Phrasing in improvisation(Letto 78 volte)

---

Reflections on musical phrasing in improvisation

It takes a truly high-level musician to improvise a melody that pops into his head amidst the jumble of chords that are constantly moving in time, and it takes an even more skilled musician to NOT play all the scales, patterns and language elements that he has practiced for hours and hours in his life.

Many people don't realize how much work and concentration it takes to get to the point where we can free from theory and play something we're feeling at that moment.

This idea of phrasing and creating meaningful musical phrases is one aspect of improvisation that's missing from many musicians' solos. Improvisation isn't just about using scales or inserting patterns into a chord progression; it's about creating music and inventing your own melodies.

WHAT IS A MUSICAL PHRASE?

When we improvise a musical phrase, we essentially become composers, creating new melodies on the fly based on an established harmonic progression. Therefore, studying composition, or at least becoming familiar with its elements, is essential to creating an effective musical phrase.

Let's consult some passages from the manual Fundamentals of Musical Composition Of Arnold Schoenberg.Schoenberg opens the discussion by focusing on the musical phrase, and the same concepts apply to improvisation:

• “The smallest structural unit is the phrase, a kind of musical molecule consisting of a certain number of integrated musical events, which possesses a certain completeness and is well suited to combination with other similar units.”
• “The term Sentence structurally means a unit that can be approximated to what a person can to sing in one breath. Its ending suggests a form of punctuation, like a comma.”
• “The mutual structuring of melody and harmony is difficult at first, but the composer should never invent a melody without having awareness of its harmony.”
• “Rhythm is particularly important to form a sentence. It helps create interest and variety, establishes character, and is often the determining factor in establishing the unity of the sentence.”

From this we can deduce that - according to Schoenberg - the effectiveness of a sentence depends on three factors:

1. Think in terms of the completeness of the musical phrase.
2. Awareness of the harmonic background.
3. Playing with rhythmic definition.

The idea of phrasing is very important in Schoenberg's music. Abandoning conventional harmony, chordal construction, and ignoring the V7's push toward I in his compositional system, the melody and phrasing of each piece are crucial to the listener, and this is something Schoenberg was very aware of.

Hearing a musical phrase being pronounced and developed is innate in every listener, whether done deliberately by a musician for study or unconsciously by the casual listener.

A non-musician may be as disconcerted when listening to bebop as a student hearing twelve-tone music for the first time, but in both cases the natural inclination towards melody and repetition is the lifeboat that saves us when we get lost in the sea of unknown harmony.

NO PHRASES, NO LISTENERS

Observing a concert audience and their reactions to a particular musician can be very instructive in this regard. Sometimes people are attentive to every note, other times they're distracted or chatting about their lives over a beer.

Aside from the differences of interest that may exist in the particular audiences, What distinguishes certain musicians from others?

When a musician fails to get the listener's attention, it is often (but not always) for one of these reasons:

• He doesn't make musical phrases, or play musical ideas.
• He can't navigate the harmony, he doesn't play the chord changes, he gets lost in the structure.
• Plays without any harmonic and/or rhythmic character, strings 8 notes together without meaning, or plays without respecting the tempo or rhythmic content of the music.

If the above definitions are anything like our solos, it will be difficult to find a willing listener for a full solo.

The same phenomenon occurs when listening to someone speak in public. If they're unprepared, unfamiliar with the topic, or just babbling, the audience unconsciously begins to fall asleep.

It makes sense: why waste time listening if the person playing hasn't invested any time in showing up to the concert?

We've certainly witnessed this kind of performance, and perhaps even been protagonists of it. All these factors destroy the connection with the listener. We get lost in the tangle of notes and chords, when instead we should be thinking about communicate with the public.

Stairs are important, but they're for the rehearsal room, not the stage. If we want to move to the next level and communicate our musical message effectively, we need to go beyond the notes. We need to speak a musical language.

 

PHRASING PREREQUISITES

Understanding how a phrase sounds is important, but there are some things we need to develop musically before we improvise our own phrases.

Sentences will not appear out of nowhere if we are still thinking about scales and chord-tonesThey won't come to us if we have to stop to remember the next chord in the structure or what key the bridge of the song is in. If we have to think about every single note we play, it's really difficult to think of a phrase that fits well in a certain passage and ties in with the entire harmonic progression of the song.

If we want to build phrases in our solos, we need to be able to hear the different types of chords (Major, minor, V7, etc.), we need to know what notes the chords are made of, we need to internalize the tempo and character of a piece, we need to know the piece well enough that we can sing the melody and chord progression.

Musical phrases do not come from the intellect or reasoning, they come from the ear and our internal musicality.

We should think in larger chunks of time and understand the progression by ear. Go beyond the chord progression. Visualize mentally and by ear what the entire chorus sounds like and predict what our first phrase will be like and how we intend to develop it.

We construct our musical message for the listener not with single notes, but with complete musical periods.

 

DEVELOPING PHRASING

The blues is the perfect vehicle for working on phrasing, a 12-bar structure with a small harmonic movement, I-IV-I-V7-I.

The movement from the first to the fourth and back again is perfect for developing a simple musical phrase: we play an idea on the first degree, develop it on the fourth, and complete it on the second-fifth. A statement and a response.

Let's take a look at this first Miles Davis chorus on “Blues By Five” (from Cookin'):

Let's look at these 12 lines Not Not from the perspective of chord analysis, but from the perspective of phrasing. Instead of thinking about each chord, let's look at these 12 bars as a single piece. Miles plays three distinct phrases:

 

Each idea leads to the next logically and seamlessly. There's breathing room after each phrase, and the listener can easily follow the line's development.

 

When we analyze a solo transcribed on paper, we get stuck on a note-by-note approach, but that's not how we listen to music. Put on a record and you'll realize that we don't listen note by note; we hear musical phrases and ideas. This is how we should think when we transcribe a solo and when we improvise a solo.

 

PLAY WHAT YOU WOULD SING

Another important part of phrasing is striving for a vocal quality in our lines, as if the notes we play were something we would naturally sing.

Chet Baker is a great example of a musician who always played what he felt. Whether he played his ideas on the trumpet or sang, the musical phrasing was always the same.

Musical phrasing is the natural result of listening to hundreds of recordings, transcribing solos and melodies, yet it is the result of developing our ear, studying theory and chord progressions and melodies, to the point that we don't have to consciously think about them.

After some time, the idea of forming a musical phrase that we hear in our head will seem natural. Just as we learned to speak, we'll begin to improvise meaningful musical phrases and develop them into our solos.

Let's keep in mind that thinking about phrases is just the beginning. Once we're accustomed to playing phrases, we can use other techniques to further develop our ideas. However we develop our solos, let's maintain a mindset focused on musical phrasing every time we improvise.