on baroque improvisation

3/9/13 On Baroque Improvisation

community.middlebury.edu/~harris/MusicPapers/baroque.html 1/17

IMPROVISATION..... with elements of Baroque Style

This is a brief invitation to Baroque Improvisation for those whohad studied several years of piano lessons, but over time havecome to say "Oh yes, I used to play the piano...". In fact a greatdeal of the sound of what we studied remains in our minds, andmuch of the neural connections for hand and fingerworkalthough latent, can be recalled with exercise and practice.Going back to formal Lessons may not be the best road since itmay bring up memories of the days of forced practice withunintuitive teaching.

I suggest trying some modest improvisation in the baroque pre-classical mode as an open door into a new area. This should notbe seen as imitation of the baroque sound. It can start formallybut may end up as poly-voiced and polytonal improv., in a newand personal style. Unlike Jazz which has a certain pre-set socialand acoustic ambience to it, this venture can be like an openbook, in which you do some personal experimentation as a endin itself. If you stick to it for a while, the results may surprise you.

When we speak of Baroque Improvisation we find there aretwo related but very different levels of improvisation. On the onehand there are professional scholars and performers who dometiculously crafted improvisations on harpsichord or organ in an



authentic Baroque style. There has been an increase of attentionpaid to this art recently and a number of skilled artists performregularly in concerts and workshops to show that the oncecommon art of improvisation at keyboard is still viable andpleasurable to play and to hear. The current professional level ofBaroque Improvisation arises partly from a necessity for modernperformance with original scores. Many early scores have leftlarge parts of the material unscored with the assumption thatcontemporary performers will fill out cadenzas if not wholesequences.

But in the 16th and 17th centuries improvisation at the keyboardwas a personal art which served as a private way to experimentwith new musical sounds and ideas. Bach was known to hiscontemporaries as a master keyboardist capable of the mostcomplex improvisations, and his reputation was then stronger inthis area than in the choral works which the modern publicassociates with Bach's highest art. Keyboard improvisation was aprivate matter, it could be done at the organ in the quiet of lateevening so long as there was a boy to pump the bellows. And theclavichord with its tiny but clear and dynamic sound was asinteresting for private music-making as the brasher plucking ofthe harpsichord . Of course demonstrations of keyboard virtuositywere always of interest to the educated musical public.

This private and personal use of a baroque style idiom is onewhich can be accessed by anyone who has studied the piano forseveral years, even without a great deal of study and practice. Aperson who has worked through some of the easier Sonatas ofMozart or Beethoven has absorbed through practice with hisfingerwork to provide an intuitive sense of the basic harmonics ofearly music. Scales in various keys and modes, triadic chordsarrangements and developments, basic modulation from one keyto another --- these are things which have been used over andover in standard repertory, and these are the same things whichan improviser will use intuitively without defining them as termsof a musical grammar.



Conversely someone who doesn't have hand and ear experiencewith these constructive elements will not be able to generateimprovised music from instructions. He will lack the flow whichis needed to put together musical phrases the way we flow forth agrammatical sentence in speech. Those early years at the pianodoing lessons may not have been totally absorbing, but they dohave a residual effect which can be used later for generating newmusical sequences.

Some hundreds of thousands of young students are studyingpiano each year in America, most quite naturally under pressurefrom parents who want their children to do something 'cultural'and educational. Since the traditional approach has beenregulatory with two handed scales and arpeggios exercises whichmay be more athletic than musical, it is no wonder that most kidsget away from the piano as soon as they can.

Many adults will admit that they once studied the piano, usuallyadding that they can't remember much and now they tend toenjoy their music as recorded by artists who play the piano farbetter than they ever could have done. Who wants to pick out theAppassionata note by note when you can have a choice of tenbrilliant CD recordings to hear? In l920 you played music orwent to a concert to hear it, that was the choice. Now recordedmusic is the available choice which has turned us into ageneration of HiFi musical listeners rather than instrumentalplayers.

