Why Don't Classical Musicians Improvise? 

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LA keeps teleporting around the room like he is actually a character in Nahre's head. One that personifies her wild improv side.

The last point you made is the most critical one - music as a communal activity as opposed to a soloistic and individualized one - is the real key to enabling musicians of all genres, not just classical, to explore improvisation. The simplest answer to why don’t classical musicians improvise is just that they are rarely given the opportunity, direction, and motivation to do so. It’s akin to the difference between having a conversation between people (improvised) and performing a monologue. Your videos are fantastically made and inspiring. Hope to meet you in person one day to collaborate!

I know that my guitar and bass playing improved ten fold when i started playing with others… music is communal

Can you two please make a duo record?

can i go to one of your rehearsals and just stand there, appreciating??

5:27 hype man

K as someone with a MMus in classical piano, I wanted to say something. 1. Improvisation did not die until the later part of the 20th century. The generation of Rachmaninoff was still trained in improvising and capable, possibly not in the same way as the generation of Mozart or of Chopin, but they still knew how to work without a score (sheet music). By this time improvisation already had significantly less of a role due to a growing emphasis on fidelity to composer's intentions. 2. I don't know with confidence why improvisation died out, and I can say with confidence that this question doesn't get much attention in music schools. I can offer a few ideas, and maybe the truth is a combination of all of them and more. One cause is attitudes like Beethoven had, in which he obsessed over what went onto his pages and didn't like people adding even embellishments to them. He wanted them to play what was on the page and only what was on the page. Another is a trend that began shortly after Beethoven's career, which I call "composer worship," the mentality that composers were these geniuses (which they were, at least the ones we know best today), that therefore we should just try to play exactly what they imagined in their minds, and that the score is the authoritative indicator. This trend started achieving new levels with performers in the mid 20th century like Wanda Landowska, who famously scoffed at a colleague, "you play it your way. I'll play it Bach's way." Even though scholars and performers would in subsequent decades learn a lot about how keyboardists of Bach's generation played and used written music, the mentality continued to grow in influence, to the point that any student entering a conservatory today can expect a thorough indoctrination in this paradigm before they finish their studies. In more recent times people have started to admit that being faithful to composers' intentions (mainly pre-19th century composers) involves improvisation appropriate to their style, but for some time, especially among people anxious to be self-righteous about their way of interpretation, obsession with what composers wrote on the page denied both the role and the value of improvisation, and we all suffered accordingly. The one other cause that I can offer for the disappearance of improvisation is the way composers wrote starting some time around 1910 and especially getting into the middle of the century. Composers were dismantling every imaginable aspect of the traditional musical language. Rhythm and metre went wild in Stravinsky (famously, Rite of Spring, which took the orchestras about 49 rehearsals just to be able to play through it without falling apart, let alone delve into refining the interpretation); harmony got dragged into atonality; serialism and then total serialism made music undecipherable even to musicians of average training. In an anarchy within which nobody knew which were the stronger beats (if there were such things) and which were the weak beats or which were the harmonic notes and which were the tension notes or how any of these related to any of the others, there was no sense in improvising. Composers took exorbitant amounts of time just to figure out what they were doing; performers had such a hard time keeping up that it was out of the question to figure out how to add your own notes and rhythms without entering an entirely different style (such as older styles that we were used to).

7:24 Exactly. It is that rigidity and hideboundness that makes popular music musicians (like me) see classical training as an impediment to creativity which is an unfair characterization but is true often enough to feed the stereotype. For every musician who lets theory inform and expand their creativity there is another who thinks musical theory is a set of rules to be enforced and acts as if accidentals and borrowed chords are errors. I once had to rewrite a melody just to get the keyboardist to play the chords I wanted him to!

Another attribute of the improviser is insatiable curiosity. The musician has to *want* to explore the unknown, hang out there without a net, (insert cliche here), etc. In the rock field the better improvisers like drummer Bill Bruford would bounce around from group to group because he knew they would provide a platform to do something he hadn't done before. It's probably hard to do that in the mainstream classical world, unless it's maybe a performer and a conductor who have that kind of relationship.

