Improvising Classical Music

About four weeks ago, while I was still waiting to play the last song of a Sunday church service, I got a text message from my wife that Atlanta's Pro-Mozart Society needed a pianist to play a concert that was to start in two hours. It turned out that I needed to cover for the pianist they originally scheduled, who missed his flight due to the daylight savings time change. I only had time to grab lunch, get a tuxedo on, and then I played an hour-long concert of improvised music with no preparation whatsoever. As unusual as this story might be for today's concert practice, it would not be unusual for Mozart at all. In fact, it would be quite common, except for the bit about the text message.

When I started playing piano many years ago, I only played classical music, and the idea of changing a single note did not ever cross my mind. Seven years later, I had just about quit playing all together, and then I heard jazz. For the next five years or so, I believed that jazz was the only music I could be interested in, and improvisation was the most attractive part of playing jazz for me.

The more jazz musicians I have been around, the more I realize that the best ones play classical music as well. So I also started playing some classical music as well, just to get into better shape as a pianist. And, then again, I found that I liked many pieces, and I realized that there are many similarities between jazz and classical. In fact there is not that much different about these two at all!

My further studies in music history resulted in similar realizations. Most of the classical composers were great improvisers as well, and many of them even wrote instructional manuals on how to improvise. Bach, Haydn, Clementi, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin were in fact all great improvisers and used that skill in their concerts as well as in more intimate musicing. The twentieth century developments in classical music made it quite impossible to improvise for most pianists, as the new classical music kept becoming less and less popular. With the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are encountering more and more composers interested in writing more tonal music, which larger audiences seem to appreciate, and it is my hope that the improvisation of tonal classical music will come back as well and become more popular.

My newest book with Mel Bay is dedicated to help classically trained pianists to start improvising.

It starts with very simple chord progression, and step-by-step it helps the pianist to develop all necessary skills to improvise in classical genre. This example illustrates the use of arpeggious to creat simple repetitive movement in the right hand, supported by steady and simple left hand:

I used excerpts from this book with my students for years, and I find that their level of confidence while improvising has grown very significantly. It also helps to make a transition from written music to improvising, which seems to intimidate many classically trained pianists. As with all my books, I wrote this one in order to teach my students, and to create a teaching tool that I would like to use myself. I hope it helps many classical pianists to find their way to improvisation!

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