"Good improvisation is...” – A conversation about improvisation

Outi Pulkkinen: Some people think that good improvisation means that it’s indistinguishable from performing a composed piece. So is good improvisation something that the listener can’t recognise as improvised?

Kari Ikonen: Improvisation sounding like a composed piece is one possible feature of improvisation, but improvisation can be good or bad regardless of what it actually sounds like. It can be really good yet sound very much like an improvisation, or it can sound like a composed piece and still be excellent.

OP: That’s one kind of improvisation, the style-appropriate method. What particularly fascinates me about improvisation is that things may come up that are utterly surprising, things that you couldn’t make happen by planning in advance. There’s no script when you improvise. You can be more exposed and more honest, because everything happens in the moment. You don’t need to mask your mistakes, and you can dwell on the small insights and on the process, building on the impulses out of which you’re creating your performance at that particular time.

KI: Improvisation can be found pretty much everywhere – in composing, in cooking, in anything creative. There’s that feeling of freedom when you take off and go with the flow. The feeling when you play an entire improvised concert and create a drive where everyone listens to everyone else, trusting one another and reacting to one another. It’s awesome.

OP: In my doctorate, the final artistic element was a four-day improvisation festival. One of the guests was a jazz drummer who thought that you can’t improvise well if you don’t have really good command of your instrument. Is this a common mindset among jazz musicians?

KI: I would say that basically you can create interesting things even if you don’t know how to play the instrument at all. All you need is a musical vision building on extensive experience. To take an example, I tried out the banjo at a friend’s house the other day. I can’t play the thing, and I just tried to make funny sounds with it. And I did. But if I had to improvise an entire concert on the banjo, I’d probably hit a wall pretty quickly. For a controlled improvisation, you need to be able to use your instrument to express what you want to express. That’s really important particularly in a live show.

OP: Sure, you can make interesting sounds with pots and pans if you have enough creativity and a good ear for it. Experiments like that can foster music that’s innovative and fun. But being really skilled allows you to tap into peak flow. If you’re proficient with your instrument, you can take improvisation to a wholly different level. That’s not to say that you can’t achieve flow with less technical skill, but you may not be able to experience the full force of it.

KI: But it’s at least as important to have a musical vision in addition to instrumental chops. You can make interesting music with lesser technical skills if you have a vision and an ability to analyse structures on the fly – to balance what has happened against what’s happening now and what may happen next. If you don’t have the ability to engage in musical dialogue like that, technical skills on your instrument won’t get you very far.

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OP: My approach focuses on the interaction of sound and body. I’ve studied a variety of improvisation methods in drama and dance, such as the method (Inter)acting with the Inner Partner, where the idea is to find a partner within yourself with whom to interact. In this method, movement, voice and words communicate with each other. I’ve come to realise that if you focus not just on sound but on the body as well, you can experience situations more sharply, the emotional dimension is easier to probe, and you are left with a more compelling muscle memory and aural memory, which means that you can tap into them later for exploring them again.

KI: More broadly, improvisation has many more applications than just in performing music for listeners at a concert. It can be therapeutic and help open mental locks, imbuing a sense of freedom. There are many musicians who never perform improvised music but do exercises like this.

OP: Yes, and they can benefit from practising improvisation techniques. In technical exercises, it may be useful to be able to just produce sounds without having to control them with the ear. And improvisation can be a composition technique too, it can help you learn a variety of things. When I was studying at the Sibelius Academy, I took a course at the Theatre Academy titled ‘Emotional memory’, which taught me about connections for exploring and experiencing emotions, so that I can draw on the emotions that emerge in a performing situation. I’ve sought to expand by palette of expression and to avoid anything that could restrict me in performance. My understanding is that often the greatest obstacle in performance is the fear of failure. A classical pianist may dread accidentally hitting the wrong key, for instance.

KI: That’s terrible. An improvising musician has the advantage of being flexible and being able to turn mistakes into strengths. When I’m playing and something doesn’t sound right to me and I’m not satisfied, I can do something in the next phrase to make it sound motivated. A mistake can turn out to be the nucleus of a new idea, and that can take the music in unusual and wonderful directions.

OP: Do you do this actively in your solo improvisations – if you slip up, you find a way to make it work?

KI: Yes, and this applies to group improvisation too. It’s really fascinating that external factors can suddenly derail you. If a string breaks in the piano, say, or you suddenly have a compelling urge to go someplace completely different than you were intending, those are the best sort of things that can happen when improvising. You really get to the core of improvisation when you’re forced to figure out a new way to proceed.

OP: Folk music is music that is commonly learned by ear and relies on memory, and improvisation and variation have always played a major role in it. While there are certain metric rules when it comes to runo singing, for instance, you can find exceptions to these in archival recordings, and the same song can exist in a multitude of variants. I stand by this principle even when performing written music: if I don’t perform it exactly as written, I consider my performance a variation. This means that you don’t have to be so worried about making mistakes. It would be great if all folk musicians could be free of the fear of mistakes. That’s not to stay that there can’t be problems if the band has agreed to arrange a piece in a particular way and someone just goes completely off topic; but something about folk music would be lost if it didn’t have the freedom and the means to adapt to whatever any particular musician is doing.

KI: Those moments of surprise are very important for me. They make the music vivid and dynamic, particularly on tour, where you play the same pieces over and over to the point of monotony. When someone suddenly takes off on a tangent, it can be the best moment. The music comes alive, and every gig has the potential to be different.

OP: But you still need to know the pieces and realise when someone is departing from what was agreed.

