical

musicians

are known for playing music exactly as it is written in the sheet music note, but this was not always the case. This may surprise you. but from the Middle Ages until about the end of the 19th century, improvisation was actually a big part of musical performance and training, so why did

classical

musicians

stop learning to

improvise

in classical music?

Improvisation dates back to the Middle Ages, soloists would add spontaneous embellishments to familiar ones. The melodies and sheet music provided served as the skeleton of the melody upon which the musicians would add their own variations. An example of melodic variation today could be found at a sporting event where national anthem singers would usually add variations and fills while keeping the melody and lyrics still recognizable overdoing it with embellishments, however it is never ideal because it can easily lead to to an unpleasant interpretation. Classical musicians also

improvise

accompaniments for melodies. In fact, the first record of improvisation in Western music comes from 9th century writings detailing how to add countermelodies to Gregorian. chants later during the Baroque era, this type of improvised accompaniment became what is called basso continuo.

They use the type of musical notation called figured bass that provides a bass line along with symbols that indicate which intervals to use chord suggestions and voicing types for a musician. Let's say a keyboardist would take this information and improvise with and over the bass line. . Probably the best-known example of improvisation in classical music is the cadenza. If you're playing a Mozart concerto in the past, towards the end, there's always a point where the harmony peaks and then everyone stops, the pianist or whatever instrument, the instrumentalists will solo basically over the themes of the main parts and traditionally that was all improvised, yeah that was your thing, maybe you would sew if you weren't older, that's the orchestra. the connector is fine, okay, the question is this improvised right here, yeah, sure, and then you go, but maybe try to make it smarter.

I don't know, maybe maybe you don't get it right every time you play something really cool. I just know how I don't know how to kill some solos continue the tradition of improvising their own cadences, including pianist Gabriella Montero and Robert Leaven Leavens tells us that something spontaneous sounds different from something that is not and the audience benefits from that in a performance Every time I've played improvised cadenzas, the audience goes very quiet for the first time in most of their lives, they're at a classical concert where they don't know what's going to happen next. I feel like, as a classical musician, I should be able to do that.

Say yes, I can improvise cadences. You say it's the lost art because they used to do it all the time, but now people just play cadences that are already written down. I understood the beam. They're all good, Barney themes, oh wow. Bonnie's main theme, no, no, you and then the orchestra, my goal, why do you think improvisation disappeared from classical music when they were the best edition of the unit? Perhaps this is partly the reason why all of these composers wrote their own versions of the cadenzas they would write. and I think in the past it was to facilitate and help performers who were just minor improvisers, so they wanted you to know that they wanted the cadenza to be good, so they wrote one or several and then, as they exist, the performers would just hang on Let's get to that and learn that also during the 19th century the Industrial Revolution created the middle class and now more people with disposable income were interested in musical performance and education rather than hiring professional musicians.

Middle class households can now buy their own instruments and play. themselves too the growth of published sheet music gave more people access to classical music the priorities of many classical music performances recordings concerts I think it's based on a certain kind of rigid exactness that is intimidating and I think that wasn't always the case when you play a piece of baroque music, even the trills, which must be very spontaneous, everyone plays them like that, so everyone will do it, but where it is in the past, I feel like maybe they would do it or in the 20th century too. brought advances in recording technology now musical performances can be captured and played forever and this new reality led to the pursuit of perfection that inevitably involves less spontaneity and fewer risks.

Recordings of famous works by composers such as Mozart and Beethoven were canonized as a museum. music with less demand for improvised performances or, as Professor Robin Moore says, spontaneous innovations cannot occur in a music that aims to be more a replica of 1790 than a musical event of today. Personally, I feel that improvisation has been returning to The role of classical music thanks to many modern composers and this has certainly influenced me, as well as looking towards other genres such as jazz, flamenco and folk music, which still encompass many forms of improvisation. I think improvisation is a very valuable and very relevant practice for musical creation. listening to and experiencing music in a very spontaneous and creative way for me it's been very rewarding learning how to improvise in these different styles trying to improvise with the band doing improvisation experiments with irregular beats and things like that so I really hope to see put more emphasis on Improvisation as a practice in formal and informal music education.

If I had to give myself some advice, I would say that before you do anything else, find friends to explore this with and friends who can help guide you and play. Because I spent a lot of time alone at the piano trying to understand certain concepts about improvisation in general, but as soon as I started playing with other people, our improvisation with Adam wanted to be one of them opened up a different perspective for me, a different perspective. type of understanding about all this I have my improvisation formula there is inspiration there is imitation and then there is recreation inspiration is what we are inspired by is the template what catches our attention is what gives us that creative feeling as my second step It's imitation, learning exactly what that template is, learning how to play that template, backwards, forwards, learning it like the back of your hand, okay, this is where the skill part of recreation comes in, the most important step, recreate, add your flavor to it, but those are the I like the formula of a formula that I use to improvise all the time.

Thank you very much for watching and if you want to see more videos, don't forget to subscribe.