Improvisation in Western Music

[b0b]

We take improvisation for granted. Today, most musicians don't read music, and most bands feature soloists improvising over a chord progression. Since the invention of the phonograph, the historical record of of live music has been preserved.

I wonder about the centuries preceding the jazz era. Was the concept of improvising over a chord progression used in European music before it became all the rage here in America? Have popular musicians always improvised? Or was the music of the common man always passed down note-for-note, written or taught by one musician to another?

[Mike Neer]

There has been improvisation in European music since at least the 9th century, where they would improvise counterpoint over chants. In the Renaissance period, musicians improvised over chord changes, too.

Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Chopin, Liszt and many others were exceptional improvisers.

[Josh Sommovilla]

B0b I am not an expert on this, and am unsure of the role of chord progressions per se, but I am pretty sure that improvisation was an integral component of a lot of baroque music. Also, I think I remember reading that Mozart participated pretty frequently in improvisation competitions.

[Bob Hoffnar]

Figured bass was a system of improvisation used by harpsichord / organ players centuries ago. It has many of the same characteristics as jazz chord charts before there were chords as we think of them. I wonder if chords were an unfortunate by product of the fourth , bass, voice added to counterpoint in the first place. But that is another subject ....

Check into bad ass classical harpsichord players. While keeping within a very strict idiom they do quite a bit of extrapolation and improvising. Figured bass is a pretty cool short hand.

[Alan Brookes]

Nowadays we think of folk music, classical music, popular music, etc., in different veins. In the Middle Ages there was not such a distinct separation as there is now. Nowadays, a classical piece will be written out in full for every instrument in the orchestra, but in earlier periods they would often add words such as "basso continuo", which basically meant, "improvise the bass part." Church music was usually written out, but folk music was not. Songs were sung and played from memory and often changed over the years, which is why there are now many variations of most old traditional numbers. When classical composers were looking for melodies they often turned to their local folk music, which is why such people as Ralph Vaughan-Williams, who based most of his melodies on English folk songs, are so different from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who based many of his melodies on Slavic folk songs. To know so much about folk music, which was mainly sung in public houses/saloons for entertainment, those composers must have spent a lot of time singing the music themselves. (I guess looking for musical inspiration is always a good excuse for a pub crawl.)

Bob, you should check out the music of people like the Baltimore Consort, who play Early Music on original instruments. It's very light to listen to, not like classical music, and there is a lot of improvisation going on. If you start listening a lot to Early Music one of the things that will strike you is how much the Blues Scale appears, which should put to rest any ideas that the Blues originated in the southern states. The blues, and its offspring jazz, go back thousands of years in Europe and Africa. In fact I think that it has always been with us. It's only the names that are new, and the modern instruments they use nowadays.

[b0b]

Bob: I thought that figured bass was a fairly specific way of indicating chord voicings - a shortcut to writing all of the notes of a chord. Modern chord names leave the voicing of the chord up to the player, which encourages more improvisation.

Alan: I've never heard any European music from before 1900 that sounded remotely like the blues. The most archetypical blues sound is the flatted 3rd melody note over a 7th chord. Where in European folk music can you hear that? Examples, please!

[Alan Brookes]

...Alan: I've never heard any European music from before 1900 that sounded remotely like the blues. The most archetypical blues sound is the flatted 3rd melody note over a 7th chord. Where in European folk music can you hear that? Examples, please!

That's a question that cannot be answered in soundbites. I have by far the largest collection of Early Music CDs and LPs of anyone I know. If you were here I could pull out some LPs and play a few tracks. As it is I'm going to have to spend some time playing through them. I shouldn't post copyrighted tracks on the internet, but I can email you an example. One good example is the first improvisation of Tres Moricas M'enamoran on the Waverly Consort Album "1492, Music from the Age of Discovery". I'll send you a .wma track via the internet.

[b0b]

Was the concept of improvising over a chord progression used in European music before it became all the rage here in America? Alan emailed me some examples of improvisation without chord progressions, mostly just noodling on a minor scale. (BTW, my computer doesn't like WMA files, Alan.)

Bob mentioned figured bass, which seems to me to be a shorthand way of writing chords in very specific inversions, before chord names were invented. I'd like to hear some expert period music improvised over figured bass sheet music.

[Guy Cundell]

Within the Baroque period, 1600-1750, improv was a desirable skill. The last sections of ternary forms, (ABA, notably Da Capo Aria) provided the opportunity for players and singers to show what they could do over the changes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_(music)

As Mike mentioned, many great composers were renown as excellent improvisors, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and in the absence of recordings, theme and variations can be considered to be written out improvisations over changes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS7yiD6cz8A

While improv has died out in classical music under a fairly oppressive pedagogical regime, it still lives on magically in the world of organists. There was a great European TV series on improv back a few years ago that devoted an episode to the organ tradition.

