By popular request you can find here more detailed recordings and some clips. I hope you enjoy.
These days the possibilities to have a playable pipe organ for rehearsing and concert available are rare. During my career as an concert player in the field of improvisation some takes were shot by surprise from concertgoers or pedastrians. Sure, not every take should be heared by the academical trained ear of a musician but i found out that enthusiasm for the king of instruments and organplaying has nothing to do with the circumstances in which a perceived and so called „correct“ context for a concert meets the expectations of the musical situation. Well i think you can imagine the embarrassment when hearing yourself improvising.
(Special thanks to Christopher Sanders, technical programming)
As an improvisor, you can allow yourself the luxury of working truely free on a wonderful instrument. That’s not too little and I keep encountering people, who are searching for more liberty and ways to express.
An impulse, to me, has always got to do with movement and enthusiasm. If your are ‚only‘ moving and perhaps even entangle yourself in utter activism, you’ll often lack enthusiasm – which your audience immediately (cf. indirect communication) realizes. If you are ‚only‘ enthusiastic, but do not set off and set yourself in motion, the fire of enthusiasm will soon extinguish to become an echo of whilom emotions. So far model 1 – which might seem somewhat uncomfortable. For you as an improvisor this means:
- What is facilitating my artistic involvement? Which projects are keeping me busy?
- Which fabulous ideas did I really, even with small means, put into practice? What did work? How was it possible?
The second model to understand an impulse is a little more physical, but still meant for your artistic development as an improvisor: impulse has always got to do with energy and contact. The motor for the advancement needs fuel, too. No pain, no gain. Get in motion and create the conditions to provide more energy. When you look at a professional dancer or singer, there are few areas of life, which are not impressed by the wish to maintain the proficiency level. Why do improvisors actually believe they could drink, sniff snow, do not get enough sleep, eat to much, do not provide any training for the tired old bones etc. and still create improvisations which really touch people?
Unfortunately, religious-christian culture development an idea of the body still being inferiour; spiritual ends are considered to be of more value than the sensual-material existence. When you’ve read Just play!, hopefully you will have a good mind to improvise. Use the energy for your improvisation and not for the production of an ill-humoured person, who is misunderstood and lives without friends.1 Hence the second aspect of this model, the contact.
When you want to develop artistically, you’ll need to establish contact. And not for the next concerts only! People there will forget about you afterwards, but people around you may have suffered of your being on the road all the time or not aproachable.
I’ve met improvisors who got crucial impulses for improvisation and the emotional openness which makes it possible from relationships, children and an intact social network:
Open up for the many impulses of life around you!
Some time ago a (hard-boilded ‚concert stallion, harrumph) renowned organist told me, that he wanted to stop his usual christmas-blues after the obligatory orchestral mass by happy paperhanging, alone and without helpful friends. Can you imagine what this might have meant to him? He brought into practice a plan then which allowed him to play less concerts and to cultivate social contacts at home. His surprised comment: ‚You should hear me improvising right now! I’ve really got a stimulus and I don’t know why…‘
Whether it’s energy and contact or enthusiams and movement, in any case you need impulses for your improvisation.2
As an impulse I recommend to you the essay by Thorsten Böddeker: Erinnerung des Aufgelösten in the suplement and his enclosed choice of CD-productions, which can belong to the victuals of an improvisor, when you are once more hungry for impulses for your artistic development. And you should get a program of the local art gallery and similar events today.
You cannot have enough cultural partners!
Do not leave the next step as an improvisor to chance. Rather use your insights from Just play! in order to make free improvisation a valuable energy source in your life. Which is what I wish to you now!
Yours
Peter Ewers
1Cf. Charles Tournemire.
2 By your leave, a personal remark: Why do you so seldom meat colleagues at art exhibitions, theater performances, political discussions, libraries, poetry-readings, rock concerts, tango- or salsa-workshops? One would like to ask: Are you playing already, or are you still practicing?