The End (of the Beginning)

The class performed last night in Killian Hall, a straight two hours without intermission. Fortunately, our audience endured.

The concert was a surprising success, considering that we started rehearsing the bulk of it two weeks ago. For many pieces it was even less than that.

For me, it was a vastly enjoyable concert. I tapped my feet and bobbed my head while in the audience. I tapped my feet and bobbed my head while on stage. I was really having fun, whereas normally I'm nervous on stage. Perhaps the greatest personal success for me was that I didn't feel nervous at all on stage. Okay, so a bit of adrenaline - but nothing close to what I've encountered in the past, especially with solos. Maybe it helped that it was a group setting, not a solo recital. But if you had asked me a few months ago, I could not have imagined being on stage, improvising, and not being nervous.

Incidentally, I played my solo violin piece (Brahms violin sonata no. 3 with Sarah on piano) in my violin teacher's studio recital tonight, and I wasn't nervous at all either - about the same as I was at the jazz concert. This has never happened. I've never had such a relaxed formal solo performance. Ever. In eleven, twelve years. I wonder if I've finally broken a performance barrier?

This class has given me a lifelong benefit - appreciation for blues. That's one of the primary reasons I signed up for the class.

I've gained a lot of non-musical things as well. For one, confidence that I can pick up new concepts. Confidence performing in front of an audience. Openness to new art.

I've made great friends through this class too. It's normal that I get to know some people in my HASS classes, but usually it's not everyone in the class and on this personal a level. Without this class, I probably wouldn't have met some of these musicians; I wouldn't have had anything to do with Dylan, Dennis, and Chih-yu, who are involved in jazz ensembles, or Dorian, who is involved in drumming (Rambax). And without meeting Dennis, I wouldn't have started learning guitar. Domino effect.

I say "End (of the Beginning)" because I think this class isn't quite over yet... after the concert, a bunch of us wanted to get together over IAP to jam.

I look at music differently now. I value live performance a lot more, and I get my head out of the page more. I now think it's totally cool to be able to just listen to a piece and play it, and then expand on it. Improvisation is a skill that I'm going to keep nursing on my own, as a complement to my classical training. I'm excited now that a new avenue has been opened in my mind.

All Blues Update/Dream Theater

All Blues met again tonight at Kresge, and we played Chih-yu's arrangement of Dream Theater's "Pull Me Under" for the first time.

Sarah joined us on piano for both pieces! I'm so happy she's branching out.

Dream Theater went very smoothly. Even though it was the first time we'd done the piece, Chih-yu had her vision all written out in nice printed scores and parts, and we basically learned the form she had in mind. We just need to practice our individual parts now, and I just have to improvise something stylistically appropriate in e minor.

So I'll be listening to this piece quite a bit in the next week:


We also tweaked All Blues after rehearsal, and it has a slightly updated form now:

* Start: (12/8 feel) Bass starts vamping the intro, drums joins in, then everyone except voice
* Chih-yu cues the head, which we play twice.
* We go into solos: piano, violin 1 (Paula), violin 1+2 (Jess/Paula duet), violin 2 (Jess), then drums. The drum solo transitions from 12/8 to 11/8. During solos, only bass and drums play along with the soloist, except everyone including bass drops out for the drum solo.
* Intro vamp starts again on bass, and all instruments vamp on it. Chih-yu cues the head and we play the head once only.
* Solos: voice, sax, and bass. During the bass solo, the violins and sax vamp in the background.
* We vamp briefly after the bass solo, then Chih-yu cues the head (2nd half).
* Ending: We repeat the last four bars two additional times, then vamp with everyone doing small improvisations on the vamp, and gradually fade out.

I'm feeling really good about All Blues. I've been practicing improvising on it in my private practice time, and I'm comfortable with it now. I actually had a lot of fun playing it tonight, especially in the final run-through. I felt so loose - it reminded me of something Donal said early on in the class, that he can tell when he is really getting into a piece when he's loose. I think I felt that "looseness" tonight, and that relaxation helped me improvise better.

Practicing

In the practice room today I came up with a few ideas when practicing improv.

* For rhythm, I set up a beat (tapping my foot) and tried to fill a certain number of beats (4 or 6 depending on the feel/time signature I'm trying to get at) with as many interesting and different rhythms as possible, just playing mainly open strings on the violin.

* For technique, I practiced double stops (two notes at once on the violin), which I should normally do but don't. Good thing my violin teacher isn't reading this. I played the usual thirds, sixths, and octaves, then the less-traditional tritone.