[b0b]

What about dance bands? Did they improvise?

[Alan Brookes]

What about dance bands? Did they improvise?

It depends on the style of the band, and who paid them. By far the most dancing that was done was by ordinary everyday working folk, dancing to folk melodies. Generally, the musicians didn't play to sheet music, they improvised. But where some sort of formation dancing was performed the band would have to stick to the melody and rhythm or the dancers wouldn't be able to practise.
The other sorts of dancing were more formal. You wouldn't want the band to vary from the music in a ballet, for instance, or the dancers would get confused. Likewise, in courtly music, the aristocrats had specific dances that they had practised and knew all their lives, which didn't leave much room for improvisation. If the band leader announced, "And now my lords, ladies and gentlemen, Sir Richard de Coverley..." everyone would know what tune to expect and what formal dance to do, even those nobles visiting from other countries.
On the other hand, those bands were paid by the lord of the manor, and would play exactly as he told them. Between dances, or while they were eating, for instance, he may well have loved improvisation.
I would recommend anyone to go into an Irish pub, for instance, and listen to the improvisations on folk tunes that have remained essentially unchanged for centuries.

[b0b]

I would recommend anyone to go into an Irish pub, for instance, and listen to the improvisations on folk tunes that have remained essentially unchanged for centuries.

Most of the Irish folk music I've heard sounds like rote memorization of melodies. Anything that remains "essentially unchanged for centuries" isn't really improvisation, is it?

[Alan Brookes]

The melody around which the improvisation is done will be what hasn't changed for centuries.

To anyone not used to listening to Early Music, by the way, it will often sound middle eastern. That's because most European instruments originated in the Middle East and were brought back to Europe during the Crusades, as was the influence of arab music. As you know, most of Spain was under Arab control for centuries, and there is still a big arab influence in Spanish culture, which has flowed over into the rest of Europe. The other thing to be aware of is that modern instruments are strung to a much higher tension, so they resonate differently. When you pluck a loose string its pitch rises to a crescendo and then falls slightly flat. This is a feature of Chinese, Indian and Arabic music which used to be feature of European music, too. Remember, there were no nylon strings available. Strings were mostly sheep gut or cow gut. They came in all sorts of diameters, and the thickness varied over the length of the string, so no two strings were alike. Most instruments had double courses, and the sounding of adjacent strings with different vibration characteristics but tuned in unison gave a very distinctive sound. Alternative strings were braided silk or vines, again, not very reliable. When metal strings came along they were not the super strong steel ones we have today. They were low grade metal, stretched by hand or with primative machinery, and they broke easily. You couldn't tune them to today's concert pitch and expect them to last.

[Earnest Bovine]

Bob: I thought that figured bass was a fairly specific way of indicating chord voicings - a shortcut to writing all of the notes of a chord. Modern chord names leave the voicing of the chord up to the player,

Actually, figured bass does not tell the player how to voice the chord. That is up to the performer, who may be good at it, or maybe not, just as with a modern pop music chord chart. Both systems tell you the chord, and the bass note.

[Earnest Bovine]

Anything that remains "essentially unchanged for centuries" isn't really improvisation, is it?

No, it's change by accident. And possibly a lot of what passes for improvisation is mistakes, poor memory, poor technique, or playing song #1 when everybody else is playing song #2.

[Andy Volk]

A good modern example of a gifted improvisor working from figured bass is the record Keith Jarrett made with Michaela Petri on recorder ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzDTgfX6 ... 52FC7CA979

http://www.amazon.com/Recorder-Harpsich ... arpsichord

40 used copies from 31 cents!!

[Bob Hoffnar]

The cadenza was usually improvised in past centuries also.

[Mike Neer]

This is a really cool series on improvisation in the Renaissance style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqieB8InFOs

Check out #1, the Benedictus duo.

[b0b]

Very cool video series, Mike. Thanks.

[John Ed Kelly]

The bulk of this post is from a musician friend Nathaniel Garbutt - he plays double bass, piano, trumpet and is also in a choir. Here's his response to this thread - I sent it to him for a comment or two!

Chrs,

''Yeah interesting discussion. Mike Neer's post is absolutely correct. Western European music from time immemorial is based on improvisation. It does strike me that people seem to think that it's only a jazz thing. Renaissance and baroque music in particular, improvisation is as much a requirement as it is in jazz. There are some interesting posts about basso continuo. Basso continuo is a technique that began in the very late renaissance/early baroque period where a composer would write the bass notes with some numeric figures under the notes - it's also called figured bass. Sometimes this bass part was written with a lot of rhythmic information sometimes it's just a single note for an entire bar or more. The numbers represent the other notes that sound above the bass note (much like a chord) and the keyboard players and bass viols (collectively called the continuo) would then improvise using the single line of music. It is very similar to the way a piano player or a bass player plays in a N.O jazz band from a chord chart.

