Mathais Wexler
Crane School of Music
SUNY Potsdam
Potsdam, NY 13676
315.267.2421
wexlermk@potsdam.edu
From a presentation given at the Pi Kappa Lambda National Convention, New Orleans, La., December 11, 1999.
I am very happy to be able to spend some time with you this morning talking about a musical process, improvisation, that has become part of my ongoing development as a performer and more and more a part of my teaching. I feel a little intimidated to be here in New Orleans, where jazz began and so much great improvisation has taken place. My saving grace is that I will be speaking from the point of view of a classically trained studio string teacher, representing a group of hungry johnnie-come-latelys to the jazz and improvisation banquet. This talk is a good excuse to do publicly what I've been doing privately for a some years, namely, to ruminate about the larger implications for our college performance curriculums of studying music in a changing world. As a group, studio string teachers are probably one of the most influential, but also one of the most deeply conservative of all college music teachers, and it is high time that the ground began to shift. Where might our observations lead us as we peer forward with hope and trepidation into the mists of the new millennium? Where is the study of performance now? And what new curricular directions do we want to pursue? What constitutes a valuable music education at the close of the 20th century?
Improvisation, of course, has been part of many traditions for a long time. It is much older than the European tradition that most of us were raised with, and is used in different musics all over the world, not to mention American pop and jazz, which are central most of our student's musical formation and orientation.
My thesis is at once simple and daunting: music schools across this country are facing an educational and cultural upheaval of unprecedented proportions as they seek to train and educate future generations of musicians and music appreciators. This crisis has been in the making for many years, as technology and demographics have gradually remade the world in which our prospective students develop, and the culture that produced most of our revered repertoire and performance traditions recedes ever further into the past. The fact is that the basic assumptions that for generations have undergirded the world of classical music are being questioned and revised. The distinctions between classical and other types of music are gradually being blurred, and it is harder and harder to claim with impunity that European art music is inherently superior to other kinds of music and therefore can be studied to the exclusion of those other musics.
These cultural issues are not at all abstract for those of us who teach the performance of classical music. The loss of the European cultural hegemony in America poses difficult curricular dilemmas for performance teachers but it may also present a golden opportunity to modernize our methods and try new approaches. Our student's futures in music, either as producers or appreciators, depend on our dealing wisely and expeditiously with the new realities that confront us.
To say that performance studios in music schools are influential is a gross understatement. Students work with their studio teacher for the entire four years of their undergraduate career. According to 1999 the Higher Education Arts Data Services Survey, there were, as of fall 1998, 26,971 undergraduates, enrolled in Bachelor of Music Programs in the United States. These are all programs with a music content of over 65%. The majority of these students are listed in the survey as being majors in a particular instrument, such as guitar, percussion, or voice. As we all know, to be "in the studio" of so and so means to undertake an involved, committed apprenticeship that may include several meetings a week individually or in small groups. Studios, especially string studios, have evolved strong, self-perpetuating traditions, and artist-teachers, as we are often called have, for the most part, blithely continued to teach the same repertoire that we, our teachers, and their teachers, learned decades ago. It is not only the repertoire, but the entire culture of studios--string studio especially--that seems frozen in an institutional time capsule. Music teaching studios are the last great 19th century holdout of higher education. Within them, older repertoire is still better and we face a growing need to question and examine the teacher's methods or biases. Studio teachers are often unabashedly authoritarian, presiding over every aspect of their student's development, from technical development and selection of repertoire to the formation of their aesthetic taste. There is no explicit, formalized curriculum--the standardizing force is the assumption that students will immerse themselves in the repertoire of the great canon reverently handed down to us through the generations. In other words, classical musicians the string players especially, have become interpreters of great works from earlier times, part artist, part curator.
And because stringed instruments have long been identified most closely with the symphonic, chamber and solo performance of classical music, nowhere is the curricular crisis more glaring than in the teaching of violinists, violists, cellists and bassists. We string teachers need to think more creatively about our options in preparing our students for a profession that is in great flux.
The truth is, we string teachers have been passing on to our students the product of a culture that has little to do with our own. In their dormitories, our students surf the web, downloading samples of Indian rock bands that are in turn influenced by American blues or rap. Even if they have an allegiance to the historical repertoire we are asking them to assimilate, they also feel connected, on their own time, to entirely different bodies of popular music, each variety with its own stylistic and cultural norms. Today's music students, like students generally, are media saturated, and as at home with the techno-rhythms of MTV as with the classic structure and presentation of a symphony or string quartet. Even IF they love classical music--and some of my students openly admit they don't - they aren't necessarily convinced that it's on a higher aesthetic plane than any of the other genres they listen to.
