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Ted Jones

Imperative to Create

- Spontaneous Improvisation

PM: If we were to outline a few facts about your musical career to introduce you to PianoMix.com Readers where would we begin?

TJ: My musical facts are conspicuously unremarkable. I have no qualifications in anything, no history of academic success, no catalogue of acclaimed performances or recordings, indeed no performances or recordings at all. The last piano recital I attended was in 1967, I know few musicians personally and, quite frankly, frequently doubt that I am either musician or pianist in any normally accepted sense of the words. I have simply experienced, for very many years, an absolute imperative to create and play piano music.

PM: How did it all begin?

TJ: I am a native of New Zealand. I was born in 1947, the only son of devoted and wise parents whose worth becomes more apparent as I age. My father was a very able pianist who knew hundreds of tunes, which he played at the many parties at our house when I was a child. Long before I started school I pestered him until he taught me the notes and how to read and write musical notation. I remember filling manuscript paper with ideas around that time. Most of them, although real music, were childish and there was certainly nothing of the prodigy in me in any way.

I had the usual childhood piano lessons, many of which comprised talking about music and eating marmite sandwiches. I was taught no technique at all, and how I ended up playing so many difficult pieces reasonably well at school concerts remains one of life's little mysteries. I became tired of it all at ten and concentrated on most of the things which interest little boys.

PM: So how does one begin a musical journey by quitting piano lessons?

In retrospect I think there were three quantum leaps, three epiphanies if you like, which revealed to me my musical self. My father brought home a 78 (LP record) of Jose Iturbi he had found in a sale. There was a thing called Fantasie Impromptu by Chopin on it. I played it repeatedly while gazing at the fire in the hearth and hearing the storm raging outside the house. It was the first section, those wonderful swirling passages through the sharp minor keys, which caused some qualitative change to occur in my brain.

It wasn't that I desired to play it, to conquer it as many an aspiring young player might feel, not at all, although I actually wasted no time in doing so. It was something beyond either laughing or crying, as if the universe were rolled into a ball of kind light, which I held in my hand. I can still see the room and the fire, I can still smell the dinner being prepared - almost forty-five years later.

GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue Score for two pianos, four hands; informative liner notes; and a digital stereo compact disc, complete version with soloist, second performance of the orchestral accompaniment only. See more info...

The second event took place soon after I had started high school. My father came home and, saying nothing, slapped down a thick score on the table in front of me. It was called "Rhapsody In Blue". His ruse had worked again and the bait was well taken. I soon played it (just about busted myself and made myself sick in the process) and demanded a teacher. I hadn't seen or heard stuff like that before.

We had an audition with a very prominent teacher who wanted me to play technical exercises for six months and play no jazz or ragtime. We considered his proposition for a full ten seconds. He rang several times after that but what would have been the use if I were not happy? In one of those peculiar coincidences my life seems to exhibit, we met my former teacher at the shops.

She had heard of a certain Llewelyn Jones (no relation), accomplished composer, classical pianist, jazz pianist and orchestra leader, who took a few pupils. At my audition I played Fantasie Impromptu and some of the Rhapsody In Blue, thinking I was pretty good. He responded by telling me I sounded drunk and hadn't any idea what I was doing. He added that he hoped I had no intention of becoming a concert pianist.

Having thus reassured me he took over the keyboard and began to play while I watched the street through the window. The mystical experience of earlier years suddenly returned. Once again I held the universe in my hand. The street scene outside stood still and embedded itself into my mind forever.

"What was that?" I asked. "I don't know, I wouldn't have a clue," he replied. Then, after staring at me fixedly for a while, he said: "I suppose I had better take you on then."

Mayerl: The Piano Transcriptions III - There's a small hotel, The mood that I'm in, So rare, I'm always in the mood for you, Turkey in the straw, For only you, Thanks for the memory...

Once any latent notion of my becoming a performing artist had been laid to rest the systematic excursions into a large variety of piano music began. Works by Waller and Billy Mayerl were played and studied alongside Chopin and Liszt studies. Each week I had to improvise something original for him. Sometimes he would play it back at me and ask what key I wanted him to play it in.

This sort of showing off frightened me for a very long time. However I soon realised that much of this type of thing is like being able to multiply large numbers together mentally. It is very rare and remarkable, but neither necessary nor sufficient for creative purposes.