* Finally, I played around with All Blues, trying out things I wouldn't try in public. I want to integrate better technique into my improvisation, because I always tend to play things that are easy for me, all single notes and nothing too high up the fingerboard. I tried integrating double stops into All Blues and that required figuring out what intervals work well. I don't write anything down when I improvise, because I'm afraid it will make me play the same thing when I do actually try to improvise. However, it doesn't seem to be a problem - I'm getting happier with my improv over All Blues with each successive practice session, so something must be sticking.

Jazz Combo

Tonight, I went to see Dennis and Chih-yu's jazz combo concert. Their group played a forty-five minute long set with no breaks, stringing together seven songs. One pretty cool thing they did was to sandwich one song inside another - so they played half of a song, transitioned to a new song and played that in its entirety, and then played the other half of the first song. The two songs were different, but they complimented each other. Anyway, that's one example of the "transformation" in musical improv that Donal always talks about. I particularly enjoyed the song "Body and Soul" - they took it slightly faster and more upbeat than I've heard on youtube versions, and Chih-yu sang it gorgeously.

All Blues

This afternoon, I had the first rehearsal for All Blues with Dylan, Dennis, Chih-yu, Dorian, and Paula.

We came up with the following form:
*Bass starts with the intro, then drums, and then violins and sax come in with harmony. We're playing in 12/8.
*We played the head twice, during which Chih-yu sings her lyrics.
*Right after, we begin solos. Dorian will have the last solo, and then he'll transition us into 11/8 (which is really just a bar of 6 and a bar of 5).
*We play the head again twice through again, with Chih-yu singing.
*More solos. Dennis will play the last solo.
*We play the head for the third time.
*Ending...?

We tried a couple of ending techniques. First, we tried fading out on a vamp, which was moderately successful - we just need to practice it a few more times. Dennis also had the idea of repeating the intro vamp at the end, but cutting out one beat from the bar each time, so we'd go from 11/8 to 10/8 to 9/8, etc. It was a cool concept but we thought it would be too hard to implement. Very mathematical though - what do you expect from a bunch of MIT kids?

In class we originally listened to this classic recording of All Blues by Miles Davis (1959):


And another, later recording by Miles Davis (1964):


I found another version by Buddy Rich:


I like the first and third versions the best, which are mellower and/or more melodic. I don't like the sound of the trumpet when played in spats as in the second version above. I'll be listening to these recordings for inspiration in my spare time now. Someday I may be able to play strings of running eighth notes on my violin like the Buddy Rich band pianist... I'll learn to walk before I run though.

Don't Leave Me High and Dry, Ravel

Tonight, Dennis, Xiao Xiao, Dorian, Claxton, and I met at Sid-Pac for the first rehearsal of "High and Dry." By the end of the rehearsal, we had another piece as well.

I had originally showed up to play in Autumn Leaves, but after briefly messing around with that, the rest of the group decided to start High and Dry. Dorian hadn't listed violin in his original arrangement for this piece, but after listening to them play a while I was tempted to join. I liked the groove. I asked Dorian, and he was like, sure yeah, hop on in. Today was basically Xiao Xiao figuring out the chords on the piano, and the rest of us listening to the youtube video and improvising along with it. Since we got started late and Dennis had to leave to play a concert, we're going to have to get together again to really hash things out.

High and Dry:


At the end of rehearsal, Xiao Xiao started playing Ravel's Toccata on piano, and Dorian started playing drums along with it. It sounded really cool, pretty jazzy - the drums gave the Toccata a toe-tapping/head-bobbing quality it doesn't usually have. Then Xiao Xiao vamped parts of the Toccata, and the rest of us joined in playing along. It was quite spontaneous, and it sounded good. We're probably going to roll this into a real piece for the concert. This will be a piece that takes after what Donal does with Bach.

Ravel Toccata:

Lesson in Blues

Last night, the "Lonely Woman" group performed at the Festival Jazz Ensemble Concert. The performance went smoothly.

Perhaps more memorable about the concert was the time spent backstage, though. During the first half of the concert, Dennis gave me a blues lesson. Some of this information we'd gone over in class, but it helped to hear it again one-on-one and to for me to play on my violin the different concepts Dennis talked about as he taught them to me.

Here's what we covered:

*The Blues Scale: the notes in a natural minor scale; 1, 3, 4, flat 5, 5, 7, 1
#Exercise: I played the scale a couple times in different keys.

