Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians

I see that Greg Sandow gave Jeff Agrell's book a great mention last April, calling it " a complete delight, radiating both love and deep understanding of music from every word." I wrote my own review of Jeff's wonderful book last February for Connections, the Music for People newsletter. But I neglected to post it here!

Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians: 500+ Non-Jazz Games for Performers, Educators, and Everyone Else by Jeffrey Agrell
Chicago: GIA Publications (2008). ISBN 978-1-57999-682-6

Jeff Agrell is one of the few classical music professors in the country who actively improvises, who passionately advocates for improvisation, who encourages and nurtures the improvisational spirit in his students, and who has succeeded at the often challenging task obtaining institutional support for a non-jazz improvisation course. After 25 years in a professional orchestra, Agrell became the French horn professor at the University of Iowa, and like many other classical musicians at midlife, was ready for a creative change. Having improvised and composed on the guitar since his teenage years, he finally began improvising on the horn. Most of us reading this article had a similar experience and found ourselves drawn to David Darling and Music for People. As he explains in the Preface to his recently released Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians: 500+ Non-jazz Games for Performers, Educators, and Everyone Else, published by GIA, Agrell found his musical guide and collaborator right at home, in the pianist Evan Mazunik, then a junior piano major at Iowa. For both it seems to have been a “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” with the ironic twist of their formal roles in the university. The two began improving together, and that work blossomed into concerts, recordings, and workshops, and the “Introduction to Improvisation” course Agrell offers regularly at Iowa (Mazunik now lives in New York).

Anyone who has been to a Music for People workshop would find Agrell’s teaching studio in Iowa surprisingly familiar, as I did one Saturday afternoon last November; it’s cluttered with the djembes and assorted small percussion instruments so rarely found in the offices of classical French horn professors yet so common in the MfP world. I sat down with him, two of his colleagues, a student or two, and the saxophonist George Wolfe from Ball State University, and we began improvising. “One of the great joys of being an improviser,” as Agrell quotes cellist Matthew Barley, “is that I can play with practically any musician in the world. It is like being fluent in dozens of languages.” And that was our experience; it was the magic of free improvisation as the University of Iowa School of Music’s 2007 Contemporary Improvisation Festival (at which I was one of the guest performer/clinicians) began.

Although the National Association of Schools of Music, which grants accreditation to college-level music programs, mandates that all music students have experience in improvisation, most institutions pay lip service to the requirement without truly embracing it. Classical music professors, unless they specialize in early music, tend to ignore improv, seeing it as something irrelevant to their mission, and many jazz professors look askance at improvisation which isn’t jazz. So it’s often a lonely mission for people like Agrell, who really gets the value of improvisation for music students, who truly grasps how the process of creating music ties everything together.

I’ve met many former classical musicians who got burned out and turned to improvising as an alternative, healing mode of making music. How many of us in the MfP culture have said at one time or another that we are “in recovery” from our classical training? We find ourselves improvising instead of playing classical music, and it’s a wonderful, liberating, and healing new era of life. It’s release! It’s an explosion of self-expression and creativity and connection with other people. Classical music, for some of us, becomes a former lover with whom we were once intensely but toxically involved, and from whom we’ve had to move on. Our new, passionate love, improvisation has taken its place, but enough hurt remains that it’s hard to “still be friends” with classical music.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why it’s rare to find people who regularly perform on a high professional level as both classical and eclectic (i.e., non-jazz) improvisers. Jeff Agrell has managed to integrate the two into his musical and teaching life. He clearly understands the central role improvisation played in what we now call classical music until the late 19th century, and he sees that improvisation can and should be part of the central, core experience of classical musicians.

All this is articulated extremely well in Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians. At 354 pages, including several indexes, the book is both a manifesto making the case for improvisation in the training of classical musicians, and an wide-ranging encyclopedia of starting points for improvisation. He makes an excellent distinction between the notation-based, “literate” approach of the traditional classical musician and the “aural” approach of the improviser working without notation. “The two approaches—literate and aural—are complimentary, not mutually exclusive. They balance each other, develop musicianship skills, and promote health and sanity. To achieve the comprehensive musicianship so vital to a contemporary musician, both approaches need to be cultivated to the highest level possible.”

