Category Archive

Piano Improvisation

Church of St Andrew and St Mary, Grantchester, 2/12/08

A cold winter afternoon, sunny, after rain. My work finished for this term, so took the opportunity to cycle out around Grantchester, over the meadows. Got to the Church, walked around, soaking in the atmosphere or whatever they say. Trying to get a feel of/for the place. Went inside, walked around the church for five minutes or so, looking at details – though not details as in a guided tour sort of examination, but things that struck me – sunlight reflected through stained glass onto a wall, the play of light in areas of bright white and shadow at various different parts of the church. There was a piano there, next to a stained-glass window – a digital piano, i.e. without strings/hammers, but with proper weighted keys and a good sound. I plugged it in, sat down, and played for just over 20 minutes (no longer because my fingers got so cold in the church).

Was it a ‘free improvisation’? Methodologically, it was completely improvised, with no prior working out of figures. Though one motif threads through the whole piece, particularly in the first ten minutes, this is one I came across improvisationally – it happened to be constructed from the first combination of notes I played. But the fact that the piece works on repetition, in a ‘minimalist’ way (as well as breaking up the constancy of flow through much use of silence), would seem to prevent the sort of complete freedom that ‘free improv’ aims for (with qualifications)? So does that mean that the improv become ‘free’ only when it moves away from repetitions of figures to scampering dissonance? This was a considered move – but so was everything. Yet at the same time things emerge you wouldn’t expect. Free improv is not abdicating control, yet at the same time it is, or at least, things do happen which you can’t quite control even though it is you playing the music – and that’s not to say that you get ‘possessed by some spirit force’ or any of that bullshit.

Or maybe that’s just what happens in all improvisation, free or not – it allows you to go to places you wouldn’t have gone playing entirely composed music. After all, the idea of composed/written music as opposed to music passed on by oral tradition (song) or communal improvisation (the West African drum choir) is a specifically western idea only properly emerging over the last five hundred years or so. And so to take it as the ‘normal’ for music is an incredibly limiting view. In that sense, improvisation is far more ‘natural’, not an aberration.

That doesn’t take away the problem of what makes an improvisation ‘free’, however – what seperates ‘free improv’ from mere ‘jamming’. We can say that the avoidance of too many key centres and stiff chords, obvious harmonic progressions helps – though of course many improvisers use tonality, often as part of an anarchic cut-up (Mengelberg, Beresford), whereas the music of Derek Bailey is a lot ‘purer’ in its abstraction and unpredictable harmonic workings. The ‘minimalist’ style (Charlemagne Palestine, La Monte Young, Terry Riley) obviously has a far more fixed harmonic base, often centred around the idea of a drone, or a drone-like repeated figure. But through this unpredictable things happen, overtones start to get teased out of the original sound, perceptions change. Five minutes after the start, you’re playing something quite different, but it’s evolved in such a way that you didn’t notice the changeover. That makes structure more malleable. So it works to similar ends as more purely free improv, perhaps.

David Grundy

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