jwilzewske: Composing-while-Dancing: EROI Festival, Organ Improvisation, and Embodiment

I mprovising is difficult-] because our current educational system makes it so.”
— William Porter, keynote talk, EROI 2011.

B ecause learning it happens so very late [in the course of pedagogy and acquiring musical skills].”
— Eastman student, quoted by William Porter, EROI 2011.

T he EROI festival this year is centered on the topic of improvisation and opened this afternoon with a stimulating, expansive meditation-cum-keynote-speech by William Porter, entitled ‘Why Is Improvisation So Difficult?’

I t was followed by a breathtaking, virtuosic “triple-header” 8:00 p.m. recital on the Craighead-Saunders organ for a packed-in audience at Christ Church across the street from Eastman School of Music:

Böhm – Praeludium in C; Herr Jesu Christ dich zu uns wend (Chorale Cycle with 6 verses); Hans Davidsson
Hindemith – Organ Sonata No. 1; William Porter
Schumann – Etuden in kanonischer Form für Orgel oder Pedalklavier, Op. 56; David Higgs
Liszt – Präludium und Fuge über den Nahmen B-A-C-H; David Higgs

U p to the mid-18th Century, improvisation was a fundamental skill in which most if not all practicing musicians were adept. Since that time, however, fewer and fewer musicians have felt fluent at improvising extemporaneously.

P orter catalogued the concepts and situations that he believes lead many musicians today to find improvising difficult. He averred that because genres and idioms are today so tremendously diverse, it is difficult to teach improvisation as ‘compositional performance’ insofar as it is not humanly possible for one person to be fully fluent in what constitutes improvisation in more than a few genres/idioms. It was far easier when the prevailing idioms/use-cases/purposes of the music were few in number and the contexts for the improvisation (e.g., liturgical/sacred music) were more structured.

F oremost among the reasons why improvisation has become ‘hard,’ Porter says, is that counterpoint, voice-leading, and harmony are in recent decades taught in ‘classroom’ settings, primarily as paper-based exercises in writing, instead of as practical performance on a keyboard instrument (or any other instrument, including voice). Student musicians only rarely these days develop any ‘muscle memory’ for improvisation per se, so that the body—the fingers, the hands, the diaphragm, the whole body—knows how to execute improvisation as a sort of ‘compositional performance’. Porter exhorted the teachers in the audience to amend the curriculum to impart such kinesthetic knowledge to students, and to do it from their earliest days when they are kids, just beginners, much in the manner that would be done with dancers or other kinds of athletes.

S ome book links are gathered below, for your interest, in the spirit of Porter’s remarks about embodiment, kinesthetics, and corporality in improvisation. Especially noteworthy is Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s new two-volume treatise ‘Bach and the Art of Improvisation’ (link below).

W hat a fantastic EROI Festival this will be, crafting the future of organ improvisation and improvisation pedagogy!

W e must kill the twin demons of ‘originality’/‘novelty’ and ‘imitation’: these ultimately lead to paralysis and inhibit improvisation. Instead, we must teach the student how to be compelling, how to be convincing. It is better to be ‘interesting’ than to be original. The integrity of saying something with conviction, and of being spontaneously responsive to other musicians and to the audience—is what we really mean by ‘improvisation’. We must teach them to prepare—to prepare to take advantage of the unexpected when it happens.”
— William Porter, keynote talk, EROI 2011.

jwilzewske

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Composing-while-Dancing: EROI Festival, Organ Improvisation, and Embodiment

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