But if a former student wants to come back to music with thepiano, it will probably not be at lessons with a prim MissPemberton sitting on the bench ready to point a skinny finger atthe score with a stern: Play that Again! And who wants to studyin a class with ten year old kids who probably are faster learnersthan you at your advanced middle years? There are teachers whofavor older students but preferably those who have proven talent,and maybe you are not sure about that now. So there is aquandary: What do you want to play? and then: Where do you begin?



For the first question, I recommend Improvisation as a musicalenterprise which is done without peering at notes in the score,without reading instructions to get the right finger in the rightplace. It is something you have to be able to do with relaxedmind, even with your eyes closed. Once the flow of interestingsound arrangements starts, it continues by its own inertia; even ifyou are doing something quite simple, at least it is entirely yourown. For developing with complexity, speed and effects, you arein sole charge, it is your decision which counts when you areimprovising your own music.

For the second question, about where to begin, it is less clear.There are abundant "courses" in piano which show you how topick out a tune with the right hand and then add standard chordswith the left to give a basic accompanied song. This is in effectwhat an accordion does with chord arrangements under a melodyline, and if you really like this sound then the accordion and notthe piano may be your instrument. There are now dozens of Jazzcourses which operate on this same chordal basis, with pre-setfigures and turns which are standard in the jazz repertory. Again,if you like jazz this is your dish; but if your ears are more tuned toBach's Goldberg or Well Tempered pieces, then an experiment inBasic Baroque may be better suited to your temperament.

But between the returning piano student wanting to do BaroqueImprov for personal pleasure, and the professionals who do theirown baroque pieces or demonstrate harpsichord cadenzas atworkshops, there is an instructional lacuna. A few colleges arenow starting teaching in the improvisational area, more willhopefully follow; but for the moment there is little practicalinstruction to go with.

In the meantime there is much you can do by experimenting onyour own, and I urge you to proceed and for the moment go italone. One should never wait in the world of music for someoneto tell you what to do and how to do it. Over the years I havebeen developing my musical skills on my own learning curve,and I think it is now time to write down what I have been doing.



It is like the classic Samurai swordsman who goes to themountain in old age to write down what he has learned, sinceotherwise his learning becomes lost. But don't wait in too longthe valley, the personal sage may never come down from themountain.

One might properly ask: Just what is the Baroque style? Whenthe word Baroque was first used it was in a derogatory sensealong with 'rococo' and referred to overly ornamented design ofmusic and architecture which filled every corner with intricatedetail in a 'horror vacui' frenzy. It is hard to understand thiscriticism since now Baroque is taken to mean clean-lined andclear music in its well laid out complexity. Furthermore it isarchitecturally intellectual and a good counterfoil to the involvedinstrumentation and expanded orchestration of the 19th century.Baroque music has its quirks and conceits, not unlike JohnDonne's difficult and tough-written poetry from the same period,but it is never mushy or inconclusive. It was written for peoplewho were musically educated and only disappeared in disfavor inmid 18th century when an expanding middle class took interest inthe concert hall and the symphonic orchestra. Music which waseasy and attractive to hear was preferred to music which had tobe understood to be appreciated, and the total effect of a piecewas what brought people to the concert hall, rather than theharder art of unraveling voices woven into the musical fabric ofthe score.

Baroque music has two advantages as a starting point forimprovisation. First the sound is familiar and intellectuallyaccessible, there are no problems of trying to understand what themusic is about, as compared to Schoenbergian twelve tone rows.Second, the actual fingerwork required to play two partInventions is natural to the hand and if one has studied evenBach's first Inventions the use of the left hand is well understoodif not yet automatic. It is probably this left hand playing which is



the first thing a new improviser has to get familiar with, sinceclassical and modern piano writing generally uses the left hand ina subordinate chordal way as accompaniment. The notion of twovoices working with and against each other will take some timeto become a part of your manual and musical thinking.

