“Improvisation is an act of rebellion”

Can classical musicians really improvise? 

That question was put to the test during an exceptional concert at the Helsinki Music Centre in June 2023: the final event of a year-long course and research project led by pianist, researcher and educator David Dolan, Head of the Centre for Creative Performance and Classical Improvisation at London’s Guildhall School of Music. 

As a visiting professor at the Sibelius Academy in 2022-23, Dolan led a brain research group including lecturer Erja Joukamo-Ampuja and Mari Tervaniemi, research director of the University of Helsinki’s Centre of Excellence for Music, Mind, Body and Brain Research. 

During their international project at Uniarts Helsinki, they studied the effects of improvisation on listeners and musicians, reinforcing the findings of earlier research done separately by Dolan and Tervaniemi.

“I first heard truly free improvisation by classically trained musicians during the final concert of Dolan’s course, when the musicians played on the bases of prompts from the audience, for example, ‘Princess in D major’,” says Tervaniemi.

During the concert, six audience members wore EEG sensors that monitored their brain activity while they listened to the students’ performance. On another occasion, the brain activity of some Sibelius Academy students was recorded while they were listening to their own improvisation.

The results of that research are currently under analyses by Tervaniemi and research engineer Tommi Makkonen. They expect to dovetail with earlier studies by Dolan and Tervaniemi showing that listeners and musicians alike find works to be more engaging and more emotionally touching when including some improvisation than when played strictly according to the sheet music. 

A focused but free mind

Through her work, Tervaniemi has developed what she calls a “speculative, academic viewpoint” of the psychological prerequisites for improvisation.

“An improvising musician needs a ‘free mind,’ without thought of any criticism or evaluation that might occur. The performer needs to be highly focused on their performance, feelings and musical intentions, while maybe also monitoring the intentions of other musicians around them,” she says.

“Music activates the same areas of musicians’ brains and the audience members’ brains during a performance. When the musician is more focused, more in flow and enjoying it more, the audience members’ brains mirror that,” says Joukamo-Ampuja.

An earlier Tervaniemi study with groups of listeners showed that they differentiate between chamber music performances that are score-based and those that include personalised improvisational elements.

“We found differentiations in the listeners’ perceptual evaluations about the performances, as well as in their brain activity. It had stronger theta activity, reflecting their internal music-driven mental state,” says Tervaniemi.

“However, since the performances were based on existing classical repertoire pieces by J.S. Bach and Finnish composer Erkki Melartin, the trio’s degree of improvisational freedom was relatively limited. One might even call it ornamentation. So these results can’t be generalised into jazz or free improvisations, for instance,” she says.

Still, according to her 2021 paper, “listeners rated partly improvised performances as more innovative and reported more joy after listening to the improvised Melartin piece.” It also noted that “listening to live performance is more engaging than listening to recorded music.”

“The changes in the brain state of those listening to improvisations or musicians listening to their own performances have similarities to other domains of human cognition that highlight the co-occurrence of a focused but free mind,” says Tervaniemi.

Rediscovering improvisation

Improvisation is gradually regaining its lost status in the world of classical music, and Professor Dolan has played a key role in that. 

“In the past century or so, improvisation mostly survived in jazz and old music,” says Joukamo-Ampuja. “Now it’s coming back in classical music, which is great. Some major orchestras are starting to include improvisation. Some musicians might play an improvised section between movements of a symphony before the orchestra joins in, for instance.” 

Still, she says, “some classical musicians don’t understand how it works, how it feels. It pushes them out of their comfort zone. Some people have very strong opinions against it, without any actual basis. Maybe they’re scared, or they’re worried that the quality isn’t there – but it absolutely is, if you’re a highly skilled musician who can improvise in a classical way.”

As an orchestral musician and senior lecturer at the Sibelius Academy, Joukamo-Ampuja trains classical musicians in improvisation and mental and physical practice techniques, while conducting research with doctors specialised in music medicine. She says the principles of improvisation are universal, regardless of the type of instrument or music.

“The classical fields are the strictest with how it should be done and what the quality should be,” she says. “But as Professor John Sloboda of the Guildhall School points out, jazz musicians are also so keen to learn the patterns of improvisation that they’re actually more copying than improvising. Usually the freest performances are backstage jam sessions after midnight. So the pressure is there in jazz, too. It’s not always free and fun, even if they’re improvising,” Joukamo-Ampuja says.

