Wanted: A Concise Theory of Everything

Wanted: A Concise Theory of Everything

Organization of Improvisation

Let's talk about improvisation again. But this time, let's get organized. 

Over the last few weeks I've been working on cleaning a house, finishing building a bathroom, having a first birthday party for my favorite little man, and starting new projects at work. In some free time, I decided to take all my notes, books, and DVDs on the subject of improvisation and attempt to synthesize some sort of master document that would reveal common trends and all the basic truths that were held by all authors regardless of individual method or order. Of course, this mystical master document was a bullet outline in Microsoft Word. These sources were:

Books:

• Cours Complet d'Improvisation a l'Orgue Vol. 1 & 2 - Marcel Dupre
• Improvising: How to Master the Art - Gerre Hancock
• Making Music: Improvisation for Organists - Jan Overduin
• Hymn Improvisation - Michele Johns
• Bach & the Art of Improvisation - Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra
• Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments - C.P.E. Bach
• Breaking Free - Jeffrey Brillhart
• Harmonization at the Keyboard - Charles Proctor

DVDs:

• Hymn Tune Improvisations: Increasing Your Skill - William Porter
• Improvisation Masterclass - Philippe Lefebvre
• Ex Tempore: The Art of Organ Improvisation in England - Ronny Krippner

The YouTubes:

• William Porter's Course on Organ Improvisation - Smarano Organ Academy

Hand-written notes from masterclasses with:

• Bruce Neswick
• Jeffrey Brillhart
• Sophie-Veronique Cauchefer-Choplin
• Edoardo Bellotti 

And innumerable examples from recordings, YouTube, and live occasions. 

Having no wise and experienced teacher to point me daily in the right direction, it becomes necessary to have a working knowledge of the complete picture so that already limited practice time isn't wasted on false avenues. Thus motivated, I looked for a complete conception of improvisation, which is also composition. To have a concise idea of how music works is a difficult task, unless one takes a few brisk steps away from the picture to lose the details and instead see how the largest of pieces fit together. 

The Big Picture

Dupre gives us an abbreviated view of organ technique, orchestration, harmony, and thematic analysis before he gives a single exercise in improvising. Then he moves into harmonization of chorale melodies, and from there into different chorale forms. After this he spends the rest of the volume on illustrating the many forms that should be learned, from Minuet and Trio, to Sonata-Allegro. 

Johns gives us the essential techniques for improvisation on hymn tunes and general instruction for study and practice in that area. 

Brillhart gives us a solid compendium of French techniques used in improvisation.

Overduin gives us many techniques for making the most out of limited skills and shows the importance of many different areas such as hymn improvisation and forms, listing important skills such as being able to improvise in regular phrases, and putting two voices together. 

Hancock covers the practical aspects of improvisation in church services and uses those skills to build a foundation on which more ambitious forms may be worked. He also gives us clear instructions on how to practice forms, which are pretty vague and inconcrete subjects. He also gives us what might be the most useful exercise in getting started improvising, though he doesn't explain clearly why.

Porter shows us how to establish an automatic accompaniment that will work for anything in a pinch, to act as a safety net for when inspiration fails. He also points us on the way to how to extract winning ideas and solutions to problems from the repertoire and practice them so as to incorporate them into our improvisations. 

From Lefebvre, Bruce, Edoardo, and Sophie we learn specific exercises for strengthening certain necessary skills used in improvisation.

Let's stay focused and follow the trail!

There's much more detail there, but we're interested in the big picture. As I started grouping together similar techniques, I was able to start clumping together bigger categories. So many simple techniques could be put into the category of Harmonization. There are a few clear techniques for thematic development, so we have a nice tidy category of Theme sitting there. A large portion of many of these books is concerned with formal structure so we have a category of Form that is quite large, but clearly defined.

Looking at all of the forms that were springing up, it became clear that the fundamental building block of all of these larger forms was the of the Phrase. Hancock is very concerned with the phrase at the beginning of his book and uses his phrase work as a foundation for all the larger forms to come. We find other building blocks of form, such as Expositions, commentary (both deductive and foreign). We find transitional material such as bridges and interludes. We stumble into development and play with episodes.

We even find 'meta-forms' which are just groups of smaller forms, such as the Triptych, or the Symphony.

From the details we find connections to fewer and fewer fundamental concepts.

Then I started piling knowledge of harmonization, counterpoint, imitation, scales, and modes into a category that I want to call Texture. (However, that may not be permanent.)

I eventually found myself setting aside various common ideas such as creating a sense of freedom, analyzing the repertoire for solutions, practicing slowly, starting from written outlines, etc. All of these things are important but I felt that they were extra-musical in nature; they seemed to lie outside purely musical concerns. I was eventually left with only three categories for music-making, an extreme of simplicity, but an arrangement that could be comprehended fully away from the written page and could be conceived at the keyboard. I was left with:

• Theme
• Texture
• Form

Since I've established those three categories, I've become very interested in Texture. Let's see why.

Theme brings Unity

Theme - A musical idea that can serve as a germ from which the rest of the composition grows. A theme will bring unity to the music like nothing else and opens up greater diversity, as well as the possibility of development. There are specific techniques for developing a theme, such as turning it upside down, playing it backwards, stretching it into longer note values, altering the notes and retaining the rhythm, changing the meter... One can play around and experiment with altering a theme with no care about texture and form. However, it is difficult to imagine a situation where playing with nothing but a theme would result in a satisfying improvisation or composition. 

Each theme is a unique snowflake and how proud we are of all of them... but the theme alone does not reveal the uniqueness and originality of the composer. On the contrary, look at what a simple and bland theme Beethoven used for the first movement of his 5th symphony... da da da duuum!

Form brings intelligibility

Form - We channel our raw unrefined emotions and ideas into a structure built to hold and express it meaningfully. This is the broadest level of music making, where we really construct a piece of music out of all of the smaller materials. Most people aren't directly aware of the structure of a piece on a conscious level, but they can sense that the music is 'going somewhere'. This is because of a logical and/or intuitive structure. There are many broad general forms such as Sonata, or Fugue, or Passacaglia, but the great composers don't use cookie-cutter forms. They alter and change them to suite the unique needs of the composition. Just like building your own house; you have all the same ingredients--bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, living room--but tailor them to your specific needs and aesthetic desires. 

People love using icebergs for presentations.

Texture - Texture (there must be a more accurate term) as I define it, is the body of the music, the unique context. Everything we learn from the study of Harmony and Counterpoint goes into this category. You have a theme? Well, what matters is how it is presented. This category is where one's unique musical language and originality can show. This is the section that is, coincidentally, treated the least in Dupre's treatise on Improvisation. This category also presents the mysteries of good music making. Consequently, I am the most interested in studying this category. Also, texture can easily be practiced and explored without needing a theme or a form. We like to call this 'doodling'. 

What now?

Now we have to try to give some order to the near infinite variety of musical textures. A great place to start will be to browse through the gigantic repertoire of the last thousand years and try to make some logical sense of it. Are textures based on a sliding scale of contrapuntal independence, such as going from chorale to fugue? Are there discrete textures that can be collected like a bag of tricks? Are there discrete ingredients to texture that can be augmented and diminished depending on what effect is desired? What emotional effect do textures produce? What is different and what is the same?

I will seek some answers to these questions. In the meantime, here is a recording of some doodling of my own. It fails as a good improvisation, but makes for satisfactory noodling.