The technique of Baroque polyphony involves freelyindependent use of the right and left hand. Since both areoperated from an opposite side of the brain, there is a realdifference in how the dominant (usually right) hand works ascompared with the left. The old words 'dexter' and 'sinister' whichhad special associations for the Romans are no longer regarded asgood and bad, but there is a clear difference in the way the rightarm throws a baseball, or the left hand carves turkey at theThanksgiving dinner table. Some of us are wired the other wayand the left hand serves as dominant, others will be ambidextrousby nature although a certain ambidexdtrosity can be achieved byuse and practice. I mention this here because it affects the wayhands work on a musical keyboard. Melody in the right handwith block accompaniment with the left fits the neural wiring ofthe majority, while a left handed pianist will find polyphonicmusic quite accessible in performance, with a natural inclinationto use the bass line strongly.

I have found that regular and conscious use of the left handedmusical voice does produce interesting results. A melody workedout with the fingers of the left hand often has a style of its own,sometimes it seems to be coming from another place in the mind,which is in fact neurally quite correct. Reading music written by aright handed composer we will ignore many LH signals, butwhen improvising a left-handed person can follow the naturalinclinations of those LH fingers, and give them, by relaxing andwatching their penchant, a life of their own. It takes time andattention for the left hand to develop its full potential, since theprocess of connecting right and left side of the brain in concert isas complicated as it is ill-understood.

But the hand connections although flexible and somewhat



forgiving, are still hard wired, and the more you learn about theway your biological equipment works, the more you get incontact with the way your biological nature responds to music.We cannot say at this point whether two handed activities doneregularly and with intent, will improve the overall operation of aperson's brain, or whether polyphonic pianists recover morequickly from one-sided damage from a stroke; but being twohanded physically and mentally is certainly no disadvantage inliving and may well have rewards which we do not generallyrecognize.

Baroque playing does not require the kind of virtuosic capabilitieswhich you need for playing Brahms or for Liszt. A huge hand-reach is not required for octave runs or for major tenths, and thekind of speed in scales which 19th century pianism requires isdifferent from fast moving Baroque scalar motions. Paralleloctaval scales and appogiations are used but are not basicrequirements for baroque playing, and much of the drill andexercise which early students are required to perform has minorreference to basic baroque playing. Long fingers laid flat againstthe keys may help some in execution of a difficult passage ofLiszt, but Bach's son stated that his father played with curledfingers following the natural relaxed cast of his hand at rest. Bynow most teachers will advise following the nature of yourmusculature and start from the way your hand anticipates playingwhen you first sit down at the keyboard.

Since the piano as we know it only came into existence after1820, and much baroque music was written and played onclavichord or harpsichord, which do not have the thunderousdynamic potential of modern grand piano, one should startimprovisation with a light touch and soft sound. The clavichordhas dynamics of sound but they are so soft as to escape a modernear, while harpsichord has almost none at all. Avoiding a heavytouch seems historically appropriate, but it also favors a lightnessof sound which comes from hammers just kissing the piano'sstrings. When we were children we were glad to just get the notesand keys right and often pounded them down as if working at a



manual typewriter; so this might be a good time to re-assess theway our fingers can work with a touch marked by delicacy. Thisconfers another advantage; if the sound is lighter and moredelicate, that is probably good for our hearing and our intimateperception of music. It is always easy to play louder, but difficultfor a loud player to play softly. That takes some care and practice.

I remember watching a harmony teacher with a class goingthrough a demonstration at the blackboard, tracing with chalk theprogression of several voices through a sequence as individualvoice-led lines, until he came to the end where he marked out theplace where they all came together on the last sound. "That" hesaid "...that is a chord! These are voices and that is --- achord. " Starting with voices you assemble good chords whichare nothing but simultaneous presets of moving voices. Thinkingof voices you get good voice-leading from chord to chord, ratherthan blocked chords in blunt array. In baroque music the voicesare important and when they come in at a final point all together,as in a Chorale to end a Cantata, there is a special effect whichcomes from the way the voices conspire to resolve together.Using the flow of moving voice-lines requires the improviser'sattention because it is not a part of the student pianist's regulartraining; but members of a choral group will be fully aware ofwhat this means.