ALL MUSIC begins as improvisation. NOT improvising results from notating a particularly successful improvisation (we call that a composition, right?). Notation tells musicians what to play, they don't have to improvise because they have something written out for them. I have come to the conclusion that improvising is very difficult, you're composing extemporaneously. However, practicing the art of improvisation (equipped with as much music theory as your brain can hold) leads to wonderful musical experiences. Most are not as complex as well-designed musical scores but they're fun, wonderful, and extremely satisfying.

What are you using to make those charts? Is there an app that can track practice time and graph it like this?

classic music is about a story and idea, improvise tells no story.

Nahre Sol: *_makes the most impressively dramatic improvisation of the barney end song_* "or something like that idk lol"

Living for LA stank face man haha. Also, as every musician knows, a stank face is the highest compliment you can give another musician. Another great one guys :)

You know you see dedicated drummer, when he is listening to classical improvisation and can't stop drumming air drums.

The drummer has such a genuine excitement when hearing the piano improv, it's so moving

I love how he gets so excited when she plays

Casually refers to the 1700s as *back in the day*

Musician: tries to break out of the confines of written sheet music Purists: *tHe sAcReD tExTs!!!*

I think improv in classical music died due to the cultural process of canonization. Critics moved from a focus on the performers, to a focus on "great composers" - this was a political effort that was encouraged in order to engender a sense of national identity in previously fractured nations like Italy and Germany. Indeed, Verdi was known as Italy's "father of the fatherland" and later became a politician himself. As time went on, the notion of the "genius composer" became more entrenched and their works considered sacred and immutable. It became sacrilege for a performer to deviate from the composer's notations.

None of my classically trained friends can improvise. They read sheet music insanely well, sight reading crazy written solos. In our Jazz group, when a solo isn't written they look at me, a not at all trained musician, to improv. Works great. Our group sounds great

You forgot the most important reason... because classical music competitions force musicians to abide by rigid guidelines for interpretation, reducing the need for creativity to 0.

Seeing both hosts going through their musical journeys are really interesting.

You don't improvise when you're taught that it's a mistake.

One type of classical musician who still need to be really good at improvising are church organists.

You guys make the best musical duo! A classical pianist and a gospel drummer, who's styles are worlds apart yet can share so much.

I've heard a couple things said about Bach. One is that he would be one of the best jazz musicians if he were alive. Another is that he would be a really great programmer.

"Before you do anything else, find friends to explore this with..." Your experience with learning and discovering improv really hit home for me. I was also classically trained with very rigid training that focused more on "perfection" (hell, I wasnt even allowed to do my own cadenzas because they weren't good enough). I always admired jazz artists and all my friends who could improvise while I struggled alone at home, unable play out of fear of making mistakes. But jamming with friends not only helped me learn to improvise more freely, but it also gave me the confidence and courage to be more expressive overall.

I want to hear the complete "Barney's theme concerto" so bad now !

He's right, it's hard for classically trained musicians to chill. It's a damn shame. He's also right about the "correctness" being intimidating.

I love this show. I know very little about music, but each of these episodes is so well researched and presented and paced and edited. I learn a tremendous amount AND it's hugely pleasurable. Thank you, Nahre, LA, and all of the talented people who make this channel.

As every one knows, J S Bach was the greatest Improvisator at his time.

Ah, fantastic stuff. That last jam was excellent. And man, LA's enthusiasm is infectious.

I have lots of friends who are concert pianists (classical) who improvise. One example: Ioana Ilie (Switzerland). She can play anything of the classical repertoire and is an incredible improviser. She has improvised several times at my organization and other concerts throughout the world. Someone in the audience can make a suggestion of a subject and she comes up with something incredible. One of her improvisations is being published by my company. At the end of these concerts, someone can come up with a well-known tune and Ioana creates a wonderful improvisation. An example. The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn. Someone in the audience suggested she improvise on this familiar tune: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Kct2lX6QtLQ.html She also teaches improvisation so that the perception that it is a lost ability disappears. Another example is Phillip Keveren, the main arranger of Hal Leonard Corporation. He is classically trained. He improvised several times at my events. The statement in the video, "So why have classical musicians stopped learning how to improvise?" They haven't. Of course, classical musicians will play a piece as written by the composer at a concert because the audience expects that. If you were to have titled your video "Why Don't Most Classical Musicians Improvise," that would have made sense. However, the title alludes to "all." It does note "rarely" in the subject area. Here is an example of my friend, Kevin Olson (Classically trained) who volunteered to improvise with Jon Schmidt of The Piano Guys. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CoXtoW6cSBk.html Another example is Jackson Berkey, (Masters/Juilliard/Classical) the co-founder and pianist of Mannheim Steamroller. I could go on but will leave this as just a few examples.