KI: And you need to trust everyone else. Everyone has to have the desire to do things differently, so that if someone chooses a particular path, everyone else can follow confidently. In scenarios like this, the audience can sense how improvisation brings excitement to the performance. It makes music a living art. An adventure.

OP: I’ve taught group improvisation on my ‘Free improvisation and expression’ courses, and I’ve developed a four-role method that helps students identify roles in a group and practise switching between them. One role is the ‘leader’, who is responsible for the big picture. They can make major turns in the direction of the music. The ‘soloist’ does not have overall responsibility but is responsible for their solo. The third role is ‘supporter’, who supports the music but does not introduce notable turns. The fourth role is ‘follower’, who takes up ideas suggested by others. In doing group improvisation with a variety of people, I’ve noticed that this ‘follower’ can sometimes end up being negative, meaning that they follow passively: they play along with the soloist but not as a duo sparring partner. Yet if these four roles are assigned randomly, some surprisingly wonderful music can come out. For instance, if everyone is designated a ‘follower’, the music can turn out remarkably sensitive and observant.

KI: Maybe all these roles are present in an improvising band, and who is what when can change quite quickly sometimes, according to the situation. Often someone takes the soloist role and the others provide support, but sometimes someone makes a gesture so significant that it changes the direction of the music. Following is also important. If someone is doing, say, an upwards glissando, it sounds really fun if everyone goes along with it.

Take my composition E-peli [E-game], which is a sort of game. I perform it with Orchestra Nazionale della Luna, which always plays all pieces differently at every gig anyway. For this one piece, we’ve agreed on a list of musical elements and hand signals for them. I lead, showing hand signs to which everyone else reacts. The improvisation is very different when everyone follows one person, ready to react and to make abrupt transitions to the next idea. This piece is great fun to play, and it even came out good when we recorded it.

OP: That sounds a bit like soundpainting, where the leader uses hand signals. There may be thousands of them. So the leader is composing music on the fly, while the musicians improvise within the bounds given.

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KI: At the end of the day, the boundaries of improvisation depend on what it is that you’re doing. If you’re sticking to a particular musical style, then that sets the framework for you. Personally, I’m more interested in freer improvisation, because that can lead to any musical style or something completely new. Sure, there’s boundaries there too, of a sort, but they get redefined all the time, everyone defines them according to their taste. But admittedly even then the music has to have some logic and connection with the music that came before, so those are boundaries too, of course.

OP: Thinking in a compositional way sets boundaries in music. It can actually be good to have strict boundaries when you’re practising improvisation, so that you know what your options are. Complete freedom can make improvising more difficult.

KI: It’s the same thing with composing: if you start writing without any limits at all, it’s really hard to get going. But if you have a defined ensemble, it’s easier to start with an outline of what the piece could be like.

OP: Last September, I began a ‘Free improvisation and expression’ course with sessions almost every week. In February, we created a one-hour performance that was not planned in advance. The only limits were the performance space, some sort of light zone, three grand pianos and some of the students’ own instruments. It was exciting to see how the students with whom I’d worked for six months took up various techniques and to observe which impulses they latched on to. Improvisation is very much about how you react to internal or external impulses. We’ve also practised exercising conscious restraint of your need to grab at impulses. This may lead to delayed reactions, which can be stronger.

KI: If everyone reacts to everything all the time, the music is going to be all over the place. It’s important to keep the big picture in sight, to make the music interesting. This applies to written music too – the individual parts must progress logically. If someone does something and I have to choose whether to react or not to react, it may be better to continue with what I’m doing if I’ve just started a particular texture, rather than reacting immediately.

OP: I also try to teach my students that if they start something that turns out not to be the best idea, they shouldn’t immediately switch to something different. This gives the rest of the group scope for adapting what they’re doing and to continue developing the idea. If something feels boring, it may nevertheless be better to stay with it for a while rather than going for new ideas all the time.

KI: That’s really important. When some musicians or even the whole band have got a good thing going, whatever it may be, it should continue for some time. If the whole band latches on to a texture, you should hang on to it and not be afraid of repetition. In music, repetition and slowly unfolding developments can sound really cool. The same is true of improvisation: if you hit on something interesting, it’s useful to stay with it for a while and think about how to move on from it – whether the idea should gradually disintegrate or whether a clear impulse to change the direction of the music is needed.

OP: Beginner improvisers sometimes get pretty wild. That’s what breaking free of the bounds of composed music will do to you.

KI: Learning by doing is usually the best, and if you listen to a recording of letting it rip, you can learn a lot about boundaries and control, about how to listen and react to what others are doing.

OP: That’s an important stage in finding your idiom, an important learning experience: sometimes it’s good to do something completely uncontrolled. I remember one case where one of my colleagues had students who would go completely nuts if they weren’t controlled. One time they got so wild that one of them broke their instrument. The teacher eventually had to set strict boundaries, and only when everyone had learned how to operate within them they were allowed freedom again. It goes to show that different people need different boundaries.

WHO:

Kari Ikonen (KI). Jazz pianist who these days mainly plays his own compositions, which are sufficiently loosely defined that there is plenty of room for improvisation.

Outi Pulkkinen (OP). Folk musician and multidisciplinary performer who has been teaching improvisation for two decades and has completed an artistically oriented doctorate on holistic improvisation.

Translation: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi

Feature photo: Outi Pulkkinen's photo by Christoffer Relander. Kari Ikonen's photo by Ssirus Pakzad. Edited by FMQ.