Agrell uses the term “games,” he explains, because of fear of mistakes which blocks the creativity of so many classical music students. I’ve had a copy for several weeks now; as I plan the sessions for the improvisation ensemble at DePauw University, where I teach, I find it a valuable resource, although I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Agrell’s suggestions for structuring a college-level improvisation course are excellent, and will be of great value to colleagues at other institutions. And there are so many ideas for structuring improvisations! Warm-Up Games, Rhythm Games, Accent Games, Dynamics Games, Melody Games, Form Games, Harmony Games, etc., etc. The list of chapters goes on and on. What did they call the old Sears catalog? The “wish book?” It’s like that, an improviser’s wish book, except you don’t have to spend money (once you’ve bought the book), just creativity. There are so many games included that I find myself overwhelmed if I try to read too much in one sitting; it’s an encyclopedic desk reference that I’ll be working through for months to come.

Many of the game descriptions are brief, and I find it sometimes takes me a while to work out in my imagination what he’s suggesting. Clearly Agrell has worked to include as many games as possible, so brevity has been a priority. And he’s obviously avoided overly defining, and thus limiting, what are meant to be improvisations. So be warned: using this book requires the reader’s patience, thought and imagination. But the rewards are many.

Without a working knowledge of classical music terminology, much of the book might be hard to follow. But for classical musicians interested in improvisation, especially those of us who lead workshops and teach courses, it’s an excellent, welcome new reference, which makes an excellent compliment to classics like Return to Child, The Listening Book, and Free Play.

Zoë Keating on how she does it

The fabulous looping cellist Zoë Keating explains it all.

Well, not in as much detail as those of us who also do cello looping might like, but it's a great WNYC Radiolab podcast, with lots of music. Zoë does looped cello compositions; my own looping is mostly improvised or quasi-improvised. (Of course she also improvises, and the podcast ends with an imprvisation.)

I love her stuff.

And she makes some insightful comments in the podcast on how much more comfortable she feels playing her own music than the compositions of others. That resonates with me. I'm hopelessly addicted to playing classical music, though, and since much of my job is teaching it, I have to keep doing things like playing the Arpeggione Sonata and driving myself nuts. There are times, though, when I'd like to leave the classical stress behind. Yet the joy of performing classical music, when it goes well, is--what's the word?--oh, right, addictive.

Back to Zoë. Here are the tech details from the bio page on her site:

The cello is amplified with an AKG C411 contact condenser mic. I run it through a few looping/sampling devices: two Electrix Repeaters, Ableton Live and a plugin called SooperLooper. I control the sampling and various other audio parameters with my feet, using a midi foot controller.

I bought ProTools SE this summer, with some faculty devlopment money that had to be spent before July 1. The package, which I have yet to open (due to being obsessed with all those shifts in the Arpeggione sonata, which I'm performing again Monday), is supposed to include a stripped-down, "lite" version of Ableton, about which I hear only great things. I'm going to need a foot controller, I know, to start really exploring it. But I'll start thinking about such post-classical things Tuesday, post-Arpeggione.

(photo by Jeffrey Rusch, from Keating's site.)

Worlds of Warcraft, for College Credit

What triggered the need to blog this morning was a blog post titled My Cello Feels Neglected . . . , in which Justin G. (aka "zoomicroom"), a student at Vanderbilt University, comments that, "It’s very difficult to find a good balance between playing LOTRO and practicing the cello. Still working on that." My sympathies to Justin--it's hard to find a good balance between practicing the cello and other responsibilities, even when they include teaching the cello (hence my previous, slightly self-pitying post).

But what the heck is LORTO?

So I kept looking through his post, which had nothing else to say about the cello (what are his prioirites, anyway?) and then started exploring the blog on which he posted.

It turns out Justin is writing on a class blog for one of Vanderbilt's first-year writing seminars, ENG 115F Worlds of Warcraft, perhaps not the first class at an elite university to focus on a popular video game, but certainly the first I've come across.

(If you're wondering how I came across Justin's comment on a blog I wouldn't usually read, here's the answer. I have Google alerts set up for "cello" and "cellist," among others, and get a daily email with each new mention of those words anywhere Google finds them on the web.)

