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Improvisation and Composition
Ian Carr
Brunel Interfaces Conference 2.12.2000
In 1959, Gunther Schuller wrote: `The art of improvisation, once the backbone
of all music-making, had died out in the early part of the 19th century.’ He was
referring specifically to Europe, but of course elsewhere in the world – India,
Africa, South America, Eastern Europe and Asia – it remained a prime source
of music-making, because improvisation is a natural human activity, not only
in music but also in life. In the 1970s, I was asked to conduct a weekend
workshop at a music college in the West Country. The students were in their
late teens or early 20s, and they assembled in a room accompanied by the
college Principal. After talking to the students for some minutes, I turned to
the Principal and said, "But they’ve never ever improvised," and he replied, "I
tell them not to improvise until they learn to read." This unwisdom shocked me
and I asked him, "Did you refrain from talking until you learned to read?" His
jaw dropped in sudden realisation of the unnaturalness. Speech is a form of
improvisation and we make sounds before we make words, words before
phrases and phrases before sentences. These improvisational oral and aural
processes also suit music, which is the invisible art perceived only through the
ear. The text of a novel or play is the literature, but the score of a symphony
or song is not the music. Keith Jarrett once said, "music is more than the
notes, more than the spaces between the notes, and more than anything
anyone can write on paper, no matter what notation they use." Yet some
classical musicians, including the late Norman Del Mar, have believed that if
music isn’t written down, it’s not worth serious consideration.
In the 20th century, the art of improvisation was reinstated by jazz musicians
as a major force in music-making. Like Mozart, Bach, Handel and Beethoven,
jazz musicians are music-makers who improvise, compose and are active
performers. Mozart had the habit of improvising something for the town in
which his composed music was being performed, and when, during the last
century, Keith Jarrett toured performing Mozart piano concertos under the
baton of Christopher Hogwood, the latter eventually managed to persuade
him to improvise a 20 minute piece for each venue. The advent of recording
afforded the possible aural permanence of both improvised and precomposed
music, thus levelling their importance as durable art.
In fact the two activities are closely connected. Improvisation, at its best, is
composition in motion with all the fittingness and inevitability of
precomposition, and composition at its best has something of the immediacy
and dynamism of improvisation. Jarrett, who ranks with the greatest
improvisers, has lamented the fact that improvisation is often regarded as "anoff-the-top-of-your-head, pattern-related, non-intellectual thing. Whereas in
reality, with consciousness, improvisation is a much deeper tapping of
something than any other process." I would add that improvisation can be one
of the most intense forms of self-examination and discovery, though
paradoxically, it only reaches that state when the musician is aware only of
the emerging music and is oblivious of himself or herself.
I gave three jazz examples of improvisation reaching the level of composition
in motion. First was Miles Davis's solo on "So What" from the 1959 album
Kind of Blue. Second was Louis Armstrong's performance of "West End
Blues," recorded on June 28th 1928. Armstrong's majestic solo trumpet
introduction, was improvised, and became a permanent fixture, and his
dramatic final chorus in which he sustains a high trumpet C for four bars, then
produces a series of cascading phrases, became the permanent last chorus.
Third was Armstrong's November 1931 recording of Hoagy Carmichael's "Up
a Lazy River", in which Armstrong's scat vocal is so brilliant chromatically,
rhythmically and harmonically, that it perfectly anticipates bebop by some
eleven years. When the artist surprises himself, he is indeed breaking new
ground, and after Armstrong's final ecstatic vocal break, he laughs and
intones "you dawg!" Similarly, when he received the pressings of "West End
Blues", he and pianist Earl Hines were so astonished by the power and subtle
emotional resonance of their accomplishment that they listened to the 2
minutes 17 seconds piece over and over again for almost two hours.
I also included two classical examples of composition so dynamic that it
seemed improvised. The first was the final movement of Beethoven's
Razumovsky Quartet opus 59 number 3. This anticipated Gershwin's "I Got
Rhythm" with dazzling contrapuntal lines and alternating either rising or
cyclical underlying harmony notes. The second example was the 4th
movement of Milhaud's "La Creation Du Monde", composed in 1923 and still
sounding contemporary today. "La Creation" is one of the finest jazz-inspired
classical works and the 4th movement consists largely of a repeated 4-bar
chromatically descending harmonic sequence, over which Milhaud's
"improvised" lines are distributed between trumpet, trombone, clarinet, oboe,
bassoon French horn and alto saxophone, and there are dynamic drum
rhythms to boot.