*Twelve-Bar Blues: Dennis explained that the dominant 7 chord is a "stable" chord in the blues, unlike in classical music. Twelve-bar blues is:
- 4 bars of tonic (I) d7 chords
- 2 bars of subdominant (IV) d7; then 2 bars of tonic (I) d7
- 1 bar dominant (V) d7, 1 bar subdominant (IV) d7, 2 bars tonic (I) d7
Then it all repeats again.
I-IV-V(-IV-I).
#Exercise: At first, I thought we were supposed to change keys whenever the chords changed, but then Dennis outlined D7,D7,D7,D7/G7,G7,D7,D7/A7,G7,D7,D7 on guitar while I soloed in D over it, and I listened to the way the different harmonies changed the way my D major sounded and heard how it works. Simple stuff, but actually I couldn't help smiling when I heard it as I was playing - it sounds neat.

*Rhythm: Dennis went over straight eighths versus swung eighths. Straight eighths are as normal even eighth notes, whereas swung eighths are like playing on beats 1 and 3 in a triplet. There's also the "in between" eighth which is somewhere between a straight eighth and a swung eighth.
#Exercise: We repeated the twelve-bar blues exercise, this time with me playing a D blues scale in either straight eighths, swung eighths, or in-between eighths. Then Dennis had me do this again, but put an accent on the off-beat, not the downbeat.

*Notes outside the blues scale/modes: I asked Dennis what notes we can use outside of the blues scale. Well, any notes really, but he talked about using two different modes in particular - Dorian and Mixolydian.
-Dorian: like a major scale, with flat 3 and 7
-Mixolydian: like a major scale, with flat 3
Dennis pointed out that the flat 3 contrasts the non-flat 3 in the d7 chords, and that musicians often use a mix of both flat and non-flat 3, sometimes sliding from one to the other. Also, the difference between major and minor blues is in whether the dominant 7 chord has a major or minor third in it.
#Exercise: I played the Dorian and Mixolydian scales a few times, then repeated the twelve-bar-blues exercise, this time trying to incorporte the flat and non-flat 3 in my improvisation.

Big thanks to Dennis. He is impossibly nice.

Lonely Woman

Lately I've been feeling the blues. I've been a bit lonely... oh wait, that's not what this is about.

Late Monday night, Donal emailed a few of us from the improv class that we were going to be playing with him in the Festival Jazz Ensemble concert set for tomorrow night. So Wednesday and yesterday, Chih-yu, Paula, Dennis, Donal, and I had rehearsal putting together our piece. It's surprising to me that we've been able to do it on such short notice. I've never prepared an improv piece before, much less planned to perform in one in front of a large audience in Kresge.

The piece we're performing is an arrangement of "Lonely Woman" by Ornette Coleman.

I'll recount how rehearsal went, since it's a model of how jazz/improv pieces can be put together.

Wednesday, Donal brought a lead sheet and we read through it first, just playing the notes straight. Then we experimented with different sets of instruments playing the "A" section. Donal liked the sound of two violins playing the melodies, except purposely not together, to create a "phasing" effect. We thought about how to incorporate the guitar and piano after that, and decided to have them back up a phrase within the "A" section to reinforce it in the second time through ("A" is repeated). We decided to have Chih-yu alone on voice to start off each section. For the "B" section, we had the same general format, and then we had to worry about transitions between the sections, but we didn't work out our final plan until Thursday.

The piece was in flux until the end of the Thursday rehearsal, which is when we really hammered out the transitions. For example, Donal had planned to do a kind of dark, moody solo after the "A" section, but we decided to change the style of it to be less depressing and faster, to contrast the rest of the piece - and to move it to after the "B" section to create a transition back to the recapitulation of the "A" section. After experimenting a bit, Donal made the solo transition into a free jazz section for piano and guitar, with the violins kind of in the background playing parts from "B" until Donal gave us a head nod to cue us to start playing material from "A" again. The piano and guitar would then fade out, leaving the violins to continue the "A" section again. Transition complete. Chih-yu also brought lyrics, which added a layer of meaning to the piece:

Lonely in the night she wonders,
Who can she tell of her heartache?
They that listen do not care.
They don't share heartache.
She is a lonely woman,
No one to cry to at all.

We considered whether the lyrics would give away the intent of the song, but we decided it would be fine, as the audience might not even listen that closely to the words, focusing instead on the emotion in Chih-yu's voice. I personally don't think the lyrics interfere, because it actually can help the audience to imagine the violins, which repeat the melodies sung by the voice, as anguished females, which is what I hear them as.

To sum up the rehearsal experience, I learned that putting together a jazz piece involves the input of everyone in the group - we could (actually, needed to) throw out ideas we jus thought about and wanted to try. Sometimes we liked the ideas, sometimes we scrapped them. But everyone was heard and sometimes the ideas we didn't like prompted new ideas we did. As the rehearsals went on, I could see the piece taking its final form slowly, and it was cool to know how each element in our arrangement came about.

