Pre-composition and the Blank Page

Just to get the caveats out of the way up front: what I am going to try and describe is not so much a fundamental difference as a difference of degree. I have been listening to a lot of non-Western music lately, partly because I love it (some of it) and partly because it is very interesting from a rhythmic point of view. Western music has a achieved a lot of its structural breadth and expressive depth by eliminating some kinds of resources, such as microtonality and large metric groups, and it is interesting to consider the possibility of reacquiring some of those resources.

Ok, enough shilly-shallying, I've been listening to quite a few Ravi Shankar recordings in the last week and have some observations. Ragas, which are melodically-inflected modes, and talas, which are metric groups, are more complex than the Western equivalents of scales and meters. A raga contains more than just a series of pitches; it also has certain implications as to how those pitches are grouped in phrases and how they are ornamented with microtonal glissandi. Talas, the rhythmic groupings, are larger than typical Western meters and may have ten, fourteen or sixteen beats to a cycle. This is where the musical focus lies. Harmony hardly exists at all as the tamboura, a four-stringed fretless lute, is constantly playing the root and fifth throughout the whole piece. Sometimes, fairly rarely, the sitar player may sit on and outline a different harmony, but this is dissonant to the tamboura and soon returns to the "tonic". There is, of course, considerable pitch variety, including microtones, but it is always in relationship to the bare fifths of the tamboura. When the tablas (drums) enter, they add another layer of interest both in contrast to and in dialogue with the sitar. Sometimes there are melodic motifs that are exploited for structural unity.

This is very enjoyable and charming music. Let's listen to some. This is Raga Jog, recorded in 1956. At the beginning you hear the sitar sweep across the sympathetic strings and the tamboura, cycling through the four strings of the tonality. Then the sitar enters with a melodic improvisation. Later on, the tablas enter. Ragas are often in three parts, the alap, the unmetered melodic introduction without the tablas, the jor, the rhythmic part once the tablas enter and the gat, a quicker section to end.

Setting aside all the traditional discussions and explanations, what I hear is a gifted group improvisation with both the sitar and the tablas that nonetheless is based on very familiar and often-used material. In this sense it is a bit like the blues--not in any overt musical manner, but just in that there is a shared melodic and rhythmic vocabulary that both players are very familiar with that enables their improvisation to be so expressive and coherent. It is a common occurrence with blues for someone to "sit in" on a session. This is because the tunes, the structures and the very typical motifs and "licks" of the soloists are a familiar, shared vocabulary. Several players can sit down and play tune after tune together because they know the genre.

My sense, after listening to quite a lot of non-Western music, is that something similar is going on there as well. It tends to be concealed by the use of traditional terminology and descriptions and by the difficulty of accommodating the music to Western notation, but that is what it sounds like to me.

Now for the blank page! What I mean by that is where a Western composer begins: instead of with a whole set of traditional practices, instruments, genres, motifs and rhythmic structures, he or she begins with a blank page. Now, of course, it is only blank in terms of possibility, not in terms of knowledge. Our composer knows a great deal, presumably, from the sound and style of early music going right back to the 12th century, to the contrapuntal structures of Bach, the motivic intensity of Beethoven, the lyricism of Schubert, the orchestration of Mahler and so on, right through all the modernist experiments of the 20th century. He or she also has a hundred or a thousand musical structures to draw on from the binary dances of the Baroque to the small ternary and sonata forms of the Classical Era, to the host of other genres and forms that have been used in Western music: bourrée, gigue, nocturne, symphony, tone poem, and on and on.

But it is still a blank page in the sense that the composer can choose ANY or NONE of the forms, styles, genres, techniques and methods available. They can be ignored completely or combined in any imaginable way. This is where the considerable difference between "classical", "concert" or "art" music comes when compared to all of the traditional musics. Not to disparage any of them, of course, because they are wonderful musical expressions and, to be honest, classical composers are always stealing from them!

But the simple fact that classical musicians do not, as a rule, just sit down and jam, points to the difference. This is usually misinterpreted as meaning that classical musicians are less creative or tied to some dead notes on paper or something. But the real reason is that composers start with that blank page and in order to know what they did with it, you have to see what they wrote. An Indian musician or a blues musician knows how the song is going to go in general terms--a classical musician really has no idea because the possibilities are so great.

It could be this:

(yes, they are playing from memory, but it was all written down)

Or this:

and the classical musicians don't know which until they open the score.

(Well, sure, I'm exaggerating a tad to make a point!)

These are two extremes of "classical" music and while one uses a few tuned drums and the other a very large orchestra, they are both based on the idea of starting with a blank page and inventing something, basically from scratch.

