The Daily Improvisation

Welcome to the Daily Improvisation, now into its second year.

My name is Eric Barnhill, and I am a pianist and instructor of the Dalcroze Method living in New York. Dalcroze is a specialized method of teaching musical skills and concepts through movement, voice and improvisation, and more information can be found here.

Dalcroze sits at the crossroads of my two central musical interests. Throughout my musical training I knew that I wanted to find a style of music making that was improvisational and generative, but that spoke the language of the great composers who were the reason I became a musician in the first place. Dalcroze was a successful path, and the only successful one I found, to speaking my own words in that language. Second, I believe that the classical music tradition can revitalize itself through re-embracing its historic relationship with the sciences. The techniques of the Dalcroze method are in sync with the brain’s primary activity — the cross-modal translation of rhythmic signals — and I have developed an application of Dalcroze eurhythmics to children and adults with special needs, called Cognitive Eurhythmics, which uses techniques from the Feldenkrais Method. More information on that is here.

Both of these aspects of Dalcroze inform my music. I’m interested in Western classical tonality, which is clearly a way of speaking in tones that is in sync with the brain. Only the beginning of this has been worked out, but the evidence is already undeniable, from infancy onward. I’m interested in counterpoint and motivic development, which are structural patterns that, in their dynamic balance of unity and diversity, are models for cognition at least as valid as any flowchart or verbal theorizing. Above all I’m interested in melody, which contains all yet somehow incorporates it into a single frame of reference, just as the brain does in its generation of an “I”. A single, organic, tonal melody is the purest encapsulation mankind has produced of the feeling of a whole self.

My improvisations tend to begin with melodic motives and fragments. When improvising I feel more like an onlooker, as these components I’ve introduced coalesce into themes and melodies, then break down into new fragments that came out of the previous activity. Harmonic structures open and close like an accordion. Accompaniments shift from background to complement, and sometimes take center stage. There’s a lot of balance and symmetry, but that’s not my choice; the music is asking for it. Or perhaps it’s my mind that asks for it. I’m not sure there’s a difference, and I think the direction forward for classical music lies in this fertile verge of mind, body and melody.