Turns Out My Improvisation is Composition After All

For nearly two decades now I have been campaigning for the virtues of improvisation. Actually, I have been doing it most of my career, but since 1998 I have been putting my music where my mouth is and turning out albums of solo piano improvisation.

It is important to me that my music is created spontaneously, but for many others, it is of no consequence. Many musicians misunderstand what improvisation is, especially at the compositional level. Even such a creative icon as Miles Davis was quoted as saying he had “no idea” what Keith Jarrett was doing when he performed his solo improvisations. I have heard people say improvisation is “real-time composition” or, one of my favorites, “composition in motion,” but this is not really the case. Many people have said to me, “Well, at some point, all composition is improvisation.” Unfortunately, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Composition is about ideas. It is about the methodical construction of music directly from those ideas, whether the ideas are musical or non-musical. Sometimes the ideas are subtle and seemingly unimportant, sometimes they are the whole point of the music. The ideas can be motivic or harmonic, or they can be philosophical. They can be a self-driven process, or they can follow a script, film, play, or dance. They can be about social comment or be completely introverted. Or they can be all of the above. And all of these ideas guide the choice of musical material, how it is developed, and what happens to it. Emotion and expression come into play, of course, but they are nearly always part of the overall plan. Composers develop musical plans, structural plans, and emotional plans. It is the same with writing a book or creating a movie, it is about “constructing” a work of art. Naturally, there are many moments of inspiration, some of them you never hear, but mostly the process falls into the category of Edison’s “one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

But it also turns out that improvisation is difficult to define and almost impossible to discern. If a musician is not playing from music, he could be playing from memory, or he could be playing by ear. Even if he is improvising, how much of what he is doing is spontaneous and how much is planned or familiar. It is impossible to tell. I’ve heard that Louis Armstrong worked out and practiced his solos in advance. I have played with several jazz soloists who played the same or nearly the same solo every night. I’ve talked with other musicians who have said that even during free-improvisation sets, the group will, over time, revert to those things that have worked before. This was true for me as well when I tried to do free improvisation gigs early in my career. So the only real way to tell whether a performer is improvising and truly creating new music on the spot is to ask him!

Most people consider improvisation to be a technique of performance. Often the standard by which to judge the quality of an improvisation is to decide to what extent the music does not sound improvised. But this means that the improvisation must sound “familiar,” which has a tendency to be rather inhibiting. Many suggest that improvisation is merely “stream of consciousness,” and some I have heard certainly is. But good improvisation is no more stream-of-consciousness than meditation is sleeping. Improvisation takes intense concentration and focus.

Improvisation differs from composition in that it is spontaneous. It is not “about spontaneity” (an idea); it is truly spontaneous. So what difference does that make? Primarily it means that you are listening to an “experience” instead of a presentation. It means that the focus and depth of the music is happening right now, and has not been reflected upon, perfected, and polished. This much is clear enough, but how does that make the music itself different? I had only a partial idea until I started transcribing my improvisations many years ago. Improvisation, indeed, handles the music differently. Instead of the music being “deduced” from another musical idea, it evolves within itself. It uses material that is actually played rather than referring back to material that was chosen beforehand. The focus of the music changes as the music evolves. The improviser “discovers” his or her material, and memory is not always perfect. Ideas, musical or otherwise, are induced and synthesized from the actual music itself. This suggests a different philosophical concept of time, cause and effect, specifics, and abstracts, and it also suggests the idea that change, relation, and juxtaposition is more fundamental than any abstract idea. As a performer, improvisation appeals to me primarily as a vehicle for expression. Music that is conceived in real time is as honest as it gets.

In the sample below, (“Place of the Butterflies”, from my album Night Drift) listen to how each musical phrase draws upon the previous phrase and feeds the one that follows. In Japan, there is a form of oral poetry called “linked verse” in which new stanzas of poetry (such as haiku) are linked to the last stanza in some way.

Though how my music is created is very important to me, it does not mean that I am haphazard or casual about how I treat it. Though every single note is spontaneously conceived, that does not stop me from editing the MIDI files or adapting them to different piano samples. I don’t use the same sounds while recording that I do when I am mastering so I must adapt my MIDI files to the samples and to the response of my keyboard. But I not only edit for my equipment and software, I edit to make sure the music is exactly what I want. I am a composer, and this is my only shot at the material. This has involved me making two (or more) shorter pieces out of one longer one, starting at a more interesting spot than I did originally, or even making cuts within a take (cutting 10 seconds can make a world of difference). Though these techniques are all common in both classical and jazz recordings, I have drawn heat from many improvisation purists for using them. To me, it is not about the performance, it is about the music. But I have finally decided that instead of trying to change the world, maybe I should just try to get people to listen to the music for what it is, and not for how it was conceived. So I no longer am going to call my music improvisation.

