Anyone out there doing improvisation as part of their playing (or practice)? Not necessarily jazz, maybe just noodling around...

When you play in this unstructured or undirected way, I think it opens up different ways of learning rather than the somewhat rigid goal-directed study of "a piece". Kind-of Eastern/mystical versus Western/scientific...

I think it's slowly coming into favour with professionals, e.g. the cellist Matthew Barley.

Views?

Yes I frequently doodle for fun. It often turns into composition so I write it down too. (Or record it.)

I'm thankfully at the stage of knowing where most of the notes are (violin!) to be able to play yesteryear's pop tunes by ear so I try to add some variation once I get started. I'm inspired by Grappelli obviously. An interesting thing happened a while ago. I simply forgot what I was supposed to play during a home session and had to make something up based on the harmony which I know well so I suppose that counts. The others noticed and flatteringly said it was a nice bit of impromptu.

It would be nice to find a CD of blues or jazz backing tracks with the chords made known so I could jam away ad inf! Or possibly some of these m.o.r songs less the solo.

Didn't Yehudi Menuhin express an interest in jazz? I heard he worked with Stephane Grappelli but his solos had to be written out for him. I expect that this was due to not enough improvisation being incorporated into his practice. Equally, I am sure that Grappelli could not match Menuhin in other areas of violin playing. In my opinion improvisation should be an integral part of practice in order to develop every aspect of musicianship. However, I guess that the amount of time spent improvising would depend on what you want to achieve.

One of my adult students has recently asked specifically for help with improvisation and it's proving a very interesting exercise.

I have had to improvise for many years - although in a fairly limited range of styles, since much of it has been in the context of playing the organ. (I can't do jazz impr for instance.) The student in question has good keyboard facility (grade 8 many years ago) but is quite tied to conventional and very correct 4 part harmony with a theoretical background, so it's been a matter of encouraging her to branch out a bit and lose the constraints, get away from 16-bar phrases, that sort of thing.

I'm not an expert in improvisation by any means but I can do it because I've had to, and it's been really interesting analysing some of the things I do almost without thinking.

ISTR Menuhin also had his "improvisations" written out when he worked with the famous Indian sitar player and musician Ravi Shankar. Menuhin was very into Eastern stuff, yoga and so on. He also had a violin pupil called Daniel Hope, who I thnk has studied those earlier "improvisations" and recreated them anew http://www.danielhope.com/cd/pop_cd_7.html . The cellist Matthew Barley is also into Indian musical styles and practices.

Playing in tune in Western intonation is hard enough, let alone Indian as well!

"Playing in tune in Western intonation is hard enough, let alone Indian as well!"

I quite agree. Although, having just aquired a violin, I have to say that the boundries between western and indian intonation seem to blur when I play!

yeh. when i play the violin the boundaries between music and non-music blur often

Structure is one key to improvising, I think - taking a phrase and inverting it later on, doing counterpoint, taking a phrase that you've messed up and repeating it so it sounds like you meant to do it, and at the same time, trying not to "edit" what you do.

It's a difficult thing, and it's especially difficult not to get into "repeating" your improvisations so they just start to become a piece of music - then it's no longer improvisation!

The organist at a famous French cathedral used to do amazing improvisations. I visited there a couple of times when it dawned on me that, actually, they were roughly the same - exactly the same, in places.

So it's got to be (for me) about being reasonably strict with structure (otherwise it turns into "noodling" and disrespects people's attention), balanced with true freshness. Not easy.

I quite often improvise when I'm playing the piano in church services - for the offertory or reflective sections of the evening prayer services. I usually start by playing various modern quiet songs and choruses and then depart by using the same chord progressions, and improvising over the top. If there's still time, I begin to alter the chord progression for variety. (I also have a few stock progressions which I fall back on if I'm coming a bit unstuck!)

I do believe it's something you can learn and develop. For example, try improvising just on a short melodic phrase (3 notes would do), OR a chord progression (although this can lead to noodling - see my prev post!) OR a rhythmic figure.

One of the comedy store (UK) players recently ran a day's workshop on improvisation (on stage, in groups) and she said it's all about "not getting in the way of yourself, not filtering" but at the same time, reincorporating elements of the conversation/action/music that had worked. Also the best sign of good improvisation on stage is when you actually don't remember (at all) what you did - but everyone else thought it was fantastic.

I think improvisation goes beyond music and applies in all spheres of activity. So perhaps you could also relate the elements of successful theatre improvisation to music.

The most exciting thing about improvisation is doing it in groups of musicians. I recently ran one workshop where we took this a stage further, and co-improvised a piece with 10 harpists and 3 dancers. That was really fun and it's great to push the boundaries a bit.

So one thing to practice, is improvising WITH other atrists / musicians - which sort of neatly comes back to jazz...