The Psychology of Improvisation: Jazz Fiddle Wizard, Martin Norgaard
UPDATE: Christian Howes will be presenting “The Improvising Brain,” a symposium and concert event, with Martin Norgaard on April 7-8, 2013 at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. Details can be found here: http://www.cas.gsu.edu/theimprovisingbrain/
What happens in the brain during improvisation, and how do we use this to get better at improvising?
This is exactly the thing Dr. Martin Norgaard researched for his doctorate in music education.
Now a professor at Georgia State University, Martin got together with me recently to talk a little about his findings, share approaches to teaching improvisation and jazz violin, and play some tunes. Martin is a thought leader in our niche and one of the coolest guys I have ever met.
Among many things we agree on:
1) Improvisation is easier when you’re working with information you’ve already ingrained.
2) Improvising over unfamiliar musical terrain (including chord progressions, meters, or stylistic frameworks) is nearly impossible, leading quickly to diminishing returns.
These situations correspond with two states of mind:
a) Creative mental state (while playing in familiar musical terrain): In this state of mind, you can train your attention and energy on your imagination, easily architecting melodic lines, rhythms, and gestures like a painter applies color and line to a canvas.
b) “Learning/drilling” mental state (when playing over unfamiliar terrain): In this state, you are creatively paralyzed, until you internalize or memorize the material which was giving you a hard time. After that you can engage the imagination and focus on being creative (but it could take a while to internalize that unfamiliar material!).
Unfamiliar musical territory could include rhythmic and stylistic conventions, but it is often usually related to harmony, i.e., the voice-led relationships between chords and scales.
Accomplished jazz musicians often have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge, like a mental map, of chordal and scalar relationships. To learn all this, you’re probably well advised to work from a jazz violin method book of some kind, for example:
Martin has a very popular course called Jazz Fiddle Wizard, (Mel Bay). Many high school and middle school string teachers have used this method in the classroom with positive results.
My method and curriculum can be found in a host of instructional videos, media, and publications easily accessed either via my shop or through my comprehensive online school: the Creative Strings Academy.
Among many recommendations, for starters, I prescribe studying chords, their inversions, and accompanying scales in extended range (instead of learning chords and scales in root position, start from the lowest note on your instrument in the scale/chord and end on the highest note in first position).
Remember when you were 5 years old and you were just learning how to read? When shown a word, you’d look at the first letter and think about what that letter was and then what that letter sounded like. Then you’d go to the next letter and think about what that letter was and what it sounded like. Then you’d put the two letters together and think about how they sounded together. Remember how long it took to read one word ? That’s similar to what classical musicians experience when they begin improvising over chord progressions. Now, when you look at a phrase written in front of you it probably takes you a fraction of a second to comprehend a series of words, let alone one letter. This is the kind of fluency you want to develop with harmonic language.
Once you learn the ABCs of harmony, your mind can operate on a high level in a creative way. But first you’ve got to learn harmony.
Don’t take my word for it. Martin pretty much agrees. But he added this:
“I advocate that you should develop your creative playing in one part of the practice on an easy tune and work on unfamiliar tunes IN THE SAME PRACTICE. If you only work on the hard stuff you never get to develop stuff like developing a motive etc.”
Here Martin talks about these different kinds of mental operations. Once you learn something it becomes second nature and you can be creative with it.
How does this show up for you in your experience? Leave a comment below and let me know.
Finally here we play down the tune “Have You Met Miss Jones”
Leave a comment here. Then check out Creative Strings Academy (there’s a free trial).
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Hi Christian,
Thanks again sooo much for your “mind opening” workshop day in Missoula! My practice routine has been upleveled and energized in both the technical/physical and mental/emotional realms. And how great to see you and Martin in conversation…so inspiring! We need to get you back here for a Daly Jazz show. All good wishes to you. Beth Youngblood
thanks Beth- big sky Montana opened my mind as well….I had no idea people are so hip in Montana. very cool creative energy in the people i met.:) I look forward to returning to the northwest hopefully next winter.
Totally love this article! I have a degrees in both violin performance and psychology and have done research in both and this is all great info and totally o. The money!
Hey Christian,
A great article and conversation! Your analogy of learning to read is so accurate. It takes quite awhile to learn the harmonic language and you can’t woodshed all the time. So I really appreciated all the ideas you gave us at the Missoula workshops for improvising with what you already know.
