Improvisation Feb 09

I woke this morning in a good mood and jumped straight on the piano and hit record to capture whatever came out. Its an improvisation with as many flaws as virtues but I like the theme, has a Mozartesque playful flavour. 

If you improvised this in one sitting then that is quite an achievement!  I love how you manage to keep all your ideas related to each other and to organize them into a coherent form.  I love the variations and the minor version of the main theme as well as the ornaments you throw in on repetition.  Now all you have to do is get this down into notation and play it without hiccups and you have yourself a sonata movement!  Very comprehensive and well structured piece.  Nice job and thanks for sharing!

The main theme was an idea I came up with the evening before I recorded myself, everything else including its variations and development was on the fly. However I use schemas and sequences I am already familiar with such as the rule of the octave, ponte and fonte and converting themes from major to minor is something I do for fun to well known themes and is easy enough to do on the fly. Also my right hand knows many ways to get up and down the keyboard using different scales, arpeggios and other patterns I've learnt.

If I am at the piano and someone talks to me I always animate what they are saying with music to mimic their mood and tone for comic effect and I have found some good themes this way. I've also pissed a few people off doing this! My wife generally laughs and then laughs harder when I mimic her laugh with trills. 

Another thing I do is take apart any piece im learning and see how chords are used. Im learning Haydns minuets from ix:11 and these are full of schemas and classic chord progressions. I learnt what I think is a neopolitan 6th from ix:11 number 7 which I learned to play in a few keys and thats how I ended up creating the theme of this improvisation; my theme has a neo 6th. 

I think improvising is very much like speech, when we talk we are communicating in unique ways using patterns already well known from practice. Composing on paper in this analogy is like written speech. I do think there is a fundamental connection between music and speech.