Hiatus

As of two days ago, I decided to take an extended break from any type of long-form composition. This decision may come a little late as I have already not written anything of that nature for over a month anyway, but it helps to make a declarative statement like that. Spending a lot of time with various composition students at Oberlin made me do some serious thinking about the way I write. I have never developed any kind of methodology to composing. I tend to begin at measure one with only a vague idea of what I want to write, and I keep going from there. This approach can be successful. I've written several pieces this way that I am quite proud of. My discussions with fellow students who have devoted themselves to being full-time composers has shown me that these people have a thought process that I don't have, the ability to hear music on a much more developed level before writing it. The process of writing is merely a realization of their ideas, rather than the process by which the music is created. Is this the only way to write music? I don't think so, but when I decide to resume long-form composition, I want to deeply reconsider the way I go about writing music. I will restrain myself from saying anything more about this right now, as I feel I have become maybe a bit too analytical about my artistic process lately. I already have enough to think about as I dramatically reconsider my approach to playing the piano, and my friends are probably getting tired of hearing me bitch about this stuff by now.

I will say, that I have exempted jazz composition from this hiatus. I feel comfortable doing this because it is really quite different. For the jazz musician, writing and playing are really two parts of the same process. Jazz composition has been quite fruitful for me lately, and I'm producing a body of work that I'm very happy with. I am currently hoping to explore this material as well as many of the pieces I've written over the last six months or so over January term at Oberlin, ideally making a recording of original music.

Practicing Freedom

I've recently had to seriously reconsider and adjust my attitude towards playing "free."

The most important accomplishment was to adjust a misconception that I had let take root in my mind, that playing free was not real piano playing. This does not mean that I didn't take the music seriously. The jazz avant-garde is a very large part of my identity as a musician, and I have nothing but reverence for the great practitioners of this art form. I merely thought that free jazz did not demand the same things from me as a pianist that more conventional playing did. When playing free, I was so concerned with spontaneity that all idea of technique was pretty much lost. I would whip my fingers carelessly around the keys wherever the moment took them.

Another problem was that it had never really occurred to me that one ought to practice playing free. To me that seemed to defeat the purpose of a medium that so heavily relied on intuition and the inspiration of the moment. I did sometimes improvise freely during my practice sessions, but when I did this I always tried to create one coherent piece of music, as if I were improvising in a performance. I would never stop to examine what I was playing or develop on any of my ideas the way I would practice navigating the changes of a jazz tune. This does not actually constitute practicing.

As of the past week, I have started finding ways to develop a vocabulary for free-improvisation and make this a part of my regular practice sessions. So far this has meant devising atonal "licks" and practicing them the way I would a jazz lick. Memorizing licks does seem very much contrary to the nature of free improvisation. I thought to myself however, that when I practice a line taken from Miles Davis or Bill Evans, the eventual goal is not to be able to use that musical idea in one of my own improvisations, but merely as a way of developing the dexterity and knowledge of jazz vocabulary necessary to create my own lines while improvising.

For a long time I resisted practicing this way, thinking that doing so would make my free playing more contrived, and not true free improvisation. Hopefully, developing some amount of consistent musical vocabulary to use in free improvisation will actually help me gain a greater level of freedom in my playing.