Piano students often use the right or Sustaining Pedalindiscriminately, usually far to much and held down far too long,and when they refer to it as the "loud pedal" they show they havemissed the point. This pedal raises all dampers across thesoundboard and lets the open strings resound sympatheticallywith the struck strings and also to each other. If you listencarefully to heavily pedaled playing, you will hear a cloudymishmash of resonances, which although useful for someprogressions and for some triadic chordal sequences, will not suitthe nature of baroque playing at all. Use of the pedal should berestricted for baroque improv. Best leave your foot on the floorfor a while, and learn how "finger pedaling" or holding down astruck key with one finger, while other fingers continue with their



motion, can give a selective pedaling effect. Right hand fifthfinger holding down still leaves three fingers and the thumbavailable for new notes, with the resonance of the one string stillsounding. This delicate selective pedaling may seem somethingnew to try out, but it is a device well known to performancepianists as a finer way of getting special resonances without amurky sound of all strings humming together. Baroque playingnormally does not need the pedal at all except perhaps to bindtogether some of the ornaments or the closing phrases of asequence.

But the "Soft or una corda Pedal over on the left side is fine forbaroque piano. Originally called 'una corda' in l820 when pianoswere strung with two string per key, the name has stuck althoughwe now have three strings. The left pedal on a grand merelymoves the hammers over to strike only two of them, and if thelateral motion is properly adjusted, the third or left-side stringwhich is not struck will pick up reverberation sympatheticallyfrom the other two strings, and produce a soft, almost lute-likeresonance which is quite charming. You will not hear this if theadjustments are not right, or you may not be tuned to such agentle acoustic resonance. Use of this pedal is often favored forbaroque playing since it gives a light and gentle sound, althoughthe modern grand piano was engineered for volume since mid-19th century rather than for delicacy of sound. The upright pianodoes not move the keyboard but raises a bar to shorten the keystroke, and Fazzoli at the high end of piano manufacture alsodoes it that way ; so the secondary reverb will not be heard there.

Some pianists keep the left pedal down continually to get a lightertone from the instrument, and it may be possible to slip a wedgeinto the works somewhere in the pedal train to stay on 'una corda'and thus be free to play with two hands and both feet on theground. Aside from acoustic reasons, this disuse of the left footgives a more balanced and relaxed playing position and leavesattention focused on the two hands in motion. (The middle pedalwhich holds strings open with raised dampers after striking, has aspecial use for grand Lisztian passages where the roar of the bass



must be extended, but is of little concern for baroque playing.)

Piano students were often instructed by a certain breed of old-fashioned teachers to play each 'note' ( meaning a 'key' or lever =Fr. touche --- we have problems of mixed wordings !) with asnappy action of each finger, which after striking goes up to araised position immediately. Where this evil information camefrom nobody really knows but it might have once suited thefinger action of the clavichord which is very particular aboutdetails of fingering. For harpsichord and piano which usedampers this is totally wrongheaded, and has producedgenerations of students who "strike" the note, ruining the soundby force and avoiding resonance by the immediate damper fall ,at the same time putting the hand into a tense and thoroughly un-pianistic attitude.

Hands and fingers need to be soft and relaxed, arms must beloose and floating, shoulders never tight and the body must beeasily seated on the bench, preferably a solo chair without theteacher hovering over your right shoulder. Pianists as well asviolinists must be relaxed, from hands to toes with the mind freefrom tension as well. Without a proper frame of approach, oneshould not try to play the piano at all. For some people, tai-chiexercises may be good for putting the body into a state ready formusic, by relaxing both body and soul. For others it may betaking a walk, shaking out the arms until they feel soft and droopat your sides. Whatever devices you try, remember that a relaxedbody and soft fingers produce lovely sounds as a reflection of theperformer's inner state. We evoke music rather than contrive it,whether we are singing, whistling while walking in the woods, orsitting quietly before the black and white gleaming keyboard. Themind of the player is the all important pre-condition for makingbeautiful sounds.