The meaning of music

An improviser who works across the genres of jazz, contemporary classical and electronic music is Heli Hartikainen, a Helsinki-based saxophonist, clarinettist and composer whose debut album, Chronovariations, will be released in September. This summer Hartikainen is the Finnish representative at the Ung Nordisk Musik composer residency and festival in Sweden, where they premiere a work for two saxophones and string quartet on August 23.

“In my opinion everyone can improvise, and it only requires one thing: courage. Of course it’s important to hear the things you want to play in your head and be able to find those things on your instrument, but I also greatly value just acts of sound and texture, boldly stepping outside any traditional conventions,” says Hartikainen.

“While improvising with live electronics, for instance, you can’t always predict the exact sound or sound combination that will form next,” they say. “It’s not always about ‘hearing the melodies in your head’ or hitting the chord changes – it can be about telling a story, communicating a feeling, or just making noise because you feel like it, sound for sound’s sake. At its best, improvisation is an act of rebellion.” 

While such completely free improvisation is central to jazz, the forms it takes in classical and folk music are more subtle and constrained by structures. Still, that can take quite a mental leap for a musician who has made a career of faithfully reproducing composers’ scores. 

“You need to dare to jump into taking more risks, to perform without structure,” says Joukamo-Ampuja. “It’s interesting that classical musicians who start improvising more – even if they’re highly skilled – often find that they need to go back and refresh their memory about harmony, to go deeper into the harmonic structures of the pieces. Then they feel freer. They rediscover the meaning of music and the purpose of being a musician.” 

Dolan has even suggested that improvisation may also help musicians struggling with depression and anxiety.

Getting into the flow

According to Dolan, “diving into improvisation begins with playfulness and readiness to take risks and is related to a state of flow.”

Mihaly Csíkszentmihály, the Hungarian-American psychologist who defined “flow” as a psychological concept, said that flow requires a state where the level of challenge in a task is coherent with the level of abilities of the person executing it.

Hartikainen agrees, saying that they always try to challenge themself while improvising. That’s partly motivated by their own experiences as a listener.

“When I’m watching a performance, I always find it most interesting and engaging when something unexpected happens and you see the performer leaving their comfort zone. That’s when the magic happens. The atmosphere becomes electrified. Nothing’s more rewarding than seeing a person overcome something that first seemed impossible. It’s like simultaneous, abstract problem-solving,” says Hartikainen. 

“Flow isn’t something you can take for granted, it’s a beloved guest that sometimes visits during improv. It’s like an instinct, a state where I’m physically and mentally one with my instrument. I’m fully immersed in the music, not thinking whether this is good, how I look, what will people think, is this harmony or melody sophisticated… Just a state of my artistic subconsciousness creating material,” says Hartikainen. “The inner monologue falls silent and gets replaced by the stream of ‘thinking in music,’ where reaction time is non-existent.”

So how can a performer attain a flow state? Tervaniemi says her studies have not yet formulated techniques to help musicians to do so.

“This is a long-term goal of our studies, but we can’t name such results yet. There is something different in the brain state of improvising musicians that combines cognitive monitoring and free flow – perhaps that notion might help musicians to find such an optimal mindset for performance,” she suggests. 

According to Joukamo-Ampuja, “you can practice flow triggers, starting through the senses and the connection points between your body and the instrument. You can also use tools like storytelling, acting, feeling emotions or playing based on atmospheres in pictures. I use that to help students to focus other things than technical aspects or just playing correctly without mistakes.” 

“Improvisors who are strongly in the flow focus on what they’re doing rather than analysing what they should do. And in a group, they’re listening to each other, so they’re more focused on their shared goal,” says Joukamo-Ampuja.

She stresses that such skills should be encouraged from a young age. 

“It’s coming back slowly in the schools, including here in Finland. The music school curriculum says they should instruct kids so that they can improvise and compose. As a result, the teachers notice that the children are freer and more interested. So that’s a benefit for the future.” 

Featured picture: Improvisation XIV by Wassily Kandinsky (1910). Source: Wikimedia