Introduction
This semester, my knowledge and experience of improvisation has expanded greatly. I began the year with no experience of group improvisation at all, and went in with an open mind. As a classical student, improvisation is not something I had been taught; when it was mentioned, it was within the context of harmonic structures, with rules on key relations and cadences. As a result, the premise of improvisation was very daunting, and I had only ever tried it when alone and without any specific intent. However, I knew that this was a large area that was missing from my skill set and that this would be valuable in my musical development. Overall, I would say the greatest improvement has been in my confidence. Upon reflection, I believe this has been a result of anxieties over knowing what to play and knowing when to play, as well being due to a lack of experience. Over the semester this has improved greatly as a result of the development of my listening skills, and also a greater knowledge of improvisatory techniques and games.
Week 1
On starting this module, I was quite apprehensive. At this point, my only experience playing with a group was in my piano trio ensemble; this requires a lot of listening for queues and for expression or rubato, but as the music is written, the performer generally knows what to expect. As quite an anxious person, this knowledge of what to expect and what each other’s roles are can be very comforting. When improvising in a group however, the role of listening is much more important: I had to listen not only for the expression, but also for the music itself – knowing when to join in, and whether to accompany or lead, was a large part of my learning this semester, and it’s something I especially want to focus on in the future.
Listening skills were built into every week of classes, and played an important role. In the first lesson we were guided to play in ‘duos’, where one person played an idea and the second person went from accompanying to building on that idea. This was especially helpful for me, as one of the major struggles I face is knowing when to lead, or accompany. In my trio I’m used to almost always accompanying, laying down harmony and melody at the same time, so it was a change that I struggled to adapt to. In the first lesson, I was aware of everyone’s roles, and had an idea of what to do, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to do it and found it difficult to join in. I wasn’t very confident and felt quite out of my depth, but I had noticed this area of weakness and was keen to improve. As a result, Jack (the other keyboard player in our group) and I arranged to meet up weekly to improvise and practice our skills as a group. The first half of the video is a clip from one of these practice sessions.
Listening skills are also tied to the content of improvisation itself. With my limited experience, it was a challenge at first to think outside of keys and tonalities, and this is something that I am still in the process of learning. In the first week, before we played in duos, we experimented with a completely free group improvisation. I remember it was almost entirely atonal, which I found very overwhelming – I remember looking at the keyboard in front of me and feeling at a complete loss from the possibilities. An observation I made, however, was that I found it even more challenging when a riff repeated on the guitar and the improvisation became more tonal. I believe that this is because the implied tonality gave me the urge to figure out what key it was in before joining in, but I found it difficult to improvise that quickly. Most improvisations in lessons since then were atonal, which I found more comfortable. If dissonance was embraced, it was less intimidating to join in. We played a number of games in classes that built on this idea of atonal playing.
Week 5
One atonal game that helped me a lot was the short-long exercise, which we first explored in week 5. This exercise explored the contrast between playing horizontal and vertical textures. Playing horizontally, we were limited to three pitches in similar registers and had to play them as staccato as possible, with only one pitch at a time per person. This meant we had to listen to the silence, and make sure we were placing our notes exactly where we meant to. To contrast this, there was a second section where whenever someone played a long note, everyone had to join in and contribute to a more stacked, vertical texture. The second we heard a long or short note, we had to switch to them. This trained our listening skills, even more so as we had to keep our eyes closed.
Gradually, we began to loosen the rules of the game. I really enjoyed this – I liked the clarity of knowing my role and being on the same page as everyone else, but there was enough freedom to explore sound without losing focus. The loosening of restrictions gave greater importance to listening to the others, and I found this really fun. There was always an element of intimidation when jumping straight into a free improv, but the feeling of relaxing into it was a lot more comfortable as a stepping-stone for me.
The exercise also opened my eyes to the idea of finding spaces to play horizontally. Generally while playing, one observation was that I tended to get taken out of it when everyone was playing, and as the piano has such a high range both in pitch and textural potential, I often found it hard to find space to join in (for example at around the 4:30 mark in the video). Playing chords sometimes muddied the sound, and playing short motifs often made the music too busy. The short-long exercise helped with this, as it shifted the way I thought about the music. Instead of considering my role as melodic or accompaniment, it was sometimes more appropriate to think of it texturally. Thinking this way made the keyboard less intimidating, and I felt more comfortable taking risks.