Some things do require practice. Harpsichord music does requiretrills, perhaps originally as a way of sustaining the sounds sincethe instrument does not produce long resonances. We usuallyconsider trills and mordents in the various formats as



"decorations", perhaps part of an objectionable baroque over-dressing; but they are also interesting and musically valid in theirown right. In any case you will want them ready on hand andpractice is fine so long as it is done in sequences rather thanbaldly practicing them as exercises, minute after minute. Thesame is true for scales of course, but remember that baroque scalework can often be a five finger run, up or down or up-and-down,giving the effect of a collapsed eight note octaval run. These areeasy to do, even with left hand, they need little comment; butpeople coming back to play after long years away will still tripover their thumb-under motion in a regular scale.

Not overspeeding and raising the wrist as you slide thumb under,will help scales infinitely, and of course right hand running downwith finger-over is much easier. Left hand scales may seemharder to do on the fly, but left hand running up is very naturaland this direction nicely suits the important base pivot soundresolving upward to meet another voice at central point. Againone starts with what figures come naturally, and since this isimprovisation there need be no practice done apart from theimprovised music session. You must give attention to minordifficulties while in full motion, without freezing your attentionon a mistake. In practice as in a formal concert, when you make amistake, go right on: That is an iron rule.

Speaking of mistakes. We were schooled to read the right noteand press the right key, and when we did either of these wrong, itwas a MISTAKE and you had to stop and go back and do thepassage again. This was seen as a matter of correctness anddiligence, but it was also a sure way to stop the flow of music anddiscourage the student's music ear. When the mistakes were allcorrected, the music might be no good after all, and freedom fromerror is never what makes a piece of music interesting or evenacceptable. It was like penmanship in the old days, when it wasthe freedom from wrong curls of the steel point pen and blackblots on the paper that earned you a good grade. Animmaculately played little exercise was what the teacher wasreally after. When we turn to Improvisation, we are going to find



all kind of "errors" in flow and in harmony; but these are acousticmicro-lessons in what goes seamlessly with something elsenaturally and acoustically.

Each dissonant sound can of course be taken as a leading-tone tothe adjacent sound, and if only one sound moves a half step theresult will actually be harmonic; so there would be no reason tostop with a "bad" note. Just go on and it will resolve, that is allthere is to it. You learn harmony by doing, since you can hearnon-consonant sounds very quickly and make decisions abouthow you want your playing to sound. And there may be toomuch sweetness, too harmonic a series, so you try a few off-keysto see how a little grit in the mixture works. But by bit youassemble tools for constructing the kind of sequence you want,something which suits the instrument, suits your ear, andsomething which a friend dropping by unannounced maycomment on saying "That's quite nice, that last part...". Firstplease yourself, it will please others, and what about those"mistakes"? Well, each of them can be taken as a starting pointfor something new, a new phrase or a new direction in theharmonic sequence; or it may trip off a fast run as a change ofpace, or a different sounding split chord. Mistakes are the seedsout of which new growth sprouts.

Baroque music might seem to be measure-and-bar music, bywhich I mean music which is always referring to the measurebars in the score as continual reference points. Some of thispractice must have come from dance steps in music which requireregularity and an anticipated beat, with an up-beat and a down-beat in each measure. Western music has been haunted by the'thesis' and 'arsis' of academicians drawn from ancient Greekmusical theory, where 'thesis' meant setting the foot down while'arsis' literally means raising it up. Somehow we reverse this inour musicology, confusing an already questionable situationfurther.