The final tipping point in my decision came not from the improvisation or jazz world, but from Classical composition. New Classical Music now readily accepts music that only exists as a recording. Many composers put out recordings with electronics, samples, field recordings or samples from other composers, real world sounds, etc. Some composers write site-specific works, even site-specific operas, and the imagination for what is included in music these days is vast. Improvisation in New Classical Music, with certain limitations, has become rather commonplace. My concern about the acceptability of my piano improvisation within this genre has become almost silly.

I mentioned before that I have transcribed my improvisations and performed them live. I have also transcribed and adapted them for other instruments, including orchestra. At that point, these works can no longer be considered improvisations by any stretch of the imagination. I have also come across other works that have been conceived as strictly for recording but have also since been adapted for live performance. One of my favorites is Steve Reich’s Violin Phase (1967), which was originally done with two tape recorders playing the same violin melody on two slightly different length tape loops, but the piece has been adapted and is now often done live. Here are two versions, one done solo with a computer Steve Reich, Violin Phase (solo violin with computer), and a second done with four solo violins Steve Reich, Violin Phase (four solo violins).

Disposable Music

Improvisation has a disposability problem. Our (Western) civilization values longevity in general, and the art world is no exception. I sat on the Phoenix Arts Commission for a while in the 1990’s, which administers the city’s public art program. I made several attempts at convincing the other commissioners to consider commissioning music or another performing art as part of the public art program, but they could not get over the fact that after a single performance, the work’s visibility and association with the capital expenditure would vanish. A work of visual art is solid, always at the site, and a constant reminder of the commission’s insight. I never asked them about improvisation, but I am pretty sure it would have not received much more than a chuckle.

Because improvisation is impermanent, some people have a lot of trouble taking it seriously.

Because improvisation is impermanent, some people have a lot of trouble taking it seriously. Nobody carefully unwraps their candy bar because they are going to throw the packaging away, no matter how wasteful they think it is. We kick the tires and slam the doors when picking out a used car, but we don’t do that when calling a cab. The impermanence of improvisation bothered me for a while. I felt I had to turn my improvisations into written music for them to command the respect I wished them to have. I remember once entering a transcribed improvisation into a composition contest. When I received written comments from the judges afterward, I found that one judge had written, “It sounds like an improvisation!” I was a little unnerved.

Though I am a child of the 1960’s, I didn’t learn about Buddhism and Taoism until I was in my forties. I had returned to graduate school during shaky times in the symphony business, and was taking Composition lessons from Chinary Ung. He is a native of Cambodia with a Buddhist background, and I was having trouble communicating with him because we had different ideas about fundamental concepts such as creativity. To remedy this, I began reading about Buddhist, Zen, and Taoist philosophy and discovered an entirely different attitude about spontaneity and impermanence, not to mention desire, time, concentration, and ability. I knew that I was not the first Western artist to discover these ideas, but it opened up a whole dimension to many artistic movements I had not previously understood or paid much attention to.

Impermanence, being a tenet of Buddhism, is one of the fundamental aesthetics of Asian art. Spontaneity is more important to Zen and Taoism, but is a staple of their art as well. The Japanese, in particular, have a special eye for spontaneity in poetry and visual art that I can’t say I fully understand. But as a musician, especially one who improvises, I do understand the magic of moments of inspiration, even in written music. In a sense, my attraction to music has always been about those magical moments. Though knowledge of music has enhanced some of these moments, it is their emotional content that drew me to music in the first place.

Eastern religious philosophy started to appear regularly in Western art in the middle of the last century, and has flowered in my lifetime. Impermanence in visual art such as ice or sand sculpture, moving or living artworks, not to mention movements such as Performance Art, have become rather commonplace. Improvisation in dance and drama, as well as music, is common and now rather widely respected. But still, it is the existence of photography and audio/video recording that has allowed these arts to flourish. The old adage, “If a tree falls in forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” is very real when it comes to impermanent art forms. Without audio and video their impermanence would be lost as well!

When I perform, it is generally for Classical audiences. I had an audience member ask me once, “Could you play that piece again?” I told her I could improvise a different piece, but not that one. “Hmmph,” she said. I asked if that was good or bad; she said, “I don’t know.”

