LIKE MOST THINGS in our society over the past century, classical music has become characterized by a division of labor. From before Bach to Beethoven, composers were also performers; as the Romantic age turned into the modern era, roles hardened into separate specialties: creators (composers) and re-creators (performers). Much was gained: composers wrote evermore complex scores that performers realized with increasing perfection. Yet something was lost: the art of improvisation, of musicians freely creating, and risking, in the moment. With that loss has gone a sense of spontaneity that thrills artist and audience alike.
“If Mozart could hear people perform his music today,” surmises pianist and Harvard professor Robert Levin, “he would be amazed at our accuracy, but he would be annoyed at the premium placed on accuracy over expression.”
Miles Davis said that there is no such thing as a “wrong” note; the note that’s played next determines whether it’s good or bad. Of course, this improvisational mindset — the ability to think, even feel, on your feet — is the essence of jazz (a similar attitude, if not fluency, informs folk music and even some rock and pop genres). But it’s mostly a foreign concept for conservatory grads bred to learn and transmit exactly what a composer put on the page — nothing less, nothing more.
“What we gain in technical perfection, we can lose in a sense of play and adventure,” says Levin, who made a name improvising his own cadenzas to Mozart’s concertos, something the composer would have expected of any eighteenth-century pro. “Much of the classical music world is based on competitions, spliced recordings and concert promoters who want a slick product. Nothing much goes wrong in this world, but nothing goes terribly right, either. If people say classical music is dying, well, maybe that’s one of the reasons.”
Of course, interpretive subtleties can be heard in today’s classical concert halls, though individuality is often limited to the play-even-slower-when-it-says-slow variety. Nineteenth century-trained piano virtuosos such as Josef Hofmann and Wilhelm Backhaus even improvised preludes to the Chopin or Schumann they played in concert, a warm-up/scene-setting practice called “preluding.” Thought exciting at the time, such invention became frowned upon as the modern age of recording cast interpretations in amber and cultural mores shifted in favor of letter over spirit.
An inspiration for later generations when it comes to improvising in the concert hall has been American composer-pianist Frederic Rzewski, seventy-two. Extolling Rzewski as a paradigm are pianists as different as Marc-André Hamelin (renowned for realizing the most transcendentally complex classical scores) and Ethan Iverson (of alt-jazz trio The Bad Plus, which incorporates everything from Nirvana to Ligeti in its twenty-first-century vision). Many of Rzewski’s compositions call for improvisation, and he performed in group improvisations for decades as a member of Musica Elettronica Viva. Rzewski has even improvised within such totems as Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, a practice that might have made even Hofmann blanch.
Improvisers with the stature of Rzewski are like white tigers in the classical realm. But there are some venturesome talents out there, on mainstream stages and in new-music circles. Pianist Gabriela Montero — a protégé of Martha Argerich — has made her reputation by giving improvisation equal time with interpretation. Cameron Carpenter carries on the tradition of free improv in the organ world, with his own glam-pop spin. Violinist Carla Kihlstedt, thirty-eight, and multi-instrumentalist/composer Fred Frith, sixty-one, are collaborators from different generations and represent a rare breed that writes, improvises, plays and sings in music from avant-folk to art rock to contemporary composition. Perhaps it’s these musicians Mozart would recognize as kindred spirits.
Speaking A Language
Although we know Bach, Mozart and Beethoven through their compositions, they were perhaps most celebrated in their day for their improvisations. Mozart spontaneously wove variations on hit opera arias at his performances, like a jazzman would on a popular song.
“Mozart was the Duke Ellington of the eighteenth century, just as it was Duke Ellington who was the Mozart of the twentieth,” Levin says. “Mozart was just speaking the dialect from 1780s Vienna, and Ellington was speaking one from 1930s Harlem. But the aesthetic goals are similar, with enormous freedom within a stylized structure. The chord changes of the jazz player are the figured bass of the eighteenth century.”
To make Mozart feel contemporary, composers from Brahms to Schnittke have composed cadenzas in their own styles for his concertos. Levin finds these interesting, but they aren’t for him: “A truly idiomatic performance of an eighteenth-century concerto involves improvisation. After all, a cadenza — meant to be an electrifying display of virtuosity by the soloist — should feel dangerous, like the performer is walking a tightrope and the audience lets out a sigh of relief at the end: ‘Whew, he made it.’ ”
Improvising in any music demands a musician be steeped in that genre’s particular vocabulary. The sixty-two-year-old Levin — who recorded a milestone series of the Mozart concertos with improvised cadenzas (and a period-instrument orchestra, for Decca) — is one of the great students of Classical-era language, using as a model the cadenzas Mozart wrote out for others and the period treatises that codified the lingua franca of the day.