I hope a person when first getting into personal improvisation willtry to ignore up and down beats and for the moment ignore theidea of a measured chunk. Forget about the four-measuresegments which is (1) played (2) repeated once, (3) modifiedslightly and then slipped into a (4) resolution for a tonal closure.There is a lot of this already in early Baroque composition, but itseems to have caught the fancy of the Western ear overall and itcontinued unabated as a stock formula through the early Classicalperiod and on into 19th century musical expansion with fullorchestration. Only in the early 20th century did we break out ofthis four-square mold and into a new world of vari-structuredsounds.

But if you start Baroque improv with the four segment sequence,that will do no harm and it will give a touch of form to yourrambling inventions. But the four segments can be extended tosix, and can lap over into a another stream of sounds with a verydifferent pace of fast moving sixteenth notes without stopping. Inother words, let the form become free at some point and see howthat changes the nature of your musical meandering. Put the otherway around: If you really like four square organization inmeasures with internal up and down stresses, why not stick withCountry Music which uses these things as its musicalsubstructure? The majority of people seem to love Country andmany can't even hear Bach, so a clarification of intent might be agood thing at the start.

Back to the keyboard, you must notice that your two hands aremirror images of each other. When you learned to do parallelscales with both hands, it must have been with a great deal ofunconscious computing in the brain to match the motion of theRH. thumb with LH. pinky at speed; but you did master thatexercise. Now here is another one which will require a bit ofrewiring: The right and left hand can run in opposite directionssimultaneously. This is perfectly natural for two mirroring hands,



and it is very interesting musically because unlike the parallelscales which preserve the same harmonics note by note, inversemotion changes from harmonic to dis-harmonic sound note bynote. Every serious student of composition is told to watchinverse motion in his writing, since it leads to very interesting andunsuspected associations of sounds. We hear these opposingmotions continually in Renaissance and Baroque music of the16th century, they offer a clean and fresh change from the over-harmonic sweetness of much 19th century practice.

When one studies Standard Harmonic Practice, one of the firstlessons will be in Modulation as a way of changing the keysignature in the course of a musical sequence. The first changewill usually be to go through the formal Circle of Fifths to thenext key in the series, e.g. C major to G major, via the dominantof the second key, and so on. This formal academic shifting oftonality is used continually in all classical music, but for animproviser's use it has to operate musically in flight, not asexemplification of a rule. It seems more musically intuitive to trymoving around from your C major beginning, and see whatsound shifts you can discover as similar to the way Bach does iton one of your CDs. If you get a Bach-like effect, you are on linein a historical sense, and if you get a different effect you maywant to shift it around and normalize it. Or you may want to keepit as interesting and let it become part of your personal harmonicsensibility. There have been so many ways of getting from oneplace to another in the repertory of musical composition thatwhatever you do come up with, will certainly have beencopyrighted by some composer in the last five centuries. There isnothing really "wrong" in sound, only things which areunfamiliar and new.

But there are some simple tonal shifts which are basic and easy touse. The straight major scale is different when you lower the thirdinterval and then the sixth to give a minor scale. We in the Westhave only these two arrangements, the major and minor scalesleftovers from the Greek handful of Modes with individualemotions attached to each. The happy major and sad minor is an



unfortunate simplification, best soon forgotten. But there is aninteresting sound-shift from any major scale to the "relativeminor" in academic terminology, which starts a minor third downwith traditional minor scale lowering. Shifting back and forthbetween these is always interesting, a standard movement in allWestern music; but you can also shift from C major to C Minorstaying in the same range but still with these same two lowerings;you are now in what is called the Relative Minor. But this gives asecond kind of easy instant shifting which is after all whatModulation is about.

However in reality, you can shift from any series to any series,just go ahead and do it and see how it sounds. There are placeswhere Bach the master improviser moves so quickly from tonalityto tonality that it is impossible to say in what key he is playing ---until he get ready to end the piece and return to home. But forpieces to be played by standard student performers, he writesmeasured phrases with clear beats and stays largely in the samekey, if only as a practical matter. There are no rules, only thepractices of continually varying performances.