The ability to improvise has always been considered a performance skill. There is no doubt that there is skill involved beyond the ability to play the instrument in the first place. However, my interest in improvisation has always been as a compositional technique. I had a long back-and-forth with a good composer once when he asked me if I was really improvising. He said that the shape of my pieces was always so good that he couldn’t imagine that happening without planning. I told him that this was one of the mysteries of improvising; the overall shape was not only intuitive, but also subconscious. I suspect being a Classical musician for fifty years has something to do with it though. I told him that the trick was to trust my urge to end when it felt right. There was no preplanning, and it didn’t always happen but that was all I could tell him. Different parts of a piece feel different, and when it is time to end, it’s time to end.

Using improvisation as a composition technique comes with several complications, however. Though some improvisers like to work with given motives or even tunes (creating improvisations on something else), I always start from scratch and “discover” the musical material I am using. But things happen. Sometimes I don’t remember the material very well or transform it, sometimes I get distracted and forget it completely, sometimes I am remembering musical material from some other improvisation, sometimes I have even found myself playing parts of McDowell’s “To A Wild Rose”, or Barber’s “Violin Concerto” or some other piece. But all this is part of improvisation. When it is going well, I seem to be playing from one phrase to another, either drawing from or reacting to the last phrase. There is focus, but not planning. I end up where I end up.

Though not always, a composer can spend months or even years finishing their pieces. It is difficult to convince somebody that the quality of an improvisation could be as good as that of a composer spending so much time on it. To me, the quality of spontaneously generated art is different than that of deliberately created art. Music, drama, dance, or literature that is created piece by piece acquires the quality gained by continuous reflection. The creator goes over and over the work until it has reached a level of completeness that he or she feels comfortable with.

Quality in spontaneous creation is gained through depth of experience.

Quality in spontaneous creation is gained through depth of experience. How strong is the focus and concentration? How honest is the expressive content? Is their imagination engaged and taking chances or is it just routine? Do they take advantage of discovered material or just pass through them? These are the kinds of aesthetic questions that need to be addressed with spontaneous art. I can’t say that improvisation takes more concentration than composition. Working on a piece for hours and hours, keeping several different things in mind can become almost hypnotic if not meditative. But I can say that the concentration has a different type of intensity. Both take serious artistic effort, and need to be taken equally seriously.

Classical Music is a Visual Art

By contemporary marketing standards, both Classical Music and Jazz are considered genres or styles. The number of genres and sub-genres listed by music services is mind-boggling. I can’t even pronounce some of them, let alone know what they sound like. But unlike most genres, Classical Music and Jazz are more defined by their procedures than by their sound or style. Both have a long history, and both now have well-established means of apprenticeship. I will discuss the nature of Jazz and improvisation at some other time, but would now like to discuss the nature of Classical music, how it has evolved, and how it has affected my creativity.

What makes Classical Music “Classical,” beyond anything else, is the fact that it is written down. Classical musicians can and do play any “style” or “genre” of music, as long as it is in written form. I think nearly every characteristic you can mention about Classical Music can be traced to the fact that it is Visual. Of course, it is true that for nearly a thousand years its written form has been an effective way of preserving it. But think about it, music has been passed down from one generation to another in every culture ever discovered, yet only European culture felt it necessary to write it down.

Music is an auditory phenomenon. Having music preserved in a visual format is beyond extraordinary. It changes our whole concept of it. For the rest of the world, music is an experience, but for Classical musicians, it is a “thing.” It has depth and breadth; it occupies space, and all of it exists at once. Accordingly, any part of it may be accessed at any time to be discussed, practiced, or even changed. As a result, every single note is susceptible to analysis, meaning, or criticism. You can talk about it as you would a visual artwork, or more often, a book. Of course, other arts have also been written down; drama has been in written form for 2,500 years! Choreography has a written shorthand too, though it never became much more than a memory tool. Visual art does not, of course, because the artist creates the artwork himself. But imagine if it did. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had written instructions for the Mona Lisa; the variety and number of Mona Lisa’s would be spectacular. Or not, because maybe the instructions by themselves would not be as inspiring without da Vinci’s realization.

Classical music is organized around ideals; this is what makes it truly “Classical.” (Not the fact that it is old!)

