The IMPROVISED CONCERTO

In SOUND SYSTEMS

EDITED BY JOEY ESCHRICH ET AL.

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY / CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND THE IMAGINATION

FORTHCOMING 2024

Abstract

My essay predicts, portrays, and sounds out a near-future society where improvisation is playfully celebrated and normalized during the entirety of classical concerto performances. A concerto’s cadenza is an obvious place for a soloist to deviate from pre-composed material, even though few soloists choose to do so today. But what if a soloist aimed to improvise in earnest throughout a concerto? What affordances, challenges, and unconventional musical and interpersonal synergies emerge when a soloist feels free to extemporize? To some listeners, the idea of a soloist improvising through every measure of, say, a Beethoven or Chopin piano concerto might sound viscerally undesirable, conceptually iconoclastic, coordinatively impractical, or physically impossible. But maybe that’s because we haven’t yet made adequate room for such scenarios in theory (in our minds and bodies) or practice (in our institutions, ensembles, and spaces).

As proof of concept, I supplement this essay with 16 new recordings of my own improvisations throughout Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30. Specifically, I offer three different improvisations (each one increasingly deviating from the original score) for five distinct passages across movements: the 1st movement’s Theme 1 (mm. 1-51); the 1st movement’s Theme 2 (mm. 118-141); the 2nd movement’s mono-theme (various); the 3rd movement’s A section (mm. 1-79); and the 3rd movement’s cadenza and ending (mm. 389-end). I will also record an original improvisation of the 1st movement’s cadenza.