On of the stock Modulations if baroque music is by ChromaticMovement, which is done by raising a few notes by one halftone, and then establishing that new-found series as the newtonality. Done with a repeated rhythmic figure, this is somethingyou hear so regularly in baroque music that it almost becomes atrademark of the style. Used overly it becomes trite, but chromaticscalar movement is something that Bach experimented with often,and many modern scholars feel that had Bach's style not becomedisfavored in his lifetime and had he lived longer, he might wellhave verged into a chromaticism like that which we find inBeethoven's last quartets, and ultimately in 20th centuryinnovations. There is nothing un-baroque in experimenting withthe half tones, which are not really "accidentals" necessitated byoverlapping diatonic tonalities. It took four centuries before wecould at last think of music in half-tone terms, while the Indianshave always employed quarter tones as a basic substructure fortheir musical art. In its rhythmic and tonal apparatus, our richly



harmonic Western musical tradition is somewhat underprivileged;some might even consider us possessed of a third-worldrhythmical musicality.

The modern piano has sounds which sing far longer than thebaroque harpsichord, and when we play baroque music with analmost staccato fingerwork in great speed, we miss one of thegood things which a modern piano can add to ancient music. Alow piano sound can last almost half a minute till disappearance,while a middle treble has a good 15 seconds of duration.Improvised playing should take advantage of some of therichness of our well engineered piano sounds and work with aconscious legato of the fingers sounds to melt naturally into eachother, while letting the singing sounds of a modern soundboardreverberate between the bursts of our active fingering.

One can think of trying to catch a bit of the singing of Corelli'swonderful strings with the on-ringing of the strings of a goodpiano. Baroque playing does not mean mechanical trapwork ofthe fingers as once taught, or exact timing of each measure as 1 +2 + 3 + 4. Listen to Casals in 1938 playing the Bach Cello Suitein loosened tempi, which is the way he heard it in his ownvirtuosic mind, even if modern critics say it is all out of shape.Our baroque improvisation can be as loose and fluid as we wish,or it can be tight and measured in places, relaxed elsewhere bycontrast. In the world of Improvisation there are no Rules, onlythe consensus of practices which seem good to hear, as part of theevolving stylistics of the improviser in the progress of his ongoingdevelopment.

In Epilog I would like to say that improvising in a modifiedBaroque Style is a wonderful training for both hands and mind.As you progress in your own curve of learning andexperimentation, you reach into new ways of handling form andsound. This can be a self-fulfilling project in itself, good for manyan evening of soundscaping in the privacy of your imagination.



Going further in this direction you may want to shift to theharpsichord which has a character of its own, different from thepiano but probably much nearer to the sounds of 18th centuryimprovisers at their keyboard. Organs are found in most churchesand they may open another window of the sound experience.

But you may want to re-shape your learning and experienceaway from the baroque style and move to an entirely differentstyle of improvisation. Although the full sound of 19th centurymusic sounds quite different from the acoustic compactness of thebaroque, it is firmly built on what went before. When Brahmssaid that every morning began for him with Bach he was thinkingof form and structure and the inner voices which are socharacteristic of his composition, rather than just the sound. Or itmay be time to make a complete acoustic break and becomeinterested in the Polytonal realm, using all the halftones of thediatonic scale as acoustic equals, and perhaps fusing elements ofstandard classical harmony with the edge and biting qualities ofminor seconds and augmented fourths.

What you have learned from your involvement with the earlierstyles should be the basis for reaching out into a personal musicalfreedom. Musical traditions in any culture are cumulative, weimbibe intuitively a sense of what went before and even if we ripup the ancient scores and say we are going on into the future witha clean slate ---- it will never work out that way. We develop newpoints of reference in our thinking, and the end of a road in antventure will be different from where you started out.

William HarrisProf. Em. Middlebury Collegewww.middlebury.edu/~harris

on baroque improvisation

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