Because Classical music is visual, it has adopted many of the characteristics of other written art forms. It has become logically and dramatically organized, like literature. Its inner parts have become mathematically structured, like architecture. But most importantly, it has adopted Western philosophical principles as truth. Classical music is organized around ideals; this is what makes it truly “Classical.” (Not the fact that it is old!) It has ideals of rhythm, tone, balance, intonation, and structure that are absolutely taken for granted. How could a composer write a complicated score if he or she didn’t know how the rhythm would be played, or notes, or even how the instruments were going to sound? Classical musicians sublimate their individualism to their musical idealism. Even individual musical expression and musicianship are considered ideals.

Above all, a Classical musician strives for the ideal of perfection. It can be an obsession. I once heard a story about Vladimir Horowitz, where he was listening to a recording of one of his recitals and, after about a half an hour, he suddenly grimaced. When asked what the matter was he said, “That was where I hit that “g” wrong.”

Classical musicians are expected to have their own ideas on style and interpretation, but the differences in style and interpretation in Classical Music are minute compared to that of Popular Music. A Popular musician tries to create a style that is individual, no matter what the genre, while Classical musicians try to all play essentially the same way. Anybody can tell the difference between Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan, even if they were singing the same song, but only an expert can identify different Classical soloists or ensembles.

For a Classical musician, the word “music” often refers to its written form, as in “I left the music in the car.” This borders on silly, when you think about it. But in reality, the “real” music has become a concept. The Beethoven Piano Sonatas have become ideals themselves. It is like Plato’s Cave Analogy, what we hear are the shadows on the cave wall. The ideal is, in itself, an interpretation of a written form, not an aural one, which makes it another step removed. This is why the institution of Classical music continues to play the same music over and over. It is tradition; it is an attempt at achieving perfection. It is like an athletic feat and one can always do it better. It has become something other than just music.

Yet, to non-Classical musicians and listeners, that is exactly what Classical Music is, just music. That is where New Classical Music and Composition come in. New music is listened to in a different way. It is heard for its style, its content, its cultural context, its originality, its innovation, and simply whether it’s liked or not. These kinds of questions are not usually addressed at a Classical concert; the quality of the music has already been settled. This means that to play New Music to a Classical audience is to already start with two strikes, the musicians and the audience. To be successful, a composer has to write something the performers feel comfortable playing and/or something the audience feels comfortable listening to; either of which, these days, involves a pretty drastic restriction in creativity. If a new piece is neither comfortable to play nor to listen to, then it REALLY has to be good! But even if a composer were to write a piece that everybody loved, that doesn’t guarantee that the piece of music will become part of the Classical Repertoire and reach the status of an ideal. That determination depends on cultural whim and luck, it is well beyond a composer’s control.

Composers imagined new music of great imagination in a popular vein, but that is not what happened.

Today, symphony orchestras play a lot of Popular Music. The Phoenix Symphony plays Popular Music at least half the time, maybe more. There was a time when some composers thought Popular styles and music would save Classical music institutions, and in a sense, it has. Composers such as Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein led a push for a more popular style. Gunther Schuller led a push for a fusion between Classical Music and Jazz. Composers imagined new music of great imagination in a popular vein, but that is not what happened. Just like the Classical Music it plays, symphony orchestras (primarily) play music from Popular artists that are already famous. There is almost no originality, but everyone is happy – performers, audience, and management.

To me, this is why creative New Classical Music of the last half-century or so has tended to cultivate not only its own audience, but also its own performers. Classical music (as well as Popular music) has ceased to embody the stylistic progressive evolution that characterized its earlier periods. “In vogue” has become somewhat of a non sequitur. Since the loosening up of the distribution of recordings, and especially since the Internet, all music has developed a stylistic multiplicity that would have been hard to imagine even fifty years ago. These days, not only are some Classical musicians only playing New Music (and making a living!), but some also do their own arrangements of other styles of music, or even write their own music. Some Classical performers are even improvising. The amount of cross-fertilization of musical style and technique has almost reached the level of individual preference. Even with all those identified genres, the most creative composers and musicians are still falling into the cracks. Being strikingly creative and fitting into a mold always seem to be mutually exclusive.

It is against this backdrop that I made my decision to pursue improvisation as my main creative outlet. For me, the Classical Music experience was too distant; I was looking for something more personal both as a composer and a performer. But I don’t see improvisation as a spontaneous Classical performance technique or real-time composition. It is its own artistic discipline with its own aesthetic and fundamentals. But improvisation is fueled by intuition, and my intuition is primed by my experience. I don’t need that experience to improvise, but my experience does make my improvisation distinctive. It is that distinction which I mean to exploit.

