Title of Research
Improvising variations on the spot
Research Question
How do we build up a vocablary of different kinds of variations to be able to improvise a piece in variation style on the spot?
Summary of Results
This artistic research investigates the practice of improvising variations on the spot in keynoard music in the 18th century. In the 18th century Baroque period, the art improvising was quite common amongst musicians, as it was one of the standard performance practices of the time. Someone hearing the term "improvisation", might conjure an image of people with an extremely specialised skill, but actually the practise has continued throughout history and is still used often nowadays in many musical styles.
There are many kinds of improvisation: dances, freeform improvisation, such as Prélude non mesuré, Italian toccata and Fantasy; and ground- or ostinato-bass (e.g. La Monica, Passamezzo Antico, Passamezzo Moderno, Bergamasca, Romanesca, La Folia etc.)
For my research, I focused to the variation style because there are numerous written-out variation examples by prominent composers from which to learn. Because of these examples, we can clearly confirm variation ideas as every variation starts with a theme and afterwards, we clearly see the composer build their ideas up from start to finish. These ideas are very useful to inspire our own ideas, because with numerous possibilities in your head, you have more from which to choose and create, an improvising vocabulary.
Finally, we can use all this vocabulary, the nuance of when to use it, as well as develop our own voices for our own improvisations.
In this research I introduce my process and how to connect all the tools for improvising variations in performance.
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