Love it. Education and inspirational. May I suggest doing an episode on "the pocket?" The pocket as in being in the pocket

Organists are classical musicians and improvise like every sunday or more (even during concerts....)

Am I the only one that wants more clasical improv? I love jazz but when I heard nahre improv on those themes I was so excited. I am so used to listening improv jazz but improvisation in a more "classical style" sounds ironically new and nice.

I never knew the history of improvisation in classical music! I really hope that it makes a comeback. Hopefully we'll see a distinction between rigid concerts with fixed cadenzas and improvisation concerts with a free improv cadenza. That'd add an entirely new element to classical

can we get some of you two jamming in every episode? it's awesome to see your musical compatibility grow each time!

Bruce Lee - "Absorb what is useful. Discard what is useless. Add to it what is your own."

I wanna hear the full version of that jam session at the end, sounded great.

Nobody: SF: Why Don't Classical Musicians Improvise? Everyone: They didn't? SF: They did! Everyone: Uh.. OK then. Cool!

I've always thought there was no place to improvise in classical music. I'm glad I'm wrong (and also I'm glad for knowing Nahre's work on her own channel and here - my favourite video of her is the one about flamenco, btw)

Sees title: "laughs in Indian classical music"

That moment when Nahre was improvising a cadenza on the Barney theme song - both Nahre and LA’s interplay and infectious energy made me imagine the of you two as cartoon characters. I adore this channel and the both of you for putting in the work in sharing this knowledge with us all.

It miss one important detail : even classical compositions have sometimes been improvised first by their creator. There is no better way to compose than to improvise, even for written music.

I want Nahrae and LA to star in a buddy comedy together.

I don't know what to say. I watched an entire video by a classical musician from beginning to end and was captivated. The explanations were interesting and within seconds I completely overlooked that the musician was a classical artist. The way that you play is inspiring no matter the genre. I can tell by your playing that you really enjoy music but what's more impressive is that you're able to transferred your joy to the listener via your style and technique. Music is music and when played well it makes the listener feel the emotion of the artist. I'm a beginner on sax and not much more than just the owner of a keyboard. I'm a fan of jazz but you have opened my ears to hear beyond genre. I'm motivated to become a better player on both instruments. Thank you for sharing.

I think if Bach came back to life in the 50's, he would have embraced bebop and would have been one of the jazz greats.

the guy's reaction to classic improvisation is the best lmaoo hes like daaaaamn guurrl u made that up just now?

I love LA, he's so genuine and sweet. I wish I'd be as free and open in showing my emotions as he is.

I've said it before, but it can't be overstated: the chemistry between LA and Nahre is wonderful. Any chance we could see uncut recordings of the sessions?

I learnt classical piano for 13 hard years as a boy. By the end of it, I felt like a glorified jukebox. My fingers could 'play' things, but I had no understanding of the bigger picture. The obsession in the world of classical music with what I think of as musical semantics and the complete lack of care towards how music 'works' in a structural sense, which if you think about it, should be 90% of music education, is why if you're a big picture thinker it can be incredibly frustrating. I look back and realise that I was uninspired and exhausted with it because I don't really care if I held a note for a fraction of a second too long or if my glissando wasn't perfect. I care about the overall sound and aesthetic quality which is created largely by specific melodic, harmonic and rhythmic choices selected from the vast, near infinite probability/choice space of different pitches, tunings, absolute and relative relationships of frequencies. I remember once being told by a teacher, who himself was a trained and graduated 1st violin that 'modes were nonsense' - even then as a relatively uneducated 16 year old, I felt suffocated by the blinkered attitude to it. I realise now that music is vast, expansive and rich with choices. I think modern composers and instrumentalists including Jazz players are probably the way to go if you want to learn about how music actually 'works'. The great irony is that all the great classical composers would agree with my sentiment - they were also more interested in how music is formed and created than small picture thinking and most of them were prolific, virtuoso improvisers.