The second half of this video was taken in our final lesson of the semester, and despite finding a lot of areas for improvement on watching back, I am very pleased with the performance. Ensemble playing is my favourite area of music – I love contributing to a full sound and being part of a room of people making music. My favourite moment was when I played the tremolo chords at 2:57, because I took a risk of echoing the saxophone motif, and Jack heard me and did the same on keys. It felt great to contribute to that moment.
However, watching it back I’m aware that I’m not matching the tone of the other instruments a lot of the time – I think I may be too caught up in the rules and listening for short/long notes to listen to more musical elements. John Stevens (2007:60-61) writes about the importance of maintaining a balance between creative freedom and being a “receptive ear,” and this is an area that I have made good progress on since the start of the semester. Stevens suggests that aural concentration can be improved in a method he calls “scribbling:” by playing in a more subconscious fashion, a performer’s playing doesn’t interfere with their concentration on external sounds. I think I embodied that to a degree at the moment I mentioned above, although it remains true that I tend to overthink what I’m playing and neglect my attention to the overall sound as a consequence. I see this as an important area I can continue to improve on throughout the remainder of my course.
Other Approaches
Another approach that I found inspiring was Zorn’s “Treatment for a Film in Fifteen Scenes,” which we looked at in Week 10. That week, we made sounds inspired by visual prompts such as “wind through the curtains” or “key opens a door,” (Zorn, 2000:59-66). We were encouraged to use extended techniques to achieve our sounds, and it was the first time I’d experimented with that in any depth. Getting inside the grand piano gave me access to a completely new range of sounds that I wasn’t used to, and after that lesson I did some research into performers that use extended techniques. A musician I was especially drawn to was Sylvie Courvoiser – her particular style of tonality and dissonance, combined with her use of the strings inside the piano, is very attractive to me. Initially, I wasn’t entirely sure what could be done with extended techniques beyond plucking the strings, but I’ve since learnt a lot about the possibilities, and it would be interesting to try them out next semester.
For example, in a performance of Courvoiser’s Trio’s ‘Bougeois’s Spider,’ she holds down chords without sounding them, and together with the sustain pedal drags a rubber across the strings. This allows the chords to sound in a muted and brittle way, and I was surprised at how resonant the effect was. In the same performance, she hits the metal beams of the piano and utilises palm muting, as well as placing objects towards the upper range of the piano to give a percussive sound when hit with the keys (Jazz Club Moods, 2019). In the Week 10 lesson, I wasn’t aware of that many techniques: I experimented with plucking the strings, playing glissandos with sustain pedal, and also used the percussive element of pressing the pedals harshly, but I wasn’t sure how I could evoke any harmony this way. With this new knowledge, I can see much more potential for creative improvisations.
Conclusion
As a musician, I like to reflect critically on my performance and practice. I am keenly aware that one of my biggest weaknesses is in my confidence. I knew that this module would push me, and I would say that it has. The necessity to not only be comfortable taking up space but also to create, produces a lot of vulnerability that is good, and this semester has created a safe space for that. Small writes that true enjoyment comes from a harmony between the human need for communication and the musical need to affirm oneself in relation with others (2007:V). I would like to embody this in my improvisatory practise, by taking more mind of the communicative aspect of music, and allowing myself not to overthink musical technicalities. Next semester, I want to push myself further. I don’t want to shy away from ideas, and I’d like to be assertive and contribute to greater sounds.
Bibliography
Jazz Club Moods (2019) Live at Moods: Sylvie Courvoisier Trio “Bourgeois’s Spider” [Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/imqChrZB9bQ [Accessed 20/01/2026].
Small, C. (2007) Foreword. In Stevens, J., Doyle, J. & Crooke, O. (eds) Search & Reflect: A Music Workshop Handbook. Teddington: Rockschool, IV-V.
Stevens, J. et al. (eds) (2007) Search & Reflect: A Music Workshop Handbook. Teddington: Rockschool.
Sylvie Courvoisier (2022) Sylvie Courvoisier SOLO Live in Bremen [Video]. Available online: https://youtu.be/h1rhv0MxVYA [Accessed 19/01/2026].
Zorn, J. (2000) Treatment for a Film in Fifteen Scenes. In Zorn, J. (ed) Arcana : musicians on music. New York: Granary Books, 59-66.
