Today was an ok day. Practicing was productive. My goal was to say goodbye to Rex this morning and not be crying on the way out the door. It was hard, but I accomplished that. Coming home tonight was hard because my Mom is really heart broken. She spent the whole day at home, and he followed her around like the faithful dog he was and she felt guilty.
At school 2 of my friends had read last night's post and gave me knowing hugs today. I love my friends.
While in a practice room, I spent 20 minutes improvising as a therapeutic release and emotional experience. It always amazes me how powerful an experience it is to just let yourself go and create music our of nothing. It's one thing when I improvise for ballet, it's really structured and the goal is to outline the form of the music, rather than any emotion.
Don't get me wrong, I love improvising for ballet. the structure allows me to practice and improve technically and in terms of thinking logically about music. It's just such an overwhelming experience to let all the musical skills I've built over the years come together to create something that expresses to the best of my ability what I want to express. I still feel that the best of my abilities is not good enough. This is not to say that I wasnt satisfied with my improvising today, it was indeed rather cathardic. I just know that I still have technical impediments as well as not enough concentation.
The concentration is something Im working on. Thats one of the things I don't do so well with is theme recollection. I can create things from nothing, and repeat something similar to the original theme later, but I need to be more exact. I think I'll start practicing with hymn tunes. that wayt he theme will have to be exact and embedded.
I think everyone should improvise. Im not sure to what degree it's true that not everyone can do it. A lot of it is getting over the fear of putting out something that is not musically valid. I recently was in a practice room with a colleague, getting her to try improvising. I really think she can do it, with work at it, it would be super good for her. But it was blatantly obvious that she felt ridiculous doing it in front of someone.... I felt that way at first too, I would only do it at home, alone..... improvising on piano that is... DIRTY!
Anyway, its especially strong in musicians who are so classically trained for so long... We get used to only putting out music that has been tried by the test of time, music that has been accepted as worthwhile. Someone who is playing at an associateship level in university is used to playing music that dazzles the listener; they play mature, complicated music. When you start improvising, the material that you put out there is way down at the maybe grade 3 or 4 level... very simplistic stuff. But the learning curve is very steep. The reason its so simplistic at first is because its completely new, and the basic principles are what needs to be developed. In order for the mind to grasp those concepts, the actual technical aspects need to be so simple that they can be easily understood, and manipulated. Once those concepts are grasped, its simply a matter of thinking logically about what you are doing, and applying all the technical tricks to what you are thinking of. This is the point at which I am working.
I have finally become completely comfortable with the concepts and thought process of improvising. I find that the more I do it, the more tools of the pianistic trade I have to use. Im finding that a lot of the Rubinsteinean techniques I've worked on in my concerto have been working their way into my improvising... likewise with all the technical work I've done over the last few years. It's exciting to hear my playing, and musicality developing.
Anyway, I want everyone to at least try improvising, and Im more than willing to help you out in getting started. I think this will be my pet project, and while I was writing this, I've decided its gonna be my indep studay project for next year. Improvising: a comprehensive approach to practical applications and teaching.... something like that...
good night for now