By Jimmy Wang
What makes a musician? Is it their ability to perform complex pieces? Or is it their compositional prowess? These things are all taught in music lessons and schools, but there is one aspect of being a musician that isn’t taught. Improvisation.
Improvisation is the spontaneous creation of music that occurs as you’re playing your instrument. To beginners, this often seems like an insurmountable task. If I take days to learn a single piece of music, how can I create something on the spot?
Certainly, one needs to attain a basic level of proficiency. But once you can play a simple melodic line, with some notes for accompaniment depending on the instrument, improvisation becomes possible.
Consider how we hum or whistle to ourselves. We just let whatever feels right express itself. The melody is free, the rhythm loose, and there’s no time pressure of coming up with something before what you’ve created runs out.
The same can be done on an instrument. For example, say you’re a guitar player. The next time you want to play a solo, try slowly singing a melody in your head while replicating it on the guitar. Do it without the stress of matching a tempo or time signature. Focus completely on letting the notes go where they feel natural. Eventually, the link between singing and playing the note will become blurred, until your internal voice can equal the playing of the instrument.
For those who play instruments that allow for the playing of multiple musical voices at once (e.g. piano, guitar), now, the challenge is to sync the improvisation of a melody with the spontaneous generation of harmony. This is where knowledge of music theory can help because, unlike melodies, we’re not naturally good at creating harmonies. Think about how it’s easy to hum on your own, but it’s hard to harmonize with another singer without expertise in the field. Feel free to skip this next part as I explain some simple principles of harmony on the piano.
We start with the twelve notes that make up an octave on the piano. Each of these notes can be used to build a key, a sequence of 7. Here’s a basic melody in the key of D.
Now, how does one create harmony to go along with it? Well, for select notes in the above tune, we pick other notes in the same key to go in the bass section.
Here, the accompanying notes are D, A, B, and A. How did we decide upon these, out of the 7 possible choices? We’ve come upon the concept of a triad.
Take the note B, in the key of D.
From that note, we go up by an interval of 2 notes. And once more, from the new note. This is a triad!
This triad includes B, D, and F#. Now, if one note in the melody is any of those three notes, we can add B to the accompanying line, or optionally its entire triad. In Fig. 3, look at the treble note D in the second bar. The corresponding note in the bass clef is B, just as described.
We can repeat this process for any note that we want in the entire melody line. We can do it for “key notes”, usually those that begin a bar or begin the second half of a bar. On these notes, adding harmony establishes rhythmic ‘weight’, which helps carry your piece forwards. Furthermore, we can play the full triad instead of just the one note on the left hand. In the future, you could split the triad up, or add interesting rhythms to it for more complexity.
As you experiment with harmony on the piano, you’ll gain an intuitive sense of what chords feel like. You’ll be able to instantly match specific chords with specific notes in the melody, to express the mood that you want.
Sometimes, after hours of running through a piece on the piano, I feel literal revulsion when I hear it being played one more time. But improvisation turns music from something that involves rote memorization and repetitive practice into an art form. The artist can enjoy their craft as much as their audience does. The musician can enjoy their music at the same time that it’s created, unlike sheet music which becomes stale to the ear.
This has practical advantages, too. When composing, without skills in improvisation, one might need to work on a piece bar by bar. This destroys what could’ve been a beautiful melodic line by chunking it into bits that don’t flow to and from one another. By contrast, improv lets melodic phrases emerge gracefully, continuous in their spontaneity.
Improvisation is what music is about. The heart sings, and we must liberate its sound.