Making Up the Classics
At a recital last month in Seoul, the pianist and musicologist Robert Levin began the program's second half by pulling four slips of paper out of a basket. Then he launched into a musical fantasy that, to a layman's ear, sounded just like Mozart. It was Mr. Levin's own spontaneous composition, invented on the spot using suggestions gathered from the audience.
The art of improvisation, long dormant in classical music, is undergoing a revival in concert halls, conservatories and recording studios. A handful of performers say they're restoring a lost tradition that stretches back to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven -- composer-performers and improvisers whose impromptu creations were almost as celebrated as their written masterpieces.
"We're seen as revolutionaries, but we're bringing back something that's very old, actually," says Gabriela Montero, a Venezuelan pianist known for ending programs of Rachmaninoff, Bach, Chopin and Liszt with improvisations based on audience requests, ranging from ringtones to nursery rhymes to "La Cucaracha." During a concert tour of the Northwest last month, Ms. Montero gave several fully improvised performances, each lasting more than an hour.
A controversial grassroots effort is proving that improvisation in classical music is back from the dead. WSJ's Alexandra Alter reports. (Nov. 27)
This season, at least half a dozen classical concerts have incorporated improvisation, and more are cropping up, often in unconventional venues. At a packed downtown Manhattan nightclub earlier this month, the cellist Matt Haimovitz teamed up with DJ Olive in an eclectic mash-up that veered from a Beethoven cello sonata to a strange duet that set Mr. Haimovitz's frenetic bowing against the turntable's hallucinatory electronic sounds. A crowd sipped beers and looked spellbound as Mr. Haimovitz improvised seamless transitions between movements, building up to a fully improvised cadenza. "There are certain movements where, as it would happen in the 18th century, we make it up on the spot," Mr. Haimovitz says.
Just last weekend at the Boston Philharmonic, Algerian-born violinist Gilles Apap dazzled the audience with an improvisation on Bach's fourth cello suite, segueing from Baroque to Celtic melodies to Appalachian fiddle tunes. This weekend, the classically trained string trio Time for Three will play a freewheeling program with the Florida Orchestra in Tampa Bay, mixing Bach, the Beatles, bluegrass and jazz and leaving room for their own melodic riffs. "We're not inventing anything. This was done in Mozart's time," says Zach De Pue, the 29-year-old concertmaster of the Indianapolis Symphony and one of Time for Three's two violinists.
Jan. 23 at Symphony Space, New York, performing the premiere of his new work "Strings and Threads," with guitarist Sharon Isbin.
A new generation of performers has embraced improvisation in ways Bach and Mozart couldn't have imagined, videotaping themselves and posting the results on YouTube. Eric Barnhill, a Juilliard-trained pianist in New York, records a daily improvisation in the style of Brahms or Schubert and posts audio files on his blog. Graduates of the country's top conservatories have formed classical garage bands that leapfrog across genres and use improvisation to blend classical motifs with jazz, folk and hip-hop.
Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, improvisation was a vital aspect of musical performances. Bach's spontaneous melodies often lasted half an hour and ended with complex, three-part fugues. Beethoven famously battled German pianist Daniel Steibelt in heated improvisation duels. When Franz Liszt performed, the audience suggested melodies and themes for him to riff on -- at an 1838 concert in Milan, he improvised based on such wide-ranging themes as marriage and railroads, according to Kenneth Hamilton's 2007 book "After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance."
Concerts began to change in the 1850s. Audiences came to prefer composers' iconic masterpieces. The growth of the music publishing business gave musicians identical, mass-produced scores. Later, the recording industry enabled listeners to memorize the nuances of famous performances. By the mid-20th century, improvisation had all but vanished among classical performers. Classical music ceded spontaneity to jazz.
Improvisation's unlikely rebirth comes at a pivotal moment. Symphony orchestras are struggling to attract the next-generation audience, but the genre is flourishing in unexpected places. Nightclubs and other pop music venues are booking new, cross-pollinating ensembles that attract young crowds. The Metropolitan Opera is reaching fans in movie theaters with screenings of live, high-definition broadcasts. InstantEncore.com, a year-old Web site, has free video of more than 1,000 classical concerts; visitors have watched nearly 60,000 streaming videos since February. In this unruly landscape, improvisation has double appeal: It offers something that's fresh and unique to each performance while steering the classical repertoire back to its roots.
"It's not like these are museum pieces under glass," says Benjamin Zander, conductor of the 29-year-old Boston Philharmonic and an advocate of reviving improvisation. "These are living, breathing pieces, and our job is to bring them to life."
