A PhD can be an uncomfortable and disorienting experience.
One minute I feel on the break of marvellous discoveries, the next minute I'm lost in a fog of research, a labyrinth in which I long ago dropped the helpful string which leads to daylight. Take the case of attention: I knew, as soon…
The usual early start this morning and, with coffee in hand, climbed up on the old stool and took some J.S.Bach models for improvisation. One is below, as I've been messing about with Baroque dance suites recently, noting the different characteristics of Allemande, Gigue, Courante etc. Actually with…
"Searching for music is like searching for God."
"They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the speakable.." so I heard David Bowie say on the radio last night, in his strange, laconic and fragile voice. I remembered these words becaus…
Classic(al) attitudes to improvisation: an evening with Franz Joseph Stoiber in the Igreja dos Jerónimos, Lisbon.
This was an unusual concert for an organist: improvisations from start to finish, and unrestricted by style or genre, as Franz Joseph Stoiber, the titular organist of Regensburg Cat…
The original title of this collection of modulatory exemplars was 
On the Theory of Modulation (Beiträge zur Modulationslehre) published in 1904.
It's particularly exciting to have this collection by Max Reger, as he is the master of the sudden modulation! His organ preludes and fantasies ar…
How do we learn to improvise? How does our mind work? Often, it seems that our brain is analogous to a computer: you put in some instructions or factual information and out pops a product. Instruction manuals, which try to be useful to everyone, often seem (in my opinion) to treat subjects like …
The following transcription of Gabriela Montero's interview describes some of the difficulties of improvising in the classical world, her roots as a musical storyteller, and her critical attitudes towards her being a creative artist as well as a concert pianist.
NL: Why is improvisatio…
http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/time-return-improvisation-its-classical-roots/
Article with audio podcast from New York's classical radio station WQXR-FM.
Naomi Lewin interviews Clive Brown, a professor of applied musicology at the University of Leeds; also Gabriela Montero, concert pianist and e…
Article by William Harris
Prof. Em. Middlebury College
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/MusicPapers/MusicAlive.html
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