The concert's tomorrow night.

Arts Council Visit

We had a rather large group of MIT Arts Council members sit in on class.

To demonstrate to them some improvisation, we started with a class rendition of the "emotion" peacefulness.[1] As usual, this piece was characterised by a soft volume, long held notes, and many major and perfect intervals.

Donal then talked about how to give music direction and form. We came up with a list of ideas of how to create development:

*Giving the music form: e.g. ABA
*Varying rhythm
*"" dynamics
*"" texture
*Harmoney modulation
*Layering a melody/motif
*Changing instrumentation - thus changing color, timbre
*Individual solos

[1] The whole "emotion" improvisation originated when Donal asked us, "What emotions can music express?" and Xiao Xiao countered, "Are there any emotions music can't express?" We made a huge list of emotions ranging from angst to joy and concluded music can express pretty much anything. We tried improvising on anger, which was less successful, but was characterized by discordant intervals, faster-moving notes played at a forte or fortissimo.

Two Concerts and Some Jamming

I have now seen two performances where Donal performed, the first in Killian Hall, which was a preview of the second, his show at the Regattabar Jazz Club, located in Harvard Square.

After the Regattabar concert, Khoa, Sarah, and I got together to jam and to put some ideas out for a piece for the December performance. It was hard to get started because we held back, self-conscious about making mistakes in front of each other. Then I decided, okay, I'm going to play without worrying - no judging - and I think it made it easier for everyone once that initial discomfort was gone.

We decided to pick a melody that we knew well already, so it would be easier to improvise off of. We settled with Amazing Grace, but found it hard to do anything terribly creative with it after a few times through. Then we did some brief minimalist-style improv, and then spent a good amount of time on twelve-bar blues. First, we took turns soloing for twelve bars, then tried a call-and-response model with two people trading off solos while one other person held the bass line. It required a lot of thought to keep our solos within the alloted number of bars for the call-and-response - on afterthought, they were too short, I think. We also found that it was hard to improvise trading off after only 2 bars, whereas 4 was manageable.


A few general patterns in improvised pieces and performances I have observed:

1. When improvising off of a well-known melody, it is good to play the melody in its entirety first, without changing it significantly. This is what Donal did at the Regattabar for his Bach pieces, and what Gabriela Montero does in her improv on Bach's Prelude in C.

2. When playing in a group, eye contact between group members is useful. I saw this happening in both of Donal's live performances. Nothing new here: it's the same for a string quartet or orchestra.

3. Though improvisation is done spontaneously, a lot of planning also goes into good improvisation to prevent collisions. Not just in practicing with the same group of people, to get a feel for what they do, but also to decide on chord progressions, who will take the melody where, and how duets will work. I realized, while practicing with Sarah and Khoa, how challenging it is to make transitions even from one person having the solo to another person.

4. The limit to improvisation is your creativity - and technique.


When playing with the blues form, I noticed that I was employing the same "tricks" to make it sound like blues, like hitting half-steps below the note I intended to land on, and then sliding up to the higher note -- in general, using a lot of neighbor tones. I decided to listen to "Freddie Freeloader" carefully to see if I could pick up more characteristics of blues music, and I made the following observations.

Freddie Freeloader:


(Granted, these are observations from one sample of blues, and may not apply to other blues pieces. However, some of these observations are more general and can apply to other types of improvisation.)

1. Sure enough, there is significant use of hitting whole steps or half steps above or below notes that the musicians intend to arrive on, before those arrival notes. This is also used in the middle of solo lines, and gives the music a kind of meandering quality. Small chromatic scales are also used to "slide" up or down to an arrival note.

2. The tempo is a finger-snapping, toe-tapping tempo.

3. The rhythm in the solo is loose, and skitters across bars so that you aren't really aware of the transitions between bars, only of the larger groups of bars (like four-measure groups).

4. Motifs are often repeated at least twice when they appear.

5. A lot of chromaticism and arpeggios are used, and the 7ths of chords. The piano often has diminished chords, in a Strong-long/Weak-short articulation/rhythm.

6. Sometimes fourths are used to begin a phrase, and fifths are used at the end (between the second-to-last and last). In general fourths and fifths constitute a lot of the jumps.

7. A lot of phrases end with note-bending -- playing a note and then sliding it out of tune -- at least on the trumpet.

8. It sounds like the musicians just have topologies in mind, and just spontaneously fill in the notes in the appropriate style. Sometimes they are running through so many notes that they are in uncertain chordal territory, but they just get back on.

9. The rhythm uses a lot of triplets and notes in groups of three (such as three eighth or quarter notes in a row).

10. The melody that opens the pieces also closes it.

Improv on TED Talks

I found this video on TED Talks (which is also a great treasure trove of ideas on many topics other than music).