My JamMan just arrived and it’s a blast. Thanks so much for the inspiration and very useful info, for my students and myself. And I’m really glad a mountain lion didn’t have you for lunch on that trail! All the best, Janet Haarvig
thanks Duane- I actually heard from John Crooks in relation to this and found out he has done some incredible research and writing on the subject- http://www.jcrooks.com.
I’m hoping he’ll post some of his thoughts on here actually.. it had never occurred to me until yesterday to think of this whole conversation as being about the “psychology” of improvisation, but the more I think about it, the more I’m interested in pursuing the idea. Also possible collaboration with my friend Noa Kageyama (www.thebulletproofmusician.com) might result out of it and follow a completely different thread.. we’ll see.. he’s got great insights into the psychology of performance- adding improvisation brings in another set of twists..
thank you Janet! I’m relieved that it made some sense and was useful as a followup/in tandem with our series of workshops in Montana…
Seriously, you are the host with the most- I can’t remember the last host who took me hiking in the mountains in the middle of a day packed with clinics-pretty special.
For me, I don’t have to memorize the music note wise, as much as feel how the flow of the music and notes goes. I can tell where the music will put scales, and such simply from hearing it and how the chord progression goes with it both underlying and prominently.
great article Chris! Thanks for sharing, I agree with the fact of feeling more comfortable playing when is something more familiar, I guess in any aspect in life as well, and also, good reminder to not stay on only playing hard stuff or easy stuff, but making a balance so that is possible to make some progress. I forget it sometimes. I hope to see you soon! Leonor
Hi Christian,
I really enjoyed listening to you and Martin here and how the mind works with learning esp in regards to improvisation. The concepts you guys discussed brought up alot of ideas for me as I’ve been working with an adult student teaching her klezmer music and working “off the page.” And for her, this is the first time and we’re taking it slowly. We’ve been working on learning and internalizing the language or scales and modes behind the music and I can see more how if one is not familiar with that then the student has no “base” from where to draw from. We’ve also done some simple ear and listening exercises which have paid huge dividends. Thanks again for sharing all this information and more. I am learning a great deal about what I need to do to improve my teaching and learning skills.
All my very best,
Steven Greenman
awesome. thanks leonor
how nice it must be to be able to hear your way through things so naturally. i realize that some people are able to use their ears in some context more easily than others and I think it’s great.
glad to hear this from you Steven. I imagine for someone such as yourself, with such a deeply rooted knowledge of the music you play, it may come more easily/naturally, to play over the modes within Klexmer music, for example…and if nothing else, if this helps you to give your student more tools that’s great. the ear/intuitive side is obviously also very important- nothing can substitute for immersion. At the same time, I think if we all use everything available to us it can only help.
From John Crooks:
This is great stuff and I think often under-discussed among teachers of improvisation.
One phenomenon I see is a tendency for both experienced improvisers and beginners to favor well-worn materials. This is understandable, a great idea, and of course we can all use more blues, AABA songs, repeating song structures etc. However, it also defies a central tenet of black music, improvisation, and american music by encouraging static forms that develop in sometimes uninteresting ways.
To play devil’s advocate: Who cares if a new jazz tune is in 13/4, has complex harmonic progressions, extends “Countdown” concepts to modes of melodic minor, or anything as long as it is still a 1-3 page chart with a head melody, stable song form and endless central blowing section? It’s still basically the same thing as “Cherokee.”–a tune.
As a creative person, one place I see real possibility is in the reevaluation of what some scholars call the “improvisational referent;” which you call “familiar musical terrain” in your post. My question: what if, as improvisers, we started looking for new ways to engage with memory, structure, and improvisational process? Challenged ourselves and our students to find ways of improvising that do not arise from chord charts, lead sheets, 12-64 bar repeating structures, etc.
I have a paper on this topic here: http://goo.gl/TERCq
My creative impulse is to use computation and computers as partners in this process. I see the relationships between technology and jazz improvisation–from the piano (notated rags, piano rolls) to radio as a distribution platform, to the amazing work musicians in jazz have done using analog synths etc–and think that digital interactivity is the next step.
What do you think?
Best,
John Crooksjohn@jcrooks.comjcrooks.com
John- after just taking a peek at your paper it looks really fascinating and I hope to check this out in depth. thanks a lot for bring this up.