Efforts to restore improvisation have stirred controversy. Ms. Montero, the Venezuelan pianist, says people occasionally walk out when she starts to improvise. Mr. Haimovitz says he was booed by an audience in Paris in the early 1990s when he improvised with an electric guitarist. Some scholars and musicians say it's counterproductive, and slightly impious, to tinker with masterpieces. "The idea that when you improvise a cadenza you are doing what they did in the 18th century is a delusion," says pianist and author Charles Rosen. "There's no reason to think that if you improvise one, it's going to be better than the one Mozart wrote."
Rahav Segev for The Wall Street Journal
Matt Haimovitz performing at Le Poisson Rouge, N.Y.
An improvisation revival could profoundly influence how classical music is taught and performed. Learning how to jam in the style of Beethoven may sound impossible, but musicians who dare to try say it enriches their understanding of rhythmic and harmonic structures and leads to livelier and more-nuanced interpretations. Improvisation could even help draw new audiences to the concert-hall format, by offering something that has never been played before.
Bringing it back won't be easy, though. There's no Suzuki method for improvisation. Few contemporary classical performers master the art, let alone try to teach it. Violinist and composer Mark O'Connor, who improvised a two-minute solo passage while performing one of his own compositions at Carnegie Hall last month, says performers have to relearn how to be creative, in part because their training places so much emphasis on the flawless execution of another person's creation.
"One of the reasons we don't see more improvisation in the academic setting is because at some point in our education system, the creative composers were separated from the virtuosic performers. Some of that is starting to be broken down now," says Mr. O'Connor, who learned to improvise by studying jazz and folk music and now coaches young musicians in improvisation at UCLA, Harvard and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Once rare outside jazz departments, such workshops have become more common in recent years. Last month, a group of piano majors at Juilliard gathered in a classroom with two grand pianos and took turns improvising in the style of Bach, Chopin and Beethoven. None had studied improvisation before, and most were hesitant. The teacher, visiting pianist David Dolan, chided them for playing too carefully and challenged the idea that the performer's job is merely to execute a composer's intentions perfectly. "Do you think Chopin would authorize you to change his text?" he asked the 10 students, who seemed stunned into silence. "Chopin wouldn't only authorize you, he would push you to do that."
Few teachers take improvisation further than Eric Edberg, a professor of music at DePauw University, in Greencastle, Ind. Prof. Edberg, a cellist, began improvising 15 years ago. He started by playing spontaneous, dissonant cello harmonies, then taught himself to improvise simple melodies. Now he teaches his cello students to improvise and coaches chamber music groups that play nothing but improvisations.
Prof. Edberg's unorthodox coaching sessions begin with freestyle humming, sighing, babbling and finger-wiggling. Sometimes he turns off the lights and instructs students to play in the dark to hone their instincts. His students say it helps them develop their own musical voice. "We're kind of like composers when we improvise," says Rebecca Janvrin, a junior majoring in vocal performance and history, who improvises with a chamber music group. "We have the whole gamut of techniques and styles from all of music history to draw from."
On a recent rainy afternoon, members of a string quartet rehearsed a loosely structured improvisation. They began plucking their strings in ascending notes that grew louder and faster. Then the cellist and viola player held down a rhythm, plucking and tapping their instruments, while the violinists took turns improvising solos. Jenna Bauer, a 19-year-old violin major, played smooth, drawn-out notes that sounded like Irish folk tunes. The other violinist, Jeremy Eberhard, a junior, played furious, dissonant chords that evoked the 20th century Russian composer Shostakovich.
The players locked eyes, looking for cues about when to switch tempos and when to end. Sometimes, they ended with a decisive swipe of their bows. Other times, they ground unexpectedly to a halt, seemingly out of ideas. Prof. Edberg told them to make more eye contact and have more confidence. "Repeat after me," he said. "There are no wrong notes. I embrace the surprises.
"They say that in jazz all the time," he continued. "If you play a wrong note, play it again, then it's not a wrong note anymore."
During a concert last week at DePauw, Prof. Edberg's chamber music students gave an hour-long performance without music stands or notes. At one point, the string quartet sat in a tight circle on stage, the lights went down and they played in complete darkness for two minutes, listening to each other's breathing to time their bowing and to match volume and rhythm. They ended with a quick, two-chord flourish, drawing applause and astonished laughter.
If improvisation were to make a widespread comeback, it could change the way contemporary audiences hear masterpieces like Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Rather than regarding them as static and timeless achievements, audiences would come to hear them as evolving works. Not every adaptation would be a success, but some say it's worth sacrificing consistency to give audiences something never heard before. Improvisers say that all it takes, apart from serious musical chops, is a willingness to fail.
"The immediacy and the intensity is vivid and dangerous," says Mr. Levin, the pianist. "Everybody in the audience is going to know if you fail, because they have 200 years of hindsight, and they love Beethoven."
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