And of course, more practically, neither is anyone else, and so its not only the cultural foundation, but more importantly, the commercial market for music that is changing. At the Crane School of Music in Potsdam, New York where I teach, the Community Performance Series used to offer six or seven concerts a year, featuring well-known classical soloists and chamber music groups. Ten years ago the series folded and has been replaced by a series that includes only one or two classical events. A few blockbuster events notwithstanding, the size of the audience for orchestral and chamber music is level at best, and probably declining. The classical record industry recently went through a bloody period of consolidation brought on by declining record sales of Beethoven Symphonies and Mozart piano concertos. And full-time orchestral jobs, for generations the backbone of the music profession, are becoming harder and harder to get. The traditional job market for traditionally trained performing musicians is saturated. Performing musicians, more than ever, will have to be flexible and be prepared to respond with new skills to new opportunities or create their own.
In any case, we need to make sure that our music students of the present will be the music producers of the future. Clearly, the narrowly focused, conservatory-type training needs to evolve. We need to give students new improved tools for a lifetime of artistic growth, and this, I believe, is where the study of improvisation will help tremendously.
Improvisation has a long and honorable history and was for centuries a mainstay of every professional musician. J.S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt were all improvising performers. Guiseppe Tartini's 1747 treatise on violin playing, L'Arte Del Arco, included a chart showing 17 ways of embellishing a particular adagio melody. That same year, Bach, as a way of presenting his credentials to Frederick the Great, improvised on a musical theme given to him at the time. Leopold Mozart's 1756 treatise on string playing includes a chapter on the tasteful way to improvise a fantasia.
As it was two centuries ago, improvising is still one of the best tools teachers have to train well-rounded musicians. Improvisation strengthens memory, and teaches a student about the geography of their instrument, as well as strengthens their rhythmic perception. It's also the most natural way to link student's formal training with the rest of their musical interests and experience, not to mention an opportunity for students to express an individuality that tends to be repressed during all-too-strict traditional studio instruction.
There are a number of levels of improvisation, some more complex than others, as any jazz player will tell you. You can embellish an existing line by changing or enhancing the rhythm, create a new melodies over the same chords that accompanied the original melody, or even, at the highest level, reharmonize and recompose an entirely new idea.
A major interest of mine is incorporating improvisation studies into the college string studio curriculum, a place where it is sorely needed. The first major hurdle, I find, is psychological. Classical music students are very concerned with playing it RIGHT. Can you blame them? After all, that's what its all about isn't it? Playing the right notes at the right time with the right articulation, and so on. It takes a tremendous leap of faith for a student to accept the following statement: "for the next ten minutes, there are no wrong notes." In the context of normal studio culture, this is an insane statement. I have found that creating a safe space for improvisation is a challenge all its own. We need to work to create a culture of improvisation within our college music curriculums where the experience of learning improvisation is a respected part of growing up musically. To get started, my students and I sat around in a big circle, and I played a simple rhythmic pattern on one string and everyone repeated it together. Jazz players will tell you that this is a form of "call and response". After a couple of times going around the circle, I started to play different rhythms for each person--giving them an opportunity to hear themselves alone without being in a threatening situation. The next level is asking them to respond with a different rhythm, to "finish" what the instructor starts. And slowly, the feeling in the room begins to loosen and relax. Among the other valuable qualities of improvising is that it is tremendous fun, and although we do our best in the studio to be serious and correct, a little fun and relaxation does wonders for morale. After working around the circle several times with one pitch, I begin to add other pitches. Finally, we begin to use entire scales. Another variation of this idea is what I call "cellophone", where each player passes on a short melody, changing the rhythm or pitch as they do. One terrific exercise is to break the players down into small groups and have each group improvise and sustain a chord together - and yes it can be dissonant. Another very useful exercise, is improvising in a particular key, just exploring the feeling of being completely free of the printed page. After a while, you can add specific rhythmic patterns. Even within one key, improvisation is a great way to train a young musical ear. And because improvisers practice patterns, practicing like an improviser is a great way to learn the patterns of your particular instrument.
Once students are feeling more comfortable, there are all kinds of way to offer opportunities to improvise. For example, to combat rhythmic difficulties, you can have someone play a scale with the rhythm section on tape. Then you can ask them to vary the rhythm, while continuing to practice the scale. Then, after a while, I might introduce simple harmonic progressions. Jamie Aebersold has a wonderful series of music minus one CDs, which are graded from very simple to quite complex. I should mention that there are now a number of very good improvising method books available for strings, such those by Jody Harmon and Chris White, as well as excellent non instrument specific methods such as the creativity in Improvisation set by Chris Azzara, Richard Grunow and Edwin Gordon.