I was also in love with mathematics, but full of bizarre original ideas which made little sense in the context of the university courses I was taking. The inevitable happened and formal study and I parted company. I took a job on the waterfront, composing music and thinking about mathematics at night. Surprisingly, I was very stable and content during my twenties despite being labelled a terrible under-achiever.

A large pile of compositions grew, I purchased my grand and created sounds of ever increasing variety and transporting power. It had taken me well over ten years of work to be able to recapture those old sensations in my own music and at will. But along with the pleasure came the realisation that no amount of it would ever be enough.

The sudden proliferation of computer technology saved me from becoming an impoverished martyr to my brazen idealism. Even without training I found programming very easy. I taught myself and soon the threat of job insecurity faded. I married the love of my life, who has unfailingly tolerated my musical obsession for twenty-three years. Ours was an international love of bewildering intensity, which pushed the bounds of my music into new and wild regions.

Now, at fifty-five, I feel I have more to say musically than ever before. Like most people my age I have pragmatic decisions to make concerning work, retirement, family, health and money. Recent years have seen strange and marked improvements in both my playing and my musical energy. At a time when most of my contemporaries are slowing down, basking and consolidating, I seem to have reached a sort of retarded artistic adolescence, burgeoning with all sorts of monstrous notions.

PM: With the perspective of time, is there something you wish you did differently?

TJ: In life yes, a number of things, in music no, very little, although I often wonder how I would have turned out had I undergone an orthodox musical education. I would have been more of a conventional pianist and musician and less of a Ted. Whether the gain would have outweighed the loss is impossible to guess.

A Pianist's Guide to Free Improvisation Sit down at the piano and play whatever comes into your head, making up your own music as you go along. Marilyn Crispell digs into her long experience with the music of Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Gary Peacock and other jazz improvisers, breaking down the finer points of creating music on the spot. See more info...

PM: What are your views on the classical music education?

TJ: I am not qualified to pass an opinion on the training of professional artists. I am dismayed, however, to hear so many fine players talk about stress and injury with something approaching acceptance. Why should playing the piano be a cause of stress and injury? Surely we must have taken a wrong turning somewhere.

PM: What do you think are some of the pitfalls of the conventional education system?

What I can see in many individuals in the general public is a sad lack of confidence, which amounts almost to a fear of expressing themselves in music. Therefore while the technical education of artists and professionals is probably better than it has ever been, there would appear to be a concomitant idea, quite false and destructive, that musical creation is the preserve of an arcane few. Of course such a position feeds vested interests in the economic and social areas of music Where would the music industry be if Mr Average realized that ninety percent of it was superfluous to creative requirements?

The astonishing fact is that measurable and traditional specifics of musical ability are not really necessary to create to one's complete satisfaction. A television documentary I saw many years ago sticks in my mind. It concerned the flowering of Carnaby Street tailoring and the consequent horror registered by the Saville Row fraternity. A young man of obvious passion was cutting out trousers with a pair of scissors. "Look," he replied to the interviewer, "We're not knocking Saville Row, we're just doing it because this is the way we want to cut trousers." I think we have to encourage musical beginners to cut their own trousers as well as design Saville Row suits.

In analogous fashion, the spontaneous improvisation of a gloriously tangled splurge of counterpoint with no discernible beat does not indicate the presence of iconoclasm. There is a world of difference between being true to one's own artistic perceptions and being purposefully wrong in the eyes of others. The former is thoroughly commendable and the latter simply a neurosis.

After the fear of being oneself, I believe the next most inhibiting idea is that of the false choice. We are so conditioned to making decisions on an "either/or" basis that it seldom occurs to us that "and" might be fully feasible. We tend to exclude possibilities at the drop of a hat. When faced with an apparent fork in my creative road I ask myself more often these days if the exclusive or is really an accurate description of things. Can I have my cake and eat it too? Increasingly and paradoxically, the answer is yes.

A third and frequently fatal disease of creativity is the assigning of extraneous prerequisites. It goes something like this: Before I write a sonata I must learn all about musical form. Before I can write cohesive musical form I must learn all about Beethoven's works. Before I do this I must learn what tonics and dominants and other horrible things are. Before I do this I must know all about scales. Before I do that I must improve my technique so I can play a scale properly. Before I do that I shall have to find a teacher. Before I do that I shall have to get some spare money to pay the teacher. So it goes. Like Achilles in his race against the tortoise I have shot myself in the foot with the starting pistol.

