Improvising and World Music
EDITORIAL
Someone asked me this summer, in all seriousness, why our singing apparatus hasn't atrophied - "we don't need it any more."
Really! Has singing become an unnatural act? NOT singing is what is strange! Let's take the other tack - that singing is the primary use of the vocal chords, and speech, with its more limited range, is secondary. The tunes we sing to small children, those they repeat in their games, the love songs, work songs, hymns of worship and wails of grief that are heard all over the world affirm our common humanity, and convey to each other our most heart-felt emotions.
Since our western world's inventions of musical notation and the printing press, we have been imposing severe limits on this world of sound - almost making it a visual art. Reading the page, being faithful to it, studying books and taking courses about music are all secondary to living, actual sound. What music can we make together, here, now?
Look what we can do without reading music or even playing an instrument: sing songs alone or with others, remember old ones 'by heart', make up new ones and learn more 'by ear', trade them with others, vary them. (We can also dance them, act them out, make fun with or of them.) Anything other than a simple repetition of the song may be called 'improvising' - the game of playing with tones and rhythms. It is the gateway to composition. Children do it very naturally. They change the words, sing higher or lower, ornamenting with high spirits and imaginative energy. It is natural to improvise: it is unnatural to repeat as if in a carbon copy, with no variants. Our human invitation to music begins with melody and expands to musical conversations - call and response - more easily than to the world of harmony.
Somehow when we go through our traditional, page oriented courses of study, we get less proficient at these 'ear' responses. Here's a quick quiz: if someone sings an unfamiliar tune, can you remember it? And imitate it (the actual voice, not the written representation)? Can you play with this tune: vary it, make up new words, ornament it, extend it? Or can you make up an answer to it responding to its mood, dance and verbal cues? Can you keep the song going when you run out of words? Can you 'spin' the moment out until the energy is gone?
This is what good improvisers do. Think not only of the jazz band, but also of adroit folk-singers, who are so at home in the world of sound that they can respond immediately even to a tune they've never heard before. I find this facility analogous to learning to ride a bicycle, or to swim. One must learn to trust the medium (the song will never let you down), and to give up conscious control (analytic thinking) for a surrendering to the ear and an intuitive response.
Singing a single-line melody is much the easiest way to relearn this skill, and it is what I teach every summer in my Writing for Voices class at Westminster Choir College, and at all the SINGS that I lead as I travel around the country. I was delighted to learn this spring that new guidelines established for College Music Departments this year include requirements both for improvisation and for 'world music'.
These are more closely related than you might think: the non-visual relationship to music is the norm in non-western cultures. African and Oriental folksongs have no traditional notation, and often defy translation into ours. So we have to learn them 'by ear', and learn too, the kinds of responses that are customary in their own surroundings. We need to listen better, twist our tongues around new words, our pitch sense around quarter-tones and sliding 'off-key' sounds, and learn rhythms more complex than any that we are used to. (Yes, in this sense, both pitch and rhythm have been enormously simplified by notation.)
Learning to swim in the sea of sound is important for us Westerners. It opens cultural gateways as we trade songs with people from all over the world who sing for the same reasons (and with the same equipment) as we do. Moving into a culture through its folk melodies is immensely rewarding, as well as horizon-expanding. And it is truly basic to an understanding of what a page of music is: in its first and last sense, an aid to remembered sound, to a rich musical experience - never just a collection of black marks signifying abstract pitches and rhythms. Let us all re-study our art to have this free relationship with it, so that we can open our ears and mouths and become ambassadors of song wherever we go.
Alice Parker
