Starters

Although I have played many concerts and broadcasts of classical and contemporary chamber music, my main interest has focused on improvised concert performance. That means walking on stage and beginning to play with absolutely nothing in mind: no preconceived structures, themes or motives, no idea in what key or tempo or mood I will begin, not even knowing where I will initially place the hands. And if something is already running in my imagination, I try to leave it in favour of beginning from a kind of emptiness. While that can often be pretty scary, it allows the possibility of an entirely unfettered creative experience — or at least an unfettered launch to the improvisation.

When I have had something in mind and begin my performance with that, I have found that it can quickly play itself out, leaving me blank, at which point I may feel abandoned by my musical imagination. Sometimes it can be more difficult to find a creative flow once you’ve already allowed your process to influenced by and partially dependent on material coming from outside your own resources. Of course, many musicians have the opposite experience; some musicians rely on having a set place from which to begin. Each musician has to see what is their best starting place.

It should be obvious that in order to improvise freely, we need to have a great deal of material from which to draw: theoretical, thematic, harmonic, technical material, and much else. And it cannot be material that has been only recently learned, because it has to be deeply internalized in order to be available for the kind of spontaneous outpouring needed for composing in the moment. Therefore, much of the material on this website contains ideas that may prove more useful as starting points for your improvisational practice than improvisational performance. While I do not advocate using starter material for a performance of free improvisation, I certainly don’t recommend trying to use these particular “starters” in a concert situation. Some of them are too detailed and too difficult for many musicians to really follow up with improvised playing, but they each offer some useful approach to practice improvising.

This first Starter, Raspberry Schubert, is based on root-position minor triads in the right hand. They are each presented as a ”1+3” texture, where the first note is played ON each beat and is followed by the rest of the four-note triad filling in the “&” of each beat. The LH simply plays the mediant (the third of each minor triad), so it tracks the RH in parallel sixths. It’s just a spunky ‘two-step’ dance with an ending designed to feed seamlessly into a repetition of the whole seven-measure passage.