Organ music is maybe the only place in classical music where the improvisation tradition didn't get lost, and it's quite an experience!

Classical composers improvise to compose not to perform. They write music for operas and for jobs. Classical musicians practice and perform composers' works is display of musical performance and technical skill. if classical musicians improvise, the music won't match those of the composers. If you can play Paganini music, and improvise at grade 3 for example there is no point in improvising. I would rather spend time on playing composers music. There is no prodigy do improvise.

I think that you missed one last reason why classical musicians don't improvise: We live in this hyper-romantic era where the composer is often considered more important than the musicians that play the music. The interpretation often strives to be The Composer's Intention™️ rather than what actually sounds good, and under that frame, there's no room for improvisation.

Her improv of barney's theme was nuts!

I've always loved listening to the Cadenzas to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 - if I'm not mistaken (I very well might be), this is also a piece where people still sometimes (often?) play their own Cadenza, isn't it? Marc-André Hamelin is one of my absolute favorite pianists - and he just rocks his Cadenza in this so hard. Have a look: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8u8Ho_3VOBs.html (including the score for his own cadenza... utter madness, in the best possible sense)

Have a listen to Jimi Hendrix. He's going after notes that aren't even on his guitar's fretboard

On improvisation, my friend Kristy Kaffenger said "stop playing from memory and start playing in the moment" as well as "stop following where the music leads and start feeling where it could go"

_Jazz people are the best improvisers_ *WELL Maybe you forgot that BACH improvised a fuge with 6 voices in front of the emperor Felipe VI*

Sounds like Nahre had a lot of fun this episode. Especially at 2:26 probababbly. Real nice video, can see how much Nahres musicianship has changed. Keep it up

Nahre...my goodness that improv of Barney in minor...WOW! LA’s face is all of us right now 😲

lmao at that SNL clip

Also Nahre's improv sections really shows off all the time she spent doing her scales and counterpoint exercises! You're fantastic! I love the way LA has the chops to just smash all over the drum kit and lead but he knows how to sit back and really fill the music out

Fantastic episode, y'all!! Nahre is spot on about how classical music is taught; even as a vocalist there was a lot of insistence on "coloring inside the lines" as it were. I can't even count the number of times musicians around me and even teachers would say, "that's nice but it doesn't sound like the recording." (I should note, that was public-school choir music, not college level folks; given a lack of resources, I can't blame the teachers for using recordings as a way to get their kids to learn the music quickly. But that expediency also became a bit like chains for creativity.) I recall participating in a concert where one of our numbers was very much a pop song type of thing, and how surprised, shocked even, most of the younger singers were upon hearing that pop music requires a TON of precision. They assumed that syncopation meant they could "mess around," and discovered that when 100 people try to improv at the same time on the same line, it's....kind of a train wreck. Or at least, it is when those 100 people are not at the top of their game and are not listening to each other, haha! It's really, really awesome seeing Nahre improvise on things. Even Barney (and I LOVED the dark minor thing by the way!). It's not something I heard often in my years of musical training, though I did hear it a lot in certain church settings, and I feel like the short amount of time that I attempted to sing with a gospel choir, my skills as a musician were really stretched to their max on nearly every level specifically because of the expectation of improvisation, variations, "little bits of extra sparkle" as our choir leader called it. At least when I was 19, I did not have much sparkle, haha! I have to note, too, that it's very very difficult to improvise what you don't know. LA noted that - to learn your inspiration until you know it backwards and forwards. A lot of the students I knew back in the day were struggling just to memorize their assigned pieces, and learning them well enough to play with them was not even on their radar mentally. Some of that was because they knew their teachers would not appreciate such inventions, obviously, but some of it was simply that they didn't, or couldn't, spend that much time with the music. And the teachers, trying to get a large number of students up to a specific standard, really didn't have the energy to devote to showing their students more about the music they were learning beyond what was on the page. Again, not their fault: they aren't bad teachers or bad students or bad musicians. It's just the system we use focuses on STANDARD and that's bound to limit, if not forbid, any venture into improvisational notions. The very best musicians I have worked with were able to improv and make it seem easy as breathing. But they also showed how much joy it brought them. Being able to execute a difficult piece of music perfectly note for note is satisfying, in its way. Being so comfortable with a piece of music (difficult or not!) that you can play around with it is exhilarating. Sharing music with others is a unique kind of connection, a way that souls touch for just a moment. As lonely as our lives are in this crazy world, it's no wonder that some of us seek out that connection, I think. Thanks for sharing your creativity with us - LA, and Nahre, and everyone that works on this amazing, wonderful channel. Your videos make me smile and cry and laugh, and every time, I come away with things I didn't know, things I maybe didn't think about very much, and I feel like my soul has been fed a little better for it.

