Speak the Language

The first stage of improvisation is to Know the Tune.

The second stage: Speak the Language.

A writer must know how the language expresses ideas. That involves such disciplines as spelling, grammar, composition of ideas into sentences and paragraphs. My impression is that modern education discounts such old-fashioned concepts, but the fact remains that deficiencies in these areas interfere with the readers' comprehension of the author's intent.

Beyond these foundational skills, a writer must read. She must read all the time, deeply and widely, immersing herself in the language and the art of storytelling, or poetry, or nonfiction writing, or (better) all of them. She reads and listens until what Tolkien called the Cauldron of Story is part of her soul.

It is the same for a musician. Here is where the academic coursework which is part of any music degree finds its application: harmony, counterpoint, musical analysis, music history. Beyond these things, every bit of music that the musician encounters goes into what one might call the “Cauldron of Song,” the great Tradition of which we all partake.

This is a good image in more ways than one. Both “cauldrons” exist more in oral transmission than in what our ancestors often called “book learning.” The books, if they are good, attempt to codify the untidy soup of words and archetypes and deeds – and tunes and rhythms and harmonies – that underlie the crafts of Story and Song. But it is the actual work – the stories, the novels, the poems and epics and fairy tales, the songs, the anthems, the jigs and reels, the ballads, the symphonic works, the hymn tunes, the sonatas – that are the genuine Language that we must know.

The musician (and the author) do not have to go to school to learn these things, not if they pay attention – “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” as the marvelous old Collect says. There are countless folk and roots musicians who have never come near a School of Music, and make better songs than people like me with my diplomas hanging on the wall. But many of us would not find our way through the thicket without some book learning, and even the folk musicians who have not been to a formal school almost always have had what amounts to an apprenticeship, listening to the old ballad singers, or sitting around the edges of bluegrass bands and occasionally getting a chance to play along, and then getting advice from the old-timers as to how it is done. That is what the books are doing, if they are worth studying. I think of old Fux and his Gradus ad Parnassum, or C.P.E. Bach and his “Essay on the True Art of Playing the Clavier” as two examples of such work. Or crusty old Schoenberg and his “Fundamentals of Musical Composition.” Or Hindemith and his “Elementary Training for the Musician,” a book that is so difficult that no one I know (and certainly not me) has gotten more than about a quarter of the way through.

Speaking the Language is often the barrier that keeps people from making their own music. Someone who has not had much formal training wishes they “knew the chords,” as it is sometimes expressed. But those who have a lot of formal education are equally paralyzed. “What if I play a parallel fifth? What if I don't resolve a dissonance, or use proper voice leading?” As soon as one starts thinking too much about such matters, it becomes impossible to play anything unless it is in black and white on the page: Real Music, written by a Composer.

To such people, of which I was one: Don't worry about it. Just play.

Yes, the proper voice leading helps. It is a tool that can make your music better, and the more skill you have with harmony and voice leading and counterpoint, the better. But at the moment of improvisation, you cannot be thinking about such things. Just play. The thinking comes in retrospect, when you realize why a passage did not come off the way you had hoped. It may lead you (as it does me) to practice progressions and cadences and suchlike that have caused trouble. And that will help you play better the next time.

When I am improvising, I am mostly keeping track of the Tune. A second level of thought is the Form, which I have often scratched out on a piece of paper, and it is usually a thought such as “Okay, I've got to get to G major from here.” A third level of thought is trying to keep the outer lines in contrary motion, and the most basic harmony – which for me is just trying to stay diatonic in whatever key I am in. Or if I am in a more chromatic language, maintaining that level of chromaticism. And while all this is happening, I simply try to go where the notes want to take me, for every musical statement, even just two or three notes, carries within itself implications that must be worked out.

It is very much like an author in the midst of a story: the characters and events that have brought him to this point have a certain inevitability that causes the story to continue in one direction and not another. At its most fundamental, it can be as little as one line...

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

That first sentence started Tolkien down a long path.

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

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My music for this week is the prelude improvisation for the middle service . It begins with a song that was unfamiliar and needed some preparation (though only a handful of people were there early enough to hear it): the tune “Tucker” by David Ashley White, to the Fred Pratt Green text “From miles around the sick ones came,” a text that fits today's Gospel. I began by simply playing a verse of the tune straight from the hymnal, and expanded somewhat from there. The music continues with a well-known Scottish tune “Ye banks and braes,” for which John Bell wrote the text “We cannot measure how you heal.”

The artwork on the YouTube clip, a seventeenth century Ukranian fresco, is not about today's Gospel; it is, instead, about the time when the woman with an issue of blood touched the hem of his garment. And that was enough; she did not need him to go out of his way or take the time to lay hands on her. Perhaps her thoughts were like those of the centurion who said “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof.” But Jesus would not leave it there; he stopped what he was doing (which was important: he was on his way to the house of Jairus, where a girl lay dead) so that he could tell the woman that it was her faith that had made her whole.