The Art of Improvisation

When was the last time you heard improvisations based on Fats Waller, Frederic Chopin, and Antonio Carlos Jobin tunes, all in a single concert program? Last week Dariusz Terefenko, offering a piano recital on "The Art of Improvisation" at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, resurrected the art of classical improvisation and bridged the worlds of classical and jazz piano in his exciting lunchtime performance, part of the Graduate Center's "Music in Midtown" series.

These days, musical improvisation is usually considered the domain of jazz musicians, thanks in part to its indispensable role in jazz's ubiquitous form of presentation: an ensemble plays a tune, each musician then improvises on the chord progression, and finally the musicians come together to play the melody once more. Soloists generally follow the same form.

But whatever this design may lack in formal imagination, it nevertheless carries music that is, almost by definition, alive with vulnerability. Improvising isn't easy, and the "freedom" associated with it demands a flexible command of harmonic language and the ability to play in many keys -- something jazz musicians generally invest years of practice to achieve, and improvised ensemble playing further challenges players to respond skillfully and spontaneously to the other musicians. 

Today's classical musicians, by contrast, generally produce note-for-note recreations of past, elaborately-developed scores. Their performances (hopefully) reveal both a deep understanding of complex musical form and a mastery of demanding technique -- central elements of the classical tradition. In addition, playing within the parameters of a set, finely crafted score invites full exploration of a composition's particular expressive potential -- something a composer may have spent years creating and to which most classical artists are devoted. But ask classical musicians to play something by ear or improvise on the spot, and you might find them staring blankly into space.

Improvisation wasn't always divorced from classical music. Many great composers whose finished pieces we so often hear today were also great improvisers when they were alive. Mozart's improvisatory prowess was legendary (depicted in the movie "Amadeus") as were Liszt's and Beethoven's, to name a few.

With the exception of artists like Gabriela Montero, a performing classical pianist who also specializes in improvisation, and Keith Jarrett, who, in addition to his famous jazz performances has recorded Bach, Shostakovich, and Handel, contemporary musicians generally seem to have chosen one path or another, as manifested in the jazz and classical traditions: either developing fluid, spontaneous mastery of harmonic/melodic musical material or the ability to craft interpretations of challenging, set compositions.

Classical education has long neglected the improvisatory art, but many traditional conservatories such as Julliard, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Eastman School of Music, have instituted jazz programs in recent years, and there are signs of integration.

Mr. Terefenko, unusually, is a professor in both the classical theory and jazz programs at Eastman, and his delightful program broke down the barriers between the two traditions. His playing's lyrical, cascading echoes of Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans found voice not only through Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin" but in fantasies on Chopin's famous Prelude in E-minor, Op. 28, No. 4, and Mazurka in B-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 1. The Prelude was rich with jazzy chord substitutions while the Mazurka took on fiery dance-like qualities related to, but quite different from, the original. It was refreshing to hear the harmonic and rhythmic elements of these familiar pieces used as points of imaginative departure rather than as fixed entities.

Hearing him speak after the concert about the importance, for all improvisation, of mastering counterpoint, was a reminder improvisation doesn't belong to jazz or to any particular musical style, but is rather a way of imaginatively and spontaneously engaging musical materials.