I think you are right, but there is another reason: the symphony. I am a singer, french horn player and organist. A singer should be able to do easier improvisations. You are often trained as a solo singer and therefore have more focus on being able to do your own interpretation of a song than acting as part of a collective in a choir. A large part of the education for the organist is about improvisation. You must be able to improvise preludes to psalms. There can certainly be different traditions in different countries. I saw in a coral book from Germany that there were written preludes to the psalms. Thats not the case in Sweden where I come from; all preludes are improvised. However, when you learn to play an orchestral instrument such as French horn, you are usually trained to become a musician in an orchestra. The symphony has somehow become the norm for classical music. With forty to one hundred musicians playing at the same time, there is no room for improvisation, but instead it requires very precise note reading.

Am I the only one who sees the funny irony in charting improvisation?

i like when a musician can think like a scientist.

❤️ the Dark Barney! 🔪

I didn’t realize that some cadenzas were improvised until I listened to different recordings of the Haydn trumpet concerto and I was very surprised to hear the different cadenzas at the end of the first movement. I’m glad someone else also appreciates classical improvisation.

I’ve always wondered this as someone who studied classical instead of jazz. I lack skills when it comes to improvising but I really need to learn since it’ll come handy someday.

All music is improvised until the artist boils it down to the exact piece of music they want.

It occurred to me recently that the musicians on late night shows often bust into improv...and it's not always well known, popular songs or strictly Jazz either. Sometimes it really is classical improv! I think it's amazing what you are doing! It's so important to keep pushing the boundaries of the musical style you love, no matter how old and "solid" in its ways it has become!

Nahre is my favorite person on RU-vid!! 😍🥰🤩

Gabriela Montero does it. What is "classical music" anyway? I'm classically trained, and in my training it meant music that was cutting-edge 100, 200, 300 years ago. Back when it was written, it was entertainment, not an academic exercise. It's been solidified (ossified?) into a canon that provides only a narrow range of creativity through interpretation. If Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, etc. were alive today, they'd be playing jazz, prog rock, movie scores, elaborate pop, etc.

LA is straight up dressed like Danny Carrey at a Tool concert

I was taught it was standard practice in all eras of classical musical to add something (ornaments - play with the rhythms within gestures - change dynamics - lead the listener into the cadences differently than the first time- etc). I think this is "improvisation" in classical. I understand that jazz and blues and rock musicians took improvisation to a new level it terms of pushing the boundaries, but I think Beethoven and all his friends would have loved it. thank you for adding such thoughtful and intelligent conversation to the RU-vid universe.

I totally love the jam part starting at 0:12 . You can see how LA starts seeing the rhythmic pattern Nahre is going for and straight away is able to accompany it with his drum fills. And the result is such a groovy, melodically appealing thing. That one instantly inspired me!

Where do you think Jazz came from anyway?

"why don't classical musicians improvise" *Julius Eastman enters the chat* 1970s, black, gay, and had the notation of his minimalist songs have entire sections of basically saying "improv this"

Short answer: They do. Or did. Now the training is rarely sufficient.