The course not only incorporates blog technology but also an ITunesU podcast. (There's a direct link to the course's podcast in the blog's sidebar.) The students aren't just playing games and listening to Itunes; they're reading books, making connections between the virtual gaming world and actual literature as well as gaming theory, and doing a lot of writing. I'll leave it to others to debate whether a first-year writing seminar which requires significant amount online gaming is a sign of the end times, or an innovative way to teach critical-thinking and writing skills by capitalizing on a passion shared by many new college students (and evidently some of their teachers, one of whom is the Chair of English at Vandy). (I'd be interested to see if Margaret Soltan, an English professor herself, at University Diaries has any thoughts.)

I imagine my avid-gamer son, while happy to be a sophomore at Grinnell, would have seriously looked at Vanderbilt had he known about this course.

I'm still not sure what LORTO is. That's OK, I don't really need to know, and I'm sure my son, to whom I'll email a link to this post, will tell me anyway.

And may Justin G. make the time to practice his cello. It's a struggle, but it's worth it, dude.

Blogging in bed

When school starts up (classes started here on August 27), life suddenly feels overwhelming, at least for a while. The mental energy to blog evaporates. Or at least it did for me.

There's tremendous emotional energy that goes into starting a new course, establishing teaching relationships with new cello students, and reestablishing relationships with returning students. And there's the really time consuming, and often frustrating, task of working out lesson times for cello students (time that most also work for their accompanists) and finding times for several chamber music groups to have coachings.

You think it's all set and then someone stops by and says, "Did I sign up for Fridays at 1:00? I don't know why I did that! I have a class then." And then the whole intricate system, or portions of it, may collapse and have to be redone.

But now it's all done. Or so I think. And the urge to blog is slowly returning. It's enhanced today by whatever it is I'm coming down with--a scratchy throat and now a cough--which I'm using as an excuse to spend most of the morning in bed. Between last night and this morning, I've skimmed through the last four days of the New York Times (actual hard copy editions!) as well as last Sunday's. I've browsed the web, watched YouTube clips and others I won't mention, and right now I'm sick of reading and watching and feel lke writing.

Bucket Drumming in the Union Square subway

As I was writing my previous post, I was remembering my absolute favorite NYC subway musical experience: a young teenage boy doing fantastic drumming--I think it was at the Lincoln Center stop--on a white bucket.

And I just found a bucket-drumming video (different drummer) from director taikieatssushi, who made the beatboxing flute and cello . Fantastic!


Turns out there are loads of bucket drumming videos on YouTube.

In the Union Square subway station

One of the delights of visiting New York City is the music one encounters from time to time. I've heard fabulous stuff in there. I wish I'd encountered beatboxing flute player Greg Pattillo with Eric Stephenson on cello, filmed here at the Union Square subway in NYC. This is way cool, with great camera work:



Here's Eric's bio from the The Project site:

An exceptionally versatile cellist, Eric Stephenson’s style ranges from classical to jazz to rock and folk. He is currently a member of the IRIS Chamber Orchestra in Memphis, Tennessee and the Colorado Music Festival. Eric served as Principal Cellist of the Canton Symphony Orchestra from 2002-2006 and was a regular substitute for the Cleveland Orchestra.

As a fellow at the Aspen Music Festival, he served as Assistant Principal Cello of the Aspen Festival Orchestra from 1999-2004. He has appeared as a soloist with the Cleveland Institute of Music Symphony Orchestra and the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge, Colorado.

Eric earned his Bachelor and Master of Music Degrees with Honors from the Cleveland Institute of Music and was a recipient of the Ellis A. Feiman Award in Cello while a student of Stephen Geber.

", , , ever since I first heard the cello I wanted to play it."

A Naples Daily News profile of 13-year-old cellist Jared Blajian. “I think it’s something I was meant to do” he says, “because ever since I first heard the cello I wanted to play it.”

The cello is Jared’s lifeblood, his release. If he has a stressful day at school, he’ll come home and, within a half hour, he let it all out in through the vision of master composers.
. . .
Jared practices almost three hours a day, every day. He sits in the study and plays, barefoot, in a T-shirt and shorts with brown hair falling lazily across his forehead. He methodically works his way through at work, tilting his head slightly toward the strings as if he’s listening to words no one else can hear. Hours later he emerges from the room to grab a bite to eat or to watch a video of an orchestra performing. Then he returns to the study.

