Why Classical Musicians Can't Improvise - Part I

let's talk about why classical musicians cannot improvise and um we start answering that question by saying where do we get our music as classical musicians what music do we play and where do we get it and the answer is this thing called the repertoire okay the repertoire we all play repertoire so if you are a singer you might take a class called art song repertoire or you might take string literature which is repertoire or keyboard literature which is repertoire repertoire repertoire retro okay um in fact a whole world is built around this idea of repertoire it's what you play at your lessons it's what you play for auditions it's what you play for recitals and i used to obsess about planning the repertoire for the perfect recital you know the perfect flow of pieces from the repertoire even your identity as a musician to some extent comes from the repertoire that you play so i remember uh my friend daniel at wheaton college conservatory was telling me at juilliard um the in his studio the teacher decided what you were well you're a schubert player so you're just going to specialize in schubert and you're the brahms guy and you're the list person and you're the whatever and you're the bach lady right okay so your repertoire actually determines even kind of who you are as a musician uh so what is this repertoire it is an official list of pieces more or less official and i don't know if any of you have ever had this experience where you wanted to play something and it was a little off and you brought it into the lesson and the teacher looked at it cross-eyed and goes well this isn't really appropriate for the repertoire okay my student brought in a piece by gotcha the other day and i can't remember why he wanted to play it because this is a terrible piece it's called the union and it it's all these patriotic tunes mashed up and and layered on top of each other and actually the counterpoint is all wrong it's really funny and i said this is not appropriate repertoire okay it's also the music that gets played repeatedly uh so we develop uh we we get to know it so we know what to expect when we go to concerts so i went to a concert i'll just pick one out of my memory in riga latvia i went to hear this french guy and he played the bach c minor takata and then he did uh the beethoven opus 111 sonata and uh something something oh some chopin stuff it was kind of interesting i thought about i have never met this guy he's a really good player he's great i know every note of this entire concert i've heard all of this i've either played it taught it or heard it i i know every single note of this whole concert isn't the repertoire interesting i know every single note okay um and of course it's supposed to have this permanent place in our musical world who is this mysterious committee of people that approves you know what how is this how it works so anyway i just think about stuff like this all the time i need to sleep more so how do we learn our repertoire well we get a printed score because that's where the repertoire lives okay you get a printed score and then you study it down to the smallest detail uh tiniest staccato marking and every little is is that is that a diminuendo or is that an accent i can't tell they're the same shape and so i need to go to the library and get effects simile and call three musicologists and stuff and if we do this if we do this well enough it will lead to a realization of the composer's intentions okay that's the point of the whole thing to recite the composer's intentions as found in the repertoire and recorded in the score that's how our world works welcome to classical music okay and if i sound mildly bored i am so the music worth playing somebody decided is that of the great master composers the intentions of these composers are encoded in musical scores performers are to study these scores diligently in order to realize all the details and this results in approved works of the repertoire performed acceptably that is recited because we are reciting something that's given to us like that french guy i had heard every single note previously so what he's doing is reciting it again maybe with a little twist on it or something but basically it's reciting we recite works from the repertoire you

Channel: cedarvillemusic

Views: 7,803

Keywords: mortensen, piano, improvisation, classical improvisation, baroque improvisation, fugue

Id: N9ZAMopuUQY

Length: 5min 12sec (312 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021