At about 4:15 I was thinking, you should check out Gabriela Montero, and right then you mentioned her! Just heard a beatiful improvisation that she did on BBC3.

I could listen to Nahre improvise standards all day.

I was also curious about why improvisation was almost non-existent in classical music. Thank you. Also, I would love to see an episode on ska, reggae, and/or dancehall.

This is the stuff that I live for. 💕

A good example of improvisation at the piano is Donald Shirley's cadenza--he of Green Book--at the end of the symphonic premiere of New World A-Comin', 1955. There he performed opposite Duke Ellington conducting the Symphony of the Air, Toscanini's ensemble. (Duke did not know when the cadenza would end so came in late with the orchestra, according to Shirley's own telling.) It is available elsewhere on RU-vid. In Shirley's view there was a cardinal difference between the art of improvisation in the original sense of that term, and the art of variation on the other. Improvisation to him had to be spontaneous composition of melody and harmony at the same time, but within the framework of known musical rules. In other words, it could not be unstructured noise. (Liszt used to do this in public.) The art of variation, in contrast, starts with a known melody and its harmonic underpinnings. One reason perhaps that "classical" improvisation is rather rare is it is very much more difficult than doing variations, as is done in jazz for instance.

Kudos on the thumbnail, first time I've seen Mozart rolling his eyes.

If anyone reads this far :) THE GREAT COMPOSERS WROTE OUT MUSIC SO IT SOUNDS GOOD EVERY TIME. Live concerts by musicians who don't use notation or prerecords vary a lot in quality. Someone might like that. But most serious composers who care about the audience and musicians want the quality to be high every time. Notation gives you that possibility. Especially when there are lots of performers playing together. Great improvisers are rare. If you want a lot of good performances you can't require a great improviser. Pop music hasn't made much use of improvised solos in a long time. It's all programed. A kind of notation using computers. The improvising pop musicians of past centuries have been replaced. Jazz and aleatoric music has improv, but they don't get a lot of performances. So what's the future of improvisation in music? Maybe artists like Nahre can write music that leaves room for a little improv and that lots of performers will want to play. That's what I try to do.

When I was doing A Level Music I found it weird how the classically trained musicians couldn’t improvise at all whereas all us plebs with guitars, drums etc could go off on one for hours!

It's already improvised and presented. Stop acting like You know everything. Pressing few keys and uploading video on RU-vid dosent make You a pro either. Funny. Get real...

Nahre is goals

Looking at.a lot of the posts here, people need to stop being ignorant about the game of music. Interpreting and reading music, and improving by ear or by following the changes and structure are completely different skill sets. It is the synergy of a multitude of abilities that make a highly functional musician, so get over thinking that there is one right way to progress, and if you or others want to limit yourselves, you shouldn’t be picking on each other .. geez.. Do scientists or Engineers say “forget about learning or understanding theory, I just do experiments.” OR “I only believe in math formulas.” Also, some musicians want multiple skills, but all these things take great time and effort! Different genres require different skills. Get over your preconceived bias due to ignorance.

There's also an attitude to the classics that they are perfect, as if written in heaven, and to change them at all is sacrilegious. This, despite the fact that we often find different versions of a work by the same composer, see their crossings out and rewritings, and even recordings where they play their own works differently. I can't help but imagine alternate realities where a well known piece like Moonlight Sonata has a few different notes in each, and in every reality people complain if the notes aren't played exactly right as the maestro intended...

Great topic. I'm the antithesis of a classical musician and am in awe of players with such control and discipline. And then scratching my head when they have no idea how to improvise. There are reasons, obviously, but it's still a funny thing to see. The best description of musical improvising I've heard is it's basically composing in real time - no going back and 'fixing things.'

LA watching Nahre improvise was how I feel watching anything you guys play. I Love this channel so much!

I have always looked at "improvsation" vs "as written" as two different schools of music. Both have merit. Both are great, both are worthy of pursuing. Each takes special skills the other does not require. They are different paths to get to the same destination.

wow the content of this channel is just... I don't know how to describe it...maybe hugely epic for the lack of a better term. I apologize for not subscribing earlier!

The French school of organ still keeps the tradition of improvisation and it is really fantastic.