My music is also meant to take advantage of the one-to-one relationship between artist and listener that has become the norm in the Digital Age. Though I can and do improvise live in concert, I don’t consider that to be the main thrust of my creativity or career. I consider my art to be more private than public. It is more conversation than lecture. For me, improvisation has become the perfect format, and in recording that improvisation and making it available online, I have found the perfect vehicle.

Points of “Arrival”

Two or three weeks ago, now, I went to see the Science Fiction movie, Arrival. It’s definitely a movie worth seeing – insightful, intelligent, and surprisingly emotional. Without giving away too much of the movie, I can say that a sub-plot of the movie revolves around a rather obscure theory of linguistics, of all things, that says, “The languages we learn tend to shape the way we think.” I had run into this theory before in reference to translations of Chinese texts, especially older ones. The pictograms of Chinese are much more versatile than words in Western languages, and can be used as nearly any part of speech. This tends to lead to more verbs than nouns and more verbs as nouns. It tends to give the language more sense of process than a noun-rich language such as English, which emphasizes things.

What struck me most about this theory was how similar it was to one of the axioms of the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan, that the tools with which we learn shape how we learn and think. (Or as he so famously stated, “The medium is the message.”) Language is, of course, a major tool but it’s only one of many.

McLuhan’s main interest was how the print-based society ushered in by Gutenberg was being supplanted by the electronic age emerging in the twentieth century. He claimed that a print-based culture was very linear and logical because written language, as printed, was very logically organized. He claimed the electronic age, where we learn from electronic media, presented many ideas and sensual data at once and therefore promoted a more intuitive but emotionally connected mode of thinking. His first book of many on the subject, Understanding Media, was published in the 1950’s and made a splash on the pop culture of the 1960’s. It had a very real effect on me and made me acutely aware of how I was thinking as much or more than what I was thinking.

McLuhan was a favorite philosopher of mine in my early twenties, as he seemed to help explain the social and especially artistic turmoil that was taking place at the time. Though he was not a reason for my interest in improvisation, I was quite aware that improvisation, as a methodology, was more associated with the electronic age and that written composition was more associated with the past.

In 1999, I wrote an orchestral work around one of McLuhan’s notions, that at the intersection of these two distinct cultures would be a seminal generation or two of thinkers who would be influenced by both cultures. As an example of this supercharged cultural hybrid, he pointed to people like Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Galileo, and Monteverdi who were able to combine the newly unleashed logicality of the Renaissance with the old intuitive sensibilities of the Middle Ages. The piece, Millennial Opening, simulates gates at the opening and closing of the era. The piece itself was a compositionally written work that was based on an improvisation, both in its musical material and its structure. It was truly a hybrid of the two creative modes of thought, stimulated by this intersection between cultures.

I had started to combine composition and improvisation in this way in 1993, and felt that I was onto something. I wrote several works during this period, but what I didn’t anticipate was that my own hybrid opening would also close. As I was writing compositions on my improvisations, I was also becoming more comfortable with improvisation. As my improvisations affected my writing, so my resulting compositions also affected my improvisation. The way I manipulated the improvised material worked its way into the improvisations to the point where I found myself as a composer trying to manipulate the manipulations

.Around 2003, these two trends met head-on. I wrote a couple of pieces that were not manipulations but variations on improvisations, and then I wrote a couple more pieces that were not much more than adapted transcriptions. I had reached a point where what I wanted to do compositionally and what I was improvising were similar enough that I no longer saw the point of filtering them through any sort of compositional process. I didn’t see the point of writing them down. Technically, aesthetically, and musically, they were basically the same.

Of course, I improvise on the piano, not string quartet or symphony orchestra. However, I could always base a work for another medium on an improvised piano transcription, and I have continued to do so. Certainly adapting and modifying improvised transcriptions is less trouble than composing from scratch, if less engaging, but the creative spirit will always find a way to affect just about anything it’s allowed to touch.

Beyond all else, a creative act is always a learning experience. You always remember the stuff you make up yourself. If how you learn is how you think, then how you create is an even more convincing inculcation. My improvisation has, in a sense, assimilated my compositional hybrid experience and become a hybrid of its own. When the linguistics professor in Arrival found herself being able to catch glimpses of her own future, it did not change how she experienced time, only how she thought about it. Improvisation has not changed my experience of music, but it has changed how I think about it, how I think about its creation, and how I see it’s role in my future.