Gilbert Isbin improvising counterpoint

[Liarspoker]

Christian, you'll like this. Different then your approach but Gilbert has some nice lines and movement.

Note Gilbert's picking hand, it's in the lute position as Gilbert is a lutenist as well.

[Christian Miller]

Very nice - an improvisation? It felt that it had a very nice shape as a composition.

Am i detecting a little bit of Jimmy Wyble in his approach?


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[BWV]

Like that its not pastiche, which is the problem with taking partimento as real music

[Christian Miller]

Like that its not pastiche, which is the problem with taking partimento as real music

I don't think Partimento - in terms of the specific type of exercise - was real music even in the eighteenth century. In terms of the wider subject of "historical improvisation". There's an obvious tension in the very name of it, depending on your own pet idea of the dreaded 'I' word.

But this isn't the first time I've encountered this tension - I had the same thing with learning to play pre-war jazz. After about a decade I found myself finally able to do it without 'censoring' myself haha. I quite enjoy this apparent paradox.

So, I suppose my own take on improvisation is that it's less about freedom exercised in very literal terms of note choices etc, but rather in the spirit of the process. This is something my Konnakol teacher, who is active as a performer of Carnatic music, pointed out. Obviously he isn't playing his jazz fusion chops on one of those gigs (he also drums for Soft Machine.)

So the function of Partimento, counterpoint and similar compositional/improvisational exercises of the time was never to sound 'interesting' but very conventional (even for the era) in an accomplished way, while building technique - and if I have this right this was true back then as we have the 'learned' style of fugues and oratorios and so on, contrasted against the modern gallant style of the opera house.

So I'm not sure I even see it as "pastiche" in that, because it's just learning the skills they learned and producing largely similar results. It can obviously sound attractive, and I really enjoy the way it sounds. I like the expression 'toy music' or perhaps Keith Swanwick's term 'pseudomusic'. There's a lot of this stuff out there. Bebop fulfils a similar role in jazz education, even though it is totally possible to play bop as real compelling music, and that's no doubt also true at the highest levels of historical improvisation - when the conventions and language has been fully internalised and transcended, the pastiche turns into something deeper.

After all, most of us are playing with the resources we've inherited from other musicians, whether we realise it or not. The harmony jazz musicians regard as 'modern' often derives from the ideas of mid 20th century concert composers, for example