The Daily Improvisation

1) Do you really improvise all this music?

Yes. Anything you hear here has never been heard before, not even by me, and will never be heard again. I hope that is part of the site’s appeal.

2) So you sit down and pull all this out of thin air?

That’s a different question. I am at work improvising at the piano for a good sized chunk of the morning - at least an hour, often more. I usually warm up with more formal structures — canons and fugues, or variations on someone else’s tune — and then go to freer materials and structures. I poke around and expore things. Eventually, enough material has flowed out that I clearly have a piece’s worth. When I feel I have a handle on this material, I turn on the recorder and create my piece.

So, I have a good idea of what’s coming. However, I never know what the final product will turn out like. It’s not that I refrain from planning: it’s that I have a fundamental belief that only music that gives form to itself in the spontaneous flow of the moment can be truly life-giving and speak relevantly to the human condition. The best composers had this wellspring from which to draw at any time, and their compositions are examples of Wordsworth’s “spontaneous emotion recollected in tranquility.”

3a) I’ve heard you do that before.
3b) I heard Haydn do that once.

I’ll bet you did! What emerges as “tropes” in any musical style are combinations of musical elements that solve all sorts of problems at once. That means they frequently can be brought to bear on a classical situation and used in its service. One of the great miracles of classical music is how this endless diversity of characters and sentiments inevitably liqudates to the same few primitives. The canonical puzzles Bach was so fascinated by late in life were, I think, attempts to come to terms with the fundamental matrices that guided musical thought.

4) This music sounds old fashioned. Shouldn’t you be pounding the piano keys with your head or something?

At this point in our planet’s cultural development, the most oudated viewpoint imaginable would be the claim to the historical inevitability of any style. The advent of postmodernist aesthetic, the rise of popular genres in popularity, quality, and profundity, and the endlessly fertile crossover experimentation going on around the world means that the most meaningful path of expression for an artist is to select the materials that mean the most to them, and use them to create the most meaningful art possible. Choices based on rationalistic deduction result in dried up, infertile product. Choices made authentically from a spontaneous feeling of the heart, resonate across any boundary.

My music is composed from the materials that speak to me, and follow the laws dictated by their nature. If they resonate with you use them to add value to your life. If they don’t find what does. Preoccupation with stuffy notions of historical dialectic is just you wasting time you’ll never get back, stuck in your head instead of listening to your whole self.

5) Can I share these? Do I have to pay for them?

All material on this site is copyright Eric Barnhill, and permission must be granted for any commercial or non-commercial use. However you are encouraged to share the files so long as I am credited with their creation. You may not steal them.

I have a section of the site for making donations. If this music gives you something of value, please give something of value back. If I can get enough interest in this site, I will be able to devote ever more time and care to creating more music.

After the site gets rolling, archives of an entire month’s mp3s will be available for a $10 donation.

6) Can I hire you to write a score for me? Or to transcribe one of your improvisations so I can play it?

Yes you can. I am