In it, a girl takes a handful of cards with notes written on them, has an audience member randomly choose some, and then improvises a piano piece based on those notes as a theme. It's a neat trick and kind of cocky too, cocky in a good way - in the sense that she is so secure in her ability to improvise that she's not afraid of anything thrown at her, even in a setting when she's going to be nervous.

I'm going to try this the next time I practice.

Bach as Teacher

I attended Donal's lecture-recital on Wednesday night, entitled "Bach as Teacher: Classical and Jazz." As I looked around Killian Hall, it was interesting to see who attended - there were some faculty I recognized, including a writing professor and her husband (also a jazz double bassist), as well as David Deveau and Marcus. I saw Xiao Xiao and Khoa too.

Donal performed with double bassist John Lockwood, and drummer/percussionist Yoron Israel. As suggested by the title, the recital consisted of jazz pieces inspired by Bach. Donal took a bunch of different Bach pieces - inventions and well-tempered clavier, I think, and took the bass lines and other catchy parts of the pieces and vamped them to form the basic structure of his pieces. This is one idea to hold onto for a potential piece in our final concert for the improv class. This would be one way to blend the classical I'm more used to with unfamiliar territory.

I was really impressed by the percussionist's single solo that evening. It's unusual for me to appreciate percussion because that's an instrument probably the most foreign to me, my instruments being all melodic. Maybe this class has gotten me to think more about rhythm. It's true though, when I think about it - rhythm can completely change the effect of a piece of music, and is at least as important as the notes. Just imagine the Star-Spangled Banner in triplets or something - that would completely ruin its stateliness. In general just trying to understand what makes jazz sound like jazz has forced me to look at the elements of music more closely.

Getting Started

I don't like to practice my usual classical repertoire in front of other people, because it makes me self-conscious. I always feel that their presence makes it to some degree a performance. At the very least, the sound I am producing is caressing or assaulting someone else's ears. So practicing within earshot of others, or even just the belief or possiblity of it happening, can alter the way I practice. Specifically, I tend to get less detail-oriented, playing through my pieces a lot more rather than working on trouble spots, and I also take fewer risks.

When practicing improvisation, my self-consciousness is amplified. I'd never improvised before starting this class, at least not anything beyond fooling around on my violin in boredom, so this is a totally new thing that I know that I am not good at. Furthermore, with improvisation, there's not really any sheet music (beyond a rough lead sheet) in front of you as a safety net. You're not following a road that has been paved ahead of you. You're out there all on your own, forging new paths in the moment. But that nervousness, and the embarrassment of making mistakes in public, are all things I need to be comfortable with in order to perform in this recital on December 10. So maybe I should start practicing in front of people?

Well, I suppose there are tools to help, too. I should learn about chords, since Donal has been using them to explain aspects of the pieces we listen to. (In any case, 21M.301 will make me learn them.) Also, it will help to learn the blues scales, which we are going to go over in class. You could argue that I should just use my ear, but I would also argue, as I've learned in 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence), that giving a name to an idea or concept gives us power over it. (Prof Winston would be proud.)

I've tried practicing improvisation on violin a few times already. I think I need to start writing down cool things that I discover, because otherwise I just forget them after a while.

I have found that it's pretty easy to hear a jazzy tune in my head, but quite difficult to play the same kind of sounds on my violin. I think it is due partly to the fact that my fingers are used to certain configurations on the fingerboard, so just in the moment, they go to the places they are used to going. I have to slow down and consciously try to get a different sound. Playing along with recordings is a good idea. After all, learning is at some point an attempt at imitation of someone greater, whether it be a teacher or a track on a CD. Recordings will give me ideas that I wouldn't come up with by myself, since I am kind of stuck in a classical mold.

Ironically, it's actually easier right now for me to improvise on the piano, though my technique on this instrument is far worse than my technique on violin. Maybe it's due to the fact that I can really see where I'm going on the keyboard, and picture the chords, whereas this is more difficult on the violin. Or maybe I'm not constrained by prior technique.

I should go ask Sarah to jam sometime. We're already going to be playing the Brahms Violin Sonata No.3 together (incidentally, performing it around the same time as the improv class concert) and this would be another interesting facet of music to explore with her.

Finally, trying to play in this class reminds me of a video I saw about a year ago on Youtube of a "hip-hop" violinist.

Introduction

I'm currently enrolled in 21M.355, Introduction to Muscial Improvisation, at MIT. Donal Fox, our illustrious instructor, has asked each student to keep a journal of our thoughts and discoveries as we progress through the course.