Musical Links InvestigationIB MUSIC 2014

Alex McQuay

St. George’s College, Quilmes

Improvisation is a technique which has been used by several different cultures around the world; it has been used in Indian, Arabic, Western, African and many more. Improvisation in music is the act of making music up as you go along.

Improvisation is based on patterns that derive chords or figures. A score will give a performer tools that will help him improvise, but what the performer plays is not written in the score. It gives a performer the liberty to play what he wants within certain musical boundaries depending on the style of music he is playing.

In this essay I will compare Improvisation techniques of the Baroque Period with the Improvisation techniques used in Jazz Music.

The Baroque period was a period in history between the years 1600 to 1750 in Western culture. In this period there were many innovations in various areas, such as architecture, literature, painting, dance, sculpture, and music. This period historically comes after and before the neo-classical revival. In this period, the areas mentioned before, were developed not only in style but also in their techniques.This period brought many changes, movements, and new thoughts kept from the Renaissance. 

Most of the improvisation in Baroque music was found in the bass. The improvisation

technique was called figured bass. It consists of a bass-line with notes in a score, which also

has certain notations that help the performer to improvise, such as added numbers

and accidentals beneath the staff to indicate what intervals above the bass notes should be

played, and therefore which inversions of which chords are to be played.

The numbers in the score indicate the number of scale steps above the given bass-line that

a note should be played. For example:

This in an example of a notation from a baroque music score. The bass note is a C, the

numbers 4 and 6 indicate that notes a fourth and a sixth above it should be played, that is

an F and an A. This means that, the second inversion of an F major chord is to be played.

Having these markings on a score, a musician playing a piece can know where to improvise and what chords to improvise.

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This is an example from a Baroque music score. This part would allow a Baroque musician to improvise, playing embellishments for these notes, but always staying on the same key as the piece. From the notations on the score, it can be seen that this music doesn’t give the performer so much liberty to improvise using other scales in a different key than the piece.

Jazz is a style of music born in the late nineteenth century in America. It has spread all around the world. Jazz music has been influenced by many musical styles and cultures. This kind of music can be blended with other music styles to create new genres such as Bossa Nova and the Rock and Roll, which ultimately derived from the Jazz.  Jazz music is all about improvisation, almost all the instruments improvise, since scores only display the chord progression and key, making the performer know what mode to use and in what key.

Jazz music uses modes to improvise. These mode are based on scales and chords, it is the most modern technique, used by rock, blues, jazz and many more musicians. This technique gives the performer more freedom inside the chord he is playing. Instead of playing the note, he can create (improvise) a melody in the mode or

1 http://musictheoryresources.com/members/FA_roman_num2.htm

scale of that note, or the key the piece is in. This can be seen in “So What” by Miles Davis. These are the different modes that can be found in Jazz:

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In Jazz music, musicians can go out of the scale they are, this means they can play notes, (accidentals), which are not in the scale or mode, but that go with the piece. A musician may also use a mode or scale which is different to the key of the piece, but goes with the piece.

This is an example from the score from the score of “So What” by Miles Davis:

2 http://tamingthesaxophone.com/jazz-modes.html

The whole notes in the bass line allow the performer to improvise over those notes, instead of playing the note for the length of the bar. This is how improvisation is presented in Jazz music, as there aren’t any notations, the musician can choose to use whatever mode or scale to use, and this is why it gives performers so much liberty when improvising.

Jazz music is based around this type of improvisation, were musicians may play scales which are not in the same key; this is what give Jazz its complex chords, and what makes jazz diatonic. Baroque music on the other hand doesn’t do this, its sticks to more traditional chords, it is more chromatic and improvisation patterns will always be in the same key as the piece, Baroque music is more limited in terms of improvisation than Jazz since you can only play scales that are in the key of the piece. In both cultures, there is a link in that they both use scales to improvise, and the notation of both cultures include tools for improvisation, this means, in the case of Jazz what chords to use, what scales or what modes; and in the case of Baroque music, what notes to use an the chord inversions.

By looking at scores from Jazz music and Baroque music, I can conclude that both of their improvisation techniques are similar; they both use scales to play embellishments around a chord or a note. But only in Jazz is where a musician has more freedom to improvise in a different key than the piece, and has more patterns to use than in baroque music. The techniques in Baroque music although they are similar, they are more limited than the ones from Jazz, since a musician can only improvise in the same key than the piece is in, and the core also has certain notations that limit the musician, as I showed in the Baroque score.

WORD COUNT: 1036

3 Miles Davis, So What (song)