PM: What can we do to unleash our creativity? Do you recommend listening to various artists, different styles?

I recommend listening as deeply and as widely as possible. Eliminate only with the utmost caution. We all have our likes and dislikes, just as I might like strawberries and you might like bananas, but my only criterion these days in any ultimate sense is the sound of the music itself and nothing else. I am gravitating more and more to this absolute position.

Social, biographical and even programmatical associations appear to me less trustworthy as I get older. The reasons for this are too numerous to list but often, for instance, the original programme of a piece of music is hopelessly old-fashioned. When I play Mazeppa I accrue no benefit from visualising people strapped to wild horses. I make my own images.

There are aspects of music today I find hard to understand. By way of example, it baffles me why so many pianists on forums spend so much time and effort discussing the fingering of Chopin's study in thirds, a lovely piece, but done to death by every man and his dog for almost two hundred years, while remaining oblivious to the power and significance of fresh and vital contemporary movements in American piano music.

A Century of Ragtime - From Eubie Blake to Dick Hyman to David Thomas Roberts, this two-disc Vanguard collection celebrating the centennial of classic ragtime includes many top-rank composers...

I am thinking specifically of David Thomas Roberts, Terra Verde, and new ragtime. I don't suppose I should be too surprised considering the neglect of the likes of Joplin and Ives for so long, but I can't help thinking it a pity nonetheless. If you listen to one new piano composer then make it David. His music is at once universal and intimate, comforting and terrifyingly sad - everything, in fact, that fine emotional piano music should be.

PM: You mentioned before being in love with mathematics. Do you draw your inspiration from the science?

It is only comparatively recently that I have become aware of certain abstract parallels between the two worlds. I am not fond of creating music by numbers, as many modern composers have done. I see the connection as much more abstract and deeper set than this. I think Hofstadter was on the right track with his ideas about self-reference in musical and mathematical forms.

Self-reference seems to occur within all musical forms of substance, not just Bach fugues. It's not so much architecture as biology, an organism rather than a building. The discovery of mathematical chaos in recent years may well offer a path of aesthetic investigation into the underlying sources of beauty and joy in music. It may lead us to understand that ineffable region lying between uninteresting structure and boring randomness.

An obvious application of this principle is improvisation which, by its nature, is a type of mental feedback loop and therefore susceptible to the laws of chaos. We can improvise, as many professionals do, firmly toward the conscious end of the spectrum. That is to say we know exactly what we are playing and where we are going. Music of this type can be elegant and very accomplished but may seem to lack life and spontaneity. At the other extreme lies complete disorder, a thoughtless abandoning of thought to reflex. This leads to freakishness and mere novelty, and ultimately tells us nothing.

Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts - Stephen Nachmanovitch has produced a celebration of human uniqueness. He helps us to make a better us of our resources of playfulness, ingenuity, and creativity.

These two states correspond precisely to stability and instability within a feedback loop. What we wish to reach is the border state of chaos, wherein an unpredictable succession of beautiful musical events tumble one after another, to the transportation of player and listener alike.

How any given individual acquires the ability to attain this state varies a great deal. It isn't something I would want to see regimented, cloned or governed by laws of academic institutions. Fortunately its own elusive nature, together with the variability of human response ought to prevent this catastrophe. I cannot think of an exception to the rule that the finest composers of piano music were and are compelling improvisers. This fact alone makes it hard to argue that improvisation is not fundamental to Western piano music in a way we do not, as yet, fully understand or appreciate. In the East, much music is synonymous with improvisation anyway and written composition a rarity.

Talking about the East, it wasn't until I was in my late thirties and read a book called "The Chinese Eye", that I realised the essentially Oriental nature of my musical impulse. It is just a simple, small book, outlining the philosophical differences between Chinese and Western approaches to painting. However, after reading it I felt immeasurably comforted and no longer a musical anachronism. It was like meeting myself through a mirror for the first time. As in those other moments, a thousand pieces of the psyche's jigsaw fell into place at a glance.

Good improvisation, good composition, good performance, good music, it seems to me, should strive to preserve and communicate much of the essence of such moments.

©2003 www.PianoMix.com

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