J.S. Bach, while he was alive, was little known as a composer, and his works were criticized for being dense and old-fashioned — but he was renowned as the greatest improviser on the organ in Europe. A famous French organist once came to town to compete against him, and, hearing him improvise while warming up, promptly left town. Bach put improvisation skills at the center of his teaching. Most of his instructional manuals are how-to books in improvisation. He often wrote out several different versions of his most popular pieces, such as the inventions, to show how a student might improvise on the structure.
Handel wrote one treatise on performance – and half of it was devoted to improvising dances and fugues.
Mozart was most famous in his day, according to scholars, “first as an improviser, then as a composer, then as a pianist”. In a famous piano competition in front of the Pope, Mozart and Clementi not only had to improvise in the final round, they had to improvise pieces together.Beethoven became famous in Vienna not as a composer but as an “astounding” improviser. It was a full ten years that he was famous as an improviser in Vienna before he started to become well-known for his compositions, and he improvised publicly until the end of his life.Beethoven wanted nothing more than to study with Mozart, and they met a total of one time, at a party. This was Beethoven’s one chance to impress Mozart, to show everything he knew – and to do it, Beethoven asked Mozart to give him themes to improvise on. When he was done Mozart turned to his colleague Attwood and said, “Someday, he will give you something to talk about.”
Schubert was almost completely unknown as a composer in his day – but he was renowned as an improviser, playing in taverns all night improvising waltzes, dances, character pieces, and drinking songs.
Chopin generated all the compositional material for his pieces in improvisation. Though he performed publicly, he let only a small circle of select friends hear him improvise, including his close friend, the writer George Sand, who felt that Chopin’s compositions were “but a pale shadow of his improvisations,” a remark echoed by others who heard him.
When Liszt came to towns to give a path-breaking solo piano recital, which he invented, he immediately went to the town’s opera house to see what works were being performed by the opera and ballet. He always closed his concerts with virtuoso improvisations on the themes of the local operas and ballets currently being shown.
rahms made money as a child playing the piano in bars, improvising and playing by ear waltzes and dances that were in Viennese fashion. He came to public prominence when Schumann attended a performance he gave of a Beethoven violin sonata – the piano was mis-tuned so to match the violinist, Brahms had to play the piece by ear in a different key. Schumann immediately sought him out.
Debussy saw improvisation as his main creative source, claiming that his harmonic innovations came from “following the law of pleasure of the ear”. In particular Debussy, with his love of exotic sonority, loved to improvise on out of tune pianos, letting the particular sonorities move him in innovative ways.
I think this list of facts speaks for itself. Music was once thought of differently. Improvisation lay at the center of the conception of what it meant to be a musician. Improvisation, however, doesn’t leave the strong archaeological records that composition does, so to the modern mind the vitality of improvisation has been drained out of our historical conception of what music has been. Our conception of how composers thought and worked has been flipped on its head. Our understanding of the evolution of western music is terminally distorted. I hope attention will be paid by future music scholars to the possibility of a functional-improvisation-centered musical culture. It could result in a revolution in terms of how we see our musical past and future.