The awful noise that started a career

The Lousiville Courier-Journal has a great profile on cellist Ben Sollee (his website) who got off to an unusual start:

When Ben Sollee's elementary school band teacher first put the bow to the cello in his third-grade classroom, she struck the wrong note. But it was still the right chord for Sollee.

"She played all the different instruments for us, and she was a violinist and didn't necessarily know how to play the cello," Sollee recalled, laughing. "She went to bow the low string, and it made an awful noise -- which I loved. And I was like, 'I'm playin' that!'"

". . . if you have to decide between a really terrific European cellist and a really good American cellist, you lean to American"

Visas are harder and harder to get since 9/11, which is helpful for American soloists, at least in Phoenix, although the IRS is creating headaches of its own affecting the cause of the Americans:

"But with all the visa malarkey, and trying to get guest artists into the country with enough confidence to include them in our season brochure - well, we are looking at more American artists," Christie says.

Even the IRS gets into the act, says Maryellen Gleason Phoenix Symphony president.

"There is a new rule about federal withholding tax," she says. "It's not a deal killer, but if you have to decide between a really terrific European cellist and a really good American cellist, you lean to American, which is good for the American, but it's another step for our bookkeeping department, and we have only so much time.

"We canceled a guest conductor for next season for the exchange rate. We're looking at a Chinese conductor instead of a European one."

On the other hand, American orchestras touring Europe can be paid in euros, and the currency conversion imbalance can help them make up for a loss in corporate sponsorship. A poor economy has left several orchestras with empty pockets that corporate donations used to fill.

The entire Arizona Republic article is here.

Life carting a cello around has never been simple.

La Demoiselle et le violoncelliste/Lalo Cello Concerto

Via Animation Blog, Jean-François Laguionie's beautiful 1965 animation, La Demoiselle et le violoncelliste (The Maid and the Cellist). The score is excerpts from the Lalo Cello Concerto, with beautiful, old-school playing (anyone recognize this recording?).

Orlando Cole Turns 100

Eric Shumsky has written a tribute to the legendary cellist and teacher Orlando Cole (Wikipedia article and ICS interview), who turned 100 this past Saturday. I heard Cole give a masterclass and speak on a panel 4 or 5 years ago at a Cello Congress; he was sharp and articulate.

Is cello playing and teaching good for longevity? Greenhouse is in his nineties and giving masterclasses internationally. Starker is in his eighties and still teaching nearly full time at IU.

I hope so. The way the stock market has been going, I may need to keep teaching until I'm 80 or 90 myself!

Matthew Barley

Strings magazine has a new profile of Matthew Barley, including this photo by Viktoria Mullova (well, I'm assuming it's that Viktoria Mullova).

I'm a Barley fan myself. He's a great role model for young musicians in a "post-classical" era. His career is diverse, he has numerous self-initiated projects, and one of the best websites in the business. As a matter of fact, I think his site and Mullova's are an excellent contrast. His is eye-catching and interactive and not having seen it for a while, my reaction was "wow!" When I saw Mullova's, I thought, "well, that's nice."

He's also into improvisation.

I was sorry to see on his website that he's been having problems with his left shoulder and had to cancel a number of performances. He's scheduled to start performing again in September.

Amy Leung

I love this photo of Amy Leung, who has a Kennedy Center gig tonight.

Update:  Carl Banner, founder and director of Washington Musica Viva, likes her a lot, and says so on his blog.  He's included audio files from a rehearsal of the Brahms clarinet trio.  

IWS

I'm suffering from IWS: Internet Withdrawl Syndrome.  I'm staying in a guest apartment at a retirement/disability facility where a good friend libes.  No wireless!  Ack!

My friend does have a beautiful IMAC that I'm able to use for short periods of time.  But we're busy with a lot of stuff, so there's not much time for blogging.  And it's interesting to observe myself wanting to web surf at night.  But I can't do that in my room.

On the other hand, there's cable TV in my room, with about 100 channels.  So even as I experience IWS, I've been experiencing CSRS: Channel Surfing Relpase Syndrome.  And having a great time with it.  I had cable turned off at my house as a way to avoid the problems of Channel Surfing Syndrome.  It helped a lot, AND it is fun to induldge in my guilty pleasure for a few nights.

