IMPROVISATION

I listen to a lot of music. And as I listen, I always think about the improvisatory quality of what I am hearing.

If you can play a piece of written music and it sounds like you are improvising, that is a wonderful thing.  Peter Serkin’s improvisatory reading of the Goldberg-Variations, for example,  came thru loud and clear last night.

Audience members want to hear this fresh musical insight and receive this feeling of improvisation. For lack of a better term, can we call this ephemeral music quality transparent?

If a musician plays a classical piece transparently, what does it sound like? You hear overlapping musical ideas. You have the impression that the musician is creating these ideas fresh for the first time. What you don’t hear are dense, opaque music blocks; think Alfred Brendel bashing his way thru a Beethoven sonata.

It is this layering which gives the sense of improvisation. There is a sense of the musical idea being freshly generated.

But the key quality is the sense that the musician is improvising the piece, even though you have heard this piece many times before.

In the 1700s, every musician could improvise. And it was improvisation that gave them a way to generate and test new musical ideas. Our principally western fixation on analysis and rigid education methods has thoroughly removed improvisation from the classical musical realm. Play every note exactly as it is written, period.

I like to think of transparent drawing as an analogue to musical improvisation. I like to think of transparent drawing as a visual improvisation. Because you can see the entire concept, there is an unavoidable sense of creation. You can see how the drawing was put together. There is a lightness to the drawing.  There is an overlapping of ideas.

And people like that. They want to be let in on the act. They want to have the sense that they are also creating along with you. They want to have the sense that they created this. The more inclusive this sense, the happier the client. There is greater satisfaction in this kind of connection.

A drawing that is transparent promotes this feeling of improvisation and creation. The more this feeling is promoted, the happier you clients are, which means you are happier.