Musical Improvisation: The Miracle of Spontaneous Composition

If you have ever attended a rock concert, you have probably seen and heard a guitarist go off into his own world in a long, perhaps prolonged improvisation.

In a jazz quartet, on the other hand, musicians toss a melody around like a half-deflated basketball. Once one of them grabs the melody, like a Harlem Globetrotter, he does things that I could never anticipate. The crowd applauds his improvisation before the next musician takes the melody from him, with the edgy high energy of the street one-upmanship known as "the dozens."

What improvisation is not

Many fans of classical music take a dim view of improvisation based on a misunderstanding. Improvisation does not mean seating an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of Steinways (tuxedos optional), with the hope that one will pound out a Chopin etude or a Beethoven sonata.

Improvisation is a skill with a place in musical academia, taught, studied, and although it sounds contradictory, practiced. Improvisational comedians do not stand up before their audiences and babble nonsense syllables; when musicians improvise, they do not just pound on the keyboard. They perform within a recognizable musical language - keys, modes, chords, something.

For me, the best way to identify the process of improvisation is to say that it is spontaneous composition. Like a tightrope acrobat, the musician-composer risks everything before an audience... and without a net.

My improvisation on improvisations: Jarrett, Messiaen, McEvilly

To illustrate the range of musical improvisation, I am going to improvise on three extremely gifted but very different musicians: jazz pianist Keith Jarrett (Wikipedia article here), classical composer Olivier Messiaen (my article here), and classical pianist Wayne McEvilly (his website here).

By its nature, improvisation is a fleeting thing, even more so than a live performance of a pre-composed work. With modern technology, however, these performances can be preserved and presented over the Internet. As with my other writing on music, I provide a link to every piece of music to which I refer, so that you can enjoy what I am discussing, even if you are not familiar with it.

Improvisation: Keith Jarrett, The Köln Concert

Listen to The Köln Concert in its entirety (a little over an hour) here.

Keith Jarrett, of these three musicians, is the most obvious one to perform improvisations, since he comes from a jazz background. But, he also has a classical background. His discography shows a distinct split personality between jazz and classical.

He is known for his entire concerts of solo piano improvisation that were preserved on LPs, the best known of which is The Köln Concert (recorded, 1975, in Köln, that is Cologne, Germany). The Wall Street Journal (here) reports that it is "the most successful solo jazz album of all time." The Journal also reports "Keith Jarrett wants to see each of the 3.5 million copies of The Köln Concert stomped into the ground."

The "problem" for Jarrett and his more dedicated fans is that The Köln Concert has come to be appreciated by people who are not jazz fans. This lush, powerful, sophisticated music is, simply, too beautiful, too accessible.

The concert was performed in two movements with a short encore - all improvisations. When the recording was released in 1975 on two LPs, the music was divided into four sections: "I" (26:15),"II a" (15:00), "II b" (19:19), and "II c" (6:59). The four parts fit snugly onto a single CD. Since there was no video recording of this concert, the YouTube videos to which I previously linked (here) simply have a picture of Keith Jarrett, while the music plays.

Improvisation: Olivier Messiaen at the Organ of Holy Trinity Church

Watch, listen to, and even download the half-hour video of Olivier Messiaen's organ improvisations here.

For more than six decades, with time off for such distractions as being a prisoner of war (an experience you can learn more about here) Olivier Messiaen served as organist of Paris's Église de la Sainte-Trinité (Church of the Holy Trinity). The Holy Trinity organ (six-minute video documentary here) became such an important part of Messiaen's life and composition that he would work out musical ideas through his organ improvisations.

I have written several articles on Messiaen. I maintain a Twitter account devoted to his music (here), and I am developing a website about his music (here). All that you really need to know before you experience this video of Messiaen's improvisations, however, is watch out.

Despite, or he might say, because of his rigorously conservative Catholicism, Messiaen displays in his music the most ecstatic spirituality that I know of in any music. At any moment, Olivier Messiaen, distinguished classical composer and one of the most highly regarded teachers of composition in the twentieth century, can morph into Brother Ollie, pounding the ivories and getting' down for the Lord, to show us how to get up to Him, for all the world as if he were not performing in a Parisian church but in a backwoods Holy Ghost revival. Let the congregation say, Amen! Sometimes, I think it might be more appropriate to yell, Twist and shout!

There were CDs of Messiaen improvising before a live audience at Holy Trinity Church, now out of print. This video (here) originally appeared on a DVD together with a performance of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (more), also out of print. Snippets of this video can be found on YouTube, but they are just bits of the complete half-hour video to which I am linking.

Improvisation: Wayne McEvilly and the paintings of Ser

Watch "Serimages With Metamusic" (almost ten minutes) here.

When I referred to Wayne McEvilly as a classical pianist, I might have offended him, because he is so much more. He has a doctorate in what was (at the time he earned it) called Oriental Studies, he is an author and friend of authors, and on his Twitter account (here) he documents his travels to and performances of classical music in public libraries in cities and towns across Oklahoma.

He also champions the exquisite paintings of an artist known as Ser. Where Ser lives, who he is, I do not know, and apparently neither does anyone on the Internet except Wayne McEvilly, and he is not telling. He does offer two lovely collections of Ser's paintings in this video (here, to which I have already linked), accompanied by his improvisations, and in another video (here) for which he plays a Bach prelude.

McEvilly calls his improvisation "MetaMusic." I prefer to think of it as "Medi-Music," music for meditation, perhaps medical music that can heal the weary soul, or music that mediates between us and the paintings of Ser... or do the paintings of the mysterious Ser mediate between us and McEvilly's music? All I know is that I have this video of Ser's paintings and McEvilly's improvisation (here - again) book marked in my favorites, so that I can quickly go to it for spiritual refreshment.

You can enjoy Dr. McEvilly's classical performances (and see him at work) in the videos listed here. You can also enjoy an interview with him (here) in which you can experience the missionary zeal that he brings to spreading classical music across Oklahoma.