More cello news soon!

Casals, "On an Overgrown Path"

On an Overgrown Path, a beautifully-writen blog new to me, has a great story about Pablo Casals, and doesn't shy away from mentioning the views of Casals's detractors. It's mostly cellists who read my blog, so I don't need to highlight all that made Casals such a great cellist and cello revolutionary (for his time). I did find this Stravinsky quote so wonderfully bitchy that I''ll post it here:

His sometimes reactionary views left Casals an easy target, and after watching a television programme programme about him, Stravinsky remarked: "That was an interesting programme. In one scene the cellist and a sort of Hungarian composer, Zoltán Kodály, are seen together with their great-granddaughters, at least that's what one supposes until one learns tat they are their wives. And what were the two racy octogenarians talking about? Well, they were saying that the trouble with me is that I must always be doing the latest thing. But who are they to talk, when they have been doing the same old thing for at least eighty years! Señor Casals also offered us an interesting insight into his philosophy - for example playing Bach in the style of Brahms."

It's a subject for another post, and will be part of my improvisation book whenever I get it done, but that last sentence speaks to what I think was a really damaging idea, or nexis of ideas. forcefully promoted by Stravinsky and picked up by others. Implicit in the remark is the notion that there is (correct) Brahms style, that one can know it, and that there is also a correct Bach style, and one can know it, too, and that all works should be played exactly as the composer wrote them and in their style.

Casals made music in his ow voice, in his own style, and did so with the greatest of love and respect for the composers and music he loved. The 20th-century modernist movement, of which Stravinsky was such an important part, was obsessed with the fantasy that musical works, including pieces written before 1900, could somehow stand on their own, were in essence fixed and permanent, and that the personality and voice of performers should, in effect, be obliterated or at least avoided.

This caused much frustration, since a piece is inevitably reborn and to some degree or another transformed with each performance. When you write a piece for other people to play, you write a piece for other people to play. They are going to play it like themselves. More later.

"Weird" cello groups

A "weird concert alert" about an upcoming Rasputina radio gig in Albany.

The story also has a link to a MySpace fan page for Maston Jones, a group with two cellist/vocalists. The page describes the group in the past tense, so I don't know if they are still together. Probably not; a quick search didn't turn up any recent links.

Middle-aged rant: I find most MySpace pages visually confusing. I don't know if it's an aging-boomer thing, or that they are just visually confusing. Dark blue links against a darkish gray background? I couldn't read them even with my glasses on.

My Chord Space

Kimberly at My Chord Space Blogs sent me a nice note. I've been enjoying her classical-music blog, and am looking forward to exploring the rest of the site.

Current Cellist of the Day

Erin Snedecor of Crofton, Maryland.

And who knows? Maybe she'll be famous in the future.

I like what her friends say about her:

Annapolis High senior, Erin Snedecor, 17, of Crofton, says she likes the cello because it speaks another language.

"You play music composed by other people, but you put your own voice to it," said Erin, whose friends joke that her instrument has become an extension of her body because she never puts it down.

Famous former cellist of the day #2

Famous former cellist #1 is Walter Mondale.

No. 2: Olympian Lolo Jones, who played the cello all through high school. This Chicago Tribune piece tells her inspiring story.

But which is more terrifying? An Olympic meet or playing a cello recital?

As if we have to ask.

Walter Mondale on Giving a Cello Recital

Giving a cello recital? Terrified?

Relax, it's natural. Turns out it's even worse than giving a Presdential acceptance speech at a national political convention, at least according to Walter Mondale. He's probably the only living person to have done both.

"I guess you could say I was anxious,'' he said [referring to his speech].

But not terrified. For example, giving that huge speech wasn't nearly so terrifying as playing a cello recital when he was growing up in Ceylon, Minn.

Mondale says one issue was, "I was no good on the cello.''

Hah! I know plenty of cellists who are at least, well, somewhat good on the cello (and some who are really good) and it seems we all get terrified from time to time, no matter how well other people may tell us we play.

(For the younger ones amongst us, Mondale was Jimmy Carter's Vice President and the 1984 Democratic candidate for President.)