9.3 Skills Practice Arcs And Chords

[Alethia Tiell]

About 25 years ago, I heard Robert Levin the pianist playing the Mozart concerto and he improvised the cadenza. So every time he played it through this was a different cadenza. And that sort of blew my mind. And I'd never heard anything like that before, and never considered anything like that before. But ever since then I've been vaguely aware that there are folks in the classical music world who've spoken about the importance of improvisation. And I have the sense that maybe in the last five to 10 years, the interest in improvisation has become a little bit more prevalent or mainstream. And there might even be a little bit more research interest in this area as well. Right before you came, I was reading this study from 2014 of musicians, which basically found that the musicians who were trained in improv scored higher on certain measures of creativity and originality, compared to musicians who are not trained in improv. Seemingly, it was because improv training had what they call this releasing effect on the evaluation system. It just enabled these folks to stop self evaluating quite as much and generate more creative ideas in the moment, which seems like a really important performance skill in that we don't want to be evaluating ourselves on stage necessarily inhibiting our ability to play more freely and creatively. But my experience with improv was sort of anxiety inducing, and that it sort of freaked me out the idea of trying to improvise. And so I think some of us might have these preconceived notions of what improvisation means that can be a little bit intimidating and scare us off and make it seem like this kind of training isn't relevant to playing Paganini Caprices or solo Bach or orchestral excerpts. And so I wasn't exactly sure where to start off the conversation. But you've been teaching and doing workshops for like 20 something years and a number of the folks who've participated in your workshops come from pretty traditional or high level classical backgrounds. So one thing I'm curious about is, is your sense of what draws some of these classically trained folks to seek out these workshops, or what they say they're looking for when they when they start up with you.

Yeah, that's a great question because, you know, just yesterday I was teaching here in midtown Manhattan. And at the end of our two day - I call them creative strings workshops or creative strings boot camps - at the end, I asked that question of some of the participants and we had, for example, professional classroom teachers who teach strings in middle school or high school. We also had a private studio teacher here in New York, who teaches mostly adults actually. And then we had a couple people who were professionals outside of music, but who want to continue to play the violin. And then we had somebody who was literally had a show at Carnegie Hall two nights ago who showed up and a graduate of Juilliard who I actually met when I first taught a class for you. So that's the range of people that I get at these classes, which I think is important because it is such a range and I asked them yesterday, why do you want to do this. One person who had another career, their career is not music. He said, I want to follow through on something in my life, he said, I feel like there's been so many aspects of my life that I haven't followed through on all the time growing up, I want to follow through on music. And with these, these concepts are going to help me to have a deeper relationship with music and go out and play in a jam session, for example, but then, another teacher, a classroom teacher, she said, I want to pass on to my students, the things that I did not receive from my teachers. And I'm driven as a pedagogue and pedagogy is like my art. And I feel like I really want to give the students these things. And by the way, you know, these these things, not just improvisation, but arranging and composition and fluency with harmony and rhythm. And I guess we could say, a more multicultural appreciation of a range of styles of music. These kinds of things have been suggested as standards within the education system in America for maybe 15 years, so the teachers would like to be giving our kids all these things in addition to what we learned through Suzuki, or through high level classical playing, not just improvisation, but it's really, it's a world of skills or a set of skills and perspectives that I'm advocating we give to people. Other people talk about that they want to connect more with music. So in fact, someone who had graduated from Juilliard, very high level player, he said, I realized that what I really want to do with music is I want to connect with people. And he said, I realized that if I go and I see a musician playing in the subway or on the street, I can't connect with that musician. I don't know how to have a collaboration, like a musical collaboration with that musician, which that resonates with me because I know that's, that's true. Like as classical musicians, we're just in this kind of bubble in the way we think about music and talk about it in the skills we have. It makes it hard for us to translate with musicians, whether they're in the participatory cultures, as it's known sometimes, or the Jazz Studies canon, the way that I kind of wrapped up that conversation we had last night after these two really intense days, what I said that, that I heard from a lot of these people, was that people want to have a relationship with music, they want to have a better relationship with music, somehow. And I feel like part of that has to do with our relationships with ourselves. Like a therapist will tell you that your job is to be your own best friend. You have to accept yourself, be aware of yourself, encourage yourself, be a conscience to yourself. Part of our journeys, as humans is to be is to have a relationship with ourselves. And I think that music is a forum and a vehicle for people actually Do that. So it's not just improvisation. But it's a lot of skills and knowledge that we don't get that is holding back people from having that deeper relationship with themselves through music.

Can you say more about that? Actually, I mean, there are a couple things that I want to go back to. I've never thought of music that way. And I wonder if you could say more about it so that I understand a little bit more clearly where you're coming from with that?

Well, there was another woman yesterday who I believe she's a professional teacher. And she said that she felt like she was an introvert. And that one time someone had asked her who you playing for. And she realized that she was playing music for herself that music was you know that she was her own audience. So when you talked about that pianist who improvised that cadenza, most classical musicians cannot do that. We just can't do it because we just haven't learned the information. And I think that then we have this sense of fear. And once we realize how disconnected we are from other musicians how we can't be a part of it. So some people in my workshop are talking about that how they felt like they couldn't be a part of these other scenarios. I used to feel like when I was... you must have felt this too, you know how like, your parents or like friends would always ask like play me a song. And then you like you get your violin out and you're like, Okay, what can I play? Well, maybe you're working on like the Sibelius Violin Concerto, or, or Vivaldi? Well, if you play it, it doesn't really sound as great as it could without the accompaniment. It's, you know, so there's always this sense that we're limited in our ability to communicate the music, because we don't really understand the music that fully. So now, going back through it, like when I work with my own kids, or with my students, I always accompany them when they play on the violin. Like even I don't even read the piano part. Like I've learned the music like in the Suzuki books, so I have at least a sense of, Okay, here's the chord structure of this song or the chord structure of this song. And there's a sense of empowerment that comes from that. So it's not just about improvisation, it's about just empowering yourself with knowledge. But I think, if whether it's like, that we feel held back from connecting with other people, we feel like we're not a complete musician. I think people want to be self expressed. I think people want to have more variety. They want to connect with different types of musicians, different kinds of people. They want different types of projects, they want to share their own work out there, like make a YouTube video and share it, like have a spontaneous musical moment with your family or in your community or at your church or like at the Irish pub or whatever. And so then people have a lot of fear and a lot of resistance around it. It's like, you kind of like, hide from that reality. In fact, one of my mentors, a person who I really, really, really respect a lot. And I'm super grateful to he's a great musician in the classical world, I'm not gonna name him. But I asked him, I said, Do you think that, uh, do you know that there's a difference between like classical symphonies and like jazz music or other forms of art? And he said, Yeah, he said, You know, like, like a Beethoven symphony is like, timeless, and it's like a work of art. It's gonna be remembered forever. And you can't really compare jazz or other kinds of music to it. I get what he's saying. And I really love this person. I mean, he's, you know, I don't hold it against him or something. But also I feel like it's problematic. And in today's world, it's more important than ever to kind of look at the assumptions we have about different paradigms of thought, different cultural paradigms. And, yeah, I mean, people are doing that everywhere and have been for 50 years in music in a way, we're not acknowledging our own faults that way. Because to me, it's very parallel.

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