Incidentally, I have found, along with Dr. Peck, that improvising is a wonderful way to practice basic harmonic literacy and aural skills: Studio improvisation can be effective reinforcement of aural skills training. String instrumentalists are constantly struggling to feel comfortable with the geography of our instruments, playing in positions and travelling between positions. Improvising is not only great aural training, it can be a way to connect that training with the technical demands offset, the cello., for instance, in a call and response context, use segments of scales to create melodies, practice thinking rhythmically by keeping the rhythmic pattern and changing the notes, or using sequences to create melodies--finally using arpeggios to create melodies, which takes us into a more harmonic way of thinking. Another angle is to improvise in one key, say, C Major, using only fourth position. It is one thing to study out of a book or complete written exercises and quite another to have this information at your fingertips NOW. Of course, there are other angles as well: in the context of building a solo one can discuss different ways to shape a phrase, for example, build these four bars from piano to a forte climax, or, start forte and let the melody disappear. Transposition was another skill that can and should be practiced by string players in the concrete context of a performance studio., for example, take a three-note cell, which happens to be the root, third and fifth of the first chord in the given progression and transpose it correctly over every chord in the progression - or how about filling in the skips to create ascending or descending scales?
Probably the most exciting thing for my students in discovering the improv world was the sense of connection to the creative moment that each student experienced while improvising, the sense of the interweaving of spontaneity and musical knowledge that occurs when you make your own music. And it was FUN! My students, while feeling frightened at first, ultimately have really enjoyed the opportunity to improvise in class.
Last semester at Crane we had an improvisation festival for cellos. We called it Cellorama, and invited two improvising cellists, Chris White and Sera Smolen, to lead us in a series of workshops designed to further the development of our improvisation skills. The workshop was a smashing success, attended by an international group of cellists and made all who attended much more comfortable with improvisation generally.
My dream is that someday, Crane students will have to demonstrate proficiency in improvisation to pass their minimum competency playing exams, and that the development of improvisatory skills in various contexts will be a part of the core performance experience.
One of the problems with, or perhaps I should say, anxieties that a classically trained musician has about improv is that sometimes it doesn't sound GOOD. By this I mean that sometimes the surface of improv can sound rough or unpolished, with less attention paid to the quality of sound or the FINISH of the presentation. There might even be MISSED NOTES! In our late 20th century world of unnaturally perfect recordings and big name soloists playing the same accepted repertoire over and over, the space for anything even vaguely experimental at the top levels of classical performance has become very small indeed. And that is why improvisation is such a breath of fresh air: it is more process oriented, and the goals are less stale perfection than self-expression, the joy of making your own music, and there is an exciting sense that its allright take a chance, to risk the possibility of making a mistake in the service of self-expression. In fact, we desperately need this kind of training for our students. We performance teachers need to be more concerned with the students subjective CONNECTION to their music and less concerned with the final outcome. Studying music is and should always be more than learning to reproduce correctly - it must be about creativity, connection and total musicianship. I agree with with David Elliot, who, in his book "Music Matters" makes the point that improvising only means composing on the spot in the simplest sense. The originality, complexity, variety and of any improvised performance is linked inextricably to composing, arranging, transposing and of course technical skill. Improvisers must be able to think harmonically and have at their fingertips massive amounts of motivic and scaler material. Improvising and improved musicianship go hand and hand, no matter what the basic level of accomplishment. All our students should be encouraged to do it!
In conclusion, I'd like to return to a question I posed at the beginning: what constitutes a valuable education in musical performance at the close of the 20th century? First of all, I should hasten to add that much of what goes on in music schools IS valuable and necessary. Students still have to learn scales, and certainly I am not advocating turning our backs on Beethoven or Brahms, for the same reason that English or literature students should never neglect Shakespeare. Our musical inheritance is precious to us and we will continue to turn it over, to learn and perform it and think about it. But we must allow ourselves the flexibility to search out new ways to connect with our students, or in this case, to reclaim a very old way, and in the process, open a world of tremendous new educational and musical possibilities. We must face the changing world or be rendered irrelevant and ineffective. We should follow the examples of musicians who routinely cross the jazz/classical barrier, like bassist Edgar Myer, or pianist Keith Jarrett, or Chick Corea, who recently recorded his new piano concerto with the London Symphony. In embracing the culture of improvisation, we will connect our students in the healthiest, most creative way possible to the music of their time, and musics of other times and places as well. The bottom line is that music students of the future will not be able to consider themselves fully educated without a string grounding in improvisation and performing familiarity with non-classical forms of music making. And if by enhancing, by broadening our educational offerings to include improvisation studies we are effectively engaging our students' interest and passion, we will, as educators, be doing our part to strengthen their life-long commitment to this magical form of communication we call music.
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