What we see or hear with traditional musics like Indian ragas, is a highly-developed vocabulary of structures and motifs that are learned by rote and then improvised on with great skill. Composers, as such, don't really exist. Much of this music I would describe as being "pre-composed". A lot of the basic texture and motifs is learned over a lengthy apprenticeship which is fundamentally different from what a student composer does. He or she certainly learns a lot about music. But then, as soon as you sit down in front of that blank page, you essentially throw all the details away so that you can invent something new.

"Music Was Always My Language"

I've talked many times about how music, technically, is not a language at all. As the famous comment goes, "if music is a language, what are the words and where is the dictionary I can look them up in?" But to musicians, music has a special role or place that might be even more important than language. Music is a world unto itself, a special mode of communication. While you can't order a hamburger with music (instrumental music, that is), or make a date to have coffee, as music doesn't deal in those kinds of specifics, you can certainly set a mood, take a journey, experience a kind of ecstasy. The quote "music was always my language" is from Gabriela Montero, the Venezuelan-American pianist and composer in an interview with Norman Lebrecht you can see here. She is talking about how she started playing a toy piano when she was just seven months old.

It is wonderful to watch her improvise, which she does twice in the brief interview. It is also wonderful to watch her take the opening theme of the Mahler 5th Symphony and improvise on it. But did you notice that in both improvisations she does the same thing? She starts in minor and ends with a shorter section in major? On a different day, she would do something entirely different, but this day, that is the way her thought went.

What do you do when you improvise? Have I got anything to say about it? I have spent countless hours improvising, most of it when I was young and playing in a band. I was forced to it because I didn't read music back then, and was barely able to pick up my part by ear, so I had to just make it up! In the early years I played mostly electric bass. Later on, on electric six-string, I improvised just as much, because we spent a lot of time jamming on blues and other progressions. 99% of it was just made up on the spot. I can still improvise a bit as I prove to myself occasionally when I am searching for an idea for a composition or working with a student. But here is the thing: improvising is not terribly interesting, at least to me. When you improvise, you mostly rely on things you know how to do: certain progressions, certain textures (like the arpeggios Gabriela Montero is using in the left hand in her first improvisation), certain melodic tricks or gestures. You have a foundation that holds it all together and on top of this you create a decorative filigree that is partly or largely improvised. But all things that your hands have done a thousand times before. A lot of improvisation, therefore, is rehashed stuff that is musically very ordinary. The extraordinary thing is how some musicians can spontaneously produce it.

But as I say, it is rarely interesting, unless you really let yourself go, as I do when I am improvising for a composition. I don't care if I hit some clangers, or go astray or whatever--I just want to see what I turn up that might be interesting. But this kind of improvisation you don't do for others, just yourself. If someone is there, you automatically turn to smooth phrases that come naturally from your hands.

Improvisation is interesting, sure, but not nearly as interesting as it seems! If you want a really good piece of music, with original construction and substance, then you probably should plan it out and write it down. That's what Beethoven and Bach did, Bach most famously in his Musical Offering.

On a visit to Potsdam to see his son, C. P. E. Bach, Bach improvised a fugue on each of six pianos Frederick the Great had just purchased for different rooms in his palace, Sans Souci. The theme, given by Frederick, was awkward and chromatic. However one can easily imagine Bach turning out different fugues in two, three, perhaps even four voices on the theme. Bach was perhaps the greatest improviser of all time as witnessed by the fact that other famous musicians such as Handel, would flee town rather than chance an improvisation duel with the Leipzig master! In any case, after he returned home, Bach prepared a collection of pieces for Frederick which he called A Musical Offering. Crowning the collection was a six-part ricercare on the theme, that not even Bach could have improvised. Here it is, with the score:

Classical Herbie Hancock

Just ran across this interesting article in the Globe and Mail.


I didn't know about Herbie Hancock's origins as a classical musician. This is an interesting quote:

“Improvisation was one of the tools of classical music,” he points out. Keyboard virtuosos from Bach to Chopin to Liszt were famous improvisers, and up until the early 19th century, cadenzas – the extended solo section in classical concertos – were routinely improvised.

“But at a certain point they became repertoire,” Hancock says. Specific cadenzas were written out, and that’s what everyone played. “Pretty soon, because learning repertoire takes up so much time for a classical pianist, there’s no time to learn to improvise.

“So one of the things I’m interested in is sparking up a new interest in classical musicians for improvising. Not necessarily improvising in a swing way with jazz – yes, if that’s what they want – but also improvising in a classical way.”

Hancock himself has been practising “improvising in a classical way” himself, something he says takes a lot of work. “But if it’s not hard, then I’m not working hard enough,” he says. “I have to make it a challenge.”

