Improv as a Practical Tool

Can improvisation, which involves no written music, be practically helpful to an instrumentalist? Let’s answer this question with another: is there a link between artistic expression and written music, or are we just following the directions? Do we just play that crescendo, or do we sometimes feel ourselves energized by it? If a marking on a score says to play a passage “joyously,” how do we know what that means?

Improvisation teaches you to synthesize these styles and emotions, and learning to do this can help a great deal to develop your stylistic and expressive playing as an instrumentalist. If you know how to make a piece that sounds like Mozart, doesn’t that mean that you understand the style? Improvisation exercises that involve expressing an emotion, feeling, or adjective also transfer directly to performance practice. If you can make a piece or a melody that expresses anxiousness, gracefulness, sorrow, fury, or alarm, that would indicate understanding of how to express those emotions through music, and you would use those tools come time to play.