There is a subtle distinction that needs to be made with regards to basso continuo and chord inversions. It was only towards the very end of the Baroque period that the idea of chord inversions took hold. So to your average baroque musician, a C major root position triad is actually an entirely different chord to a C major first inversion triad and not just an altered version of the same thing. This makes sense as functional harmony often makes a distinction between chord inversions as the inversion alters the function so trying to think of them as the same but different can often seem unnecessarily complicated. Basso continuo also doesn't stipulate anything about voicings (other than the note in the bass which is always the root of the chord anyway)

If a 'C' written on the bass clef is written with no figure below it then it was assumed that a 5/3 figure is intended. This means play a 'C' in the bass and above this 'C' you're going to need a diatonic fifth and a third above the bass i.e. a G and an E if there is no key signature.
If the 'C' has just a 6 or the more complete form of 6/3 underneath it, it means you'd need a sixth and a third above the bass so an A and a C.

There is nothing to say which octave or which order these notes need to be voiced above the bass note...it also doesn't mean you can't use passing chords or are only limited to those notes specified in the figure. It is just a different way of writing down the important notes in the current harmony with flexibility for writing rhythm. Any competent continuo player will know how to play passing chords over a figured bass in much the same way a jazz pianist won't just stick the chords/notes on the chord chart.

There are also common progressions that were used for the basis of improvisation - some so common they have a name like 'La folia' (in the same way we say 'A blues' and understand it as a 12 bar progression).

Singers, especially baroque opera singers, were expected to be strong improvisers. The whole "da capo" or ternary form for aria's in opera seria is designed specifically for improvisation. The aria is in 2 basic parts - part A and part B. The singer will sing through both parts A and B only lightly varying the melody. The highlight is then when part A is repeated again after part B and the singer was expected to go to town. Audience members would attend the same opera night after night expecting something completely different and the singer would be castigated and poorly reviewed if they didn't deliver.
Handel was able to start writing a 3/3.5 hour opera and have it open in under a month due to the fact that he could use standard forms like the "da capo" aria and write lean simple melodies with often only a single line of basso continuo as an accompaniment. He could then rely on his musicians and singers to improvise and fill in the gaps.

Mozart's piano concerto's also contain segments where the written piano part suddenly stops and is replaced with just block chords...basically Mozart would have just used this information and improvised his figurations. Most of his concertos also don't contain written cadenzas which he would have improvised and expected other performers to do so. Mozart did write some special cadenzas for "amateur" performers with the distinction being that "professionals" could improvise their own and the difference between the two classes of performer was the ability to improvise well. It was also common practice for keyboardists to improvise little modulating preludes or intermezzos in between pieces in different keys to soften an abrupt change in tonality.

Most of Chopin's music is just a written down and cleaned up improvisation and it wasn't really until the later half of the 19th century that the focus drastically shifted away from improvisation and towards how much control composers could take in how music information could be reliably encoded into the written score and how the music was performed.

It is possibly due to the fact that musical information has been transmitted down through history in written form rather than recorded form and that jazz coincides with recording technology that people come away with the perception that European music is only written down and only played as written and jazz is improvised.''

[Jan Viljoen]

Here is a video about Renaissance singing improvisation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8wLxWnTDAE

Thanks for a nice thread.

[b0b]

So, the "improvisation" is just deciding which of two or three notes you'll sing on the beat. It seems that nobody is allowed to change the timing of notes or go outside their assigned range. Very strict rules - not like improvising a solo on "Crazy Arms".

[Jan Viljoen]

B0b,

It seems to me there are/were some rules which musicians had to follow.

Dont know who made the rules and if they can be changed or adapted for various instruments.

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-Authentic- ... -Era-Music

http://www.continuo.ca/files/Crash%20co ... rpoint.pdf

[Alan Brookes]

Bob, they didn't video things in the middle ages, so all we know about what they played is from writings at the time. No-one has heard pre-baroque music played on original instruments by the players of the time for hundreds of years. We don't know what went on at jam sessions. I tend to think that improvisation is built into human nature, in all aspects of life. Otherwise things would never change.

[Michael Maddex]

... I tend to think that improvisation is built into human nature, in all aspects of life. ...

I think that Alan is probably quite right here. I can easily imagine some medieval troubadour with his lute strapped across his back (ala the Johnny Cash guitar) telling his fellow folk musician friends: 'Man, I never play any song the same way twice.'