My emphasis. Yes, I think one of the reasons classical musicians rarely improvise these days is that the repertoire became so complex and demanding that there really wasn't room for it any more. As composers demanded more and more control over every detail of the performance, something we can see in examining the greater complexity of scores from 1800 to the 20th century, the free space that could be filled by improvisation shrank. Interesting...

Composition vs Improvisation

First, have a look at this post and the comments. Composition and improvisation are, I think, fundamentally different things. By 'composition' I mean the process, sometimes very lengthy, that ultimately results in a fully realized piece of music. By 'improvisation' I mean the spontaneous performance of music that is sometimes undertaken within a fairly strict set of boundaries, such as when a jazz or blues musician takes a solo for a specific segment of a piece or when a completely free group improvisation is performed--or anything in between. I think these are different things requiring different skills, but with some overlap.

Let's take some examples. On a few occasions I have had a musical idea and sat down and written it out in one session. This has happened with fairly short pieces and the flow of ideas is largely without much cogitation. On other occasions I have wrestled with a piece for days or weeks before finding a final realization. Let me cite a couple more examples of the intersection of improvisation and composition. The first is J. S. Bach. In May 1747 Bach paid a visit to his son, C. P. E. Bach who was court composer to Frederick the Great. Here is an article on that occasion. Frederick the Great had recently purchased six pianos and he gave Bach a chromatic theme on which Bach improvised fugues on each of the pianos. But two months later, after returning home, Bach sent to the king a fully-worked out set of pieces, known as The Musical Offering which included a six-part fugue on the theme. The implication is that while Bach was capable of improvising a fugue on a given theme--something few could do today--in order to achieve the finest musical results, he had to return to his studio to work out the details. Another example is from Beethoven. He was well-known as an improviser on piano, but at the same time he is also known for struggling for months and years to hammer out his compositions, sketching and re-sketching themes and harmonizations many times over.

I think that the conclusion must be that while some greatly gifted and knowledgeable musicians can improvise to an extent that is astonishing, the spontaneous nature of it is inherently limiting. In spontaneous creation one falls back on certain familiar patterns and techniques that would be avoided if you had the time to do so. Sometimes when improvising, one may come across by accident a novel idea which might later be worked out in a composition, but much of the time, improvisation probably results in fairly conventional patterns and structures. In jazz, for example, learning to improvise probably involves learning what sort of patterns fit within what harmonies.

I think the fundamental principle that separates composition from improvisation is what we might call a musical "Occam's Razor" --don't multiply entities needlessly. In improvisation, the tendency is to spin off phrases with abandon, which must often result in ideas that clash with one another. In a spontaneous context, no great matter. But in a composition, this is exactly what one avoids as it dilutes the focus of the piece.

These are obviously just my musings on the subject and I would love to hear contrary opinions from those who have more experience in the world of improvisation.

Here is the crown of the Musical Offering: a six voice fugue that Bach composed after his visit:

Could Bach, or anyone, have improvised this? Even Bach didn't think so. I'm amazed that a six-voice fugue can even be played on a keyboard by a single player.

UPDATE: There are some interesting observations in the comments and one reader emailed to me the following: "I hope you (both) will pursue the question what characteristic (known retrospectively, of course) of a piece is especially recalcitrant to improvisation but more amenable to composition. Process theory, as far as I know, is also lacking in such an explanation (structural ontology)."


The phrase "structural ontology" itself makes me break out into a cold sweat because I almost understand what it might mean. But let me try and answer this because it is an interesting question. I would attack it by asking myself where the musical idea comes from? When you are composing, I have no idea. I have had ideas come to me at completely random times, though the shower seems to be a favorite place. Ideas just come. Then you have to sit down and work on them. That is a partly free-wheeling, partly thought-out process that is difficult to untangle. Now with improvisation, I think there is a lot of somatic involvement. Your fingers (in my case as a guitarist) just want to go to certain places. I suppose it is a kind of amalgam of somatic and auditory. In plain English, your fingers (or lips or whatever) have certain inclinations based on many hours of playing and this combines with what you are hearing either in what has just been played by you or others, or what you sense might be about to be played, and that comes together...


On reflection I see that I completely failed to answer the question which was, what characteristic(s) are recalcitrant to improvisation? I think the obvious one would be, as my anonymous commentor notes, "a complex structure that must fit at multiple scales requires composition: St Matthew's passion has structure at all time levels, from 3-second phrases to palindromic patterns at the "30-minute" level. " Yes, this kind of complexity really cannot be improvised. But why? I think the answer is that the only way to create a successful complex structure extended over a significant amount of time, is to have total control over every detail so that those details do not interfere with the unfolding of the structure but rather enable it. In other words, the design of a large piece of classical music depends on oppressing the improvisatory creativity of the musicians playing it. Heh! You don't want the flute taking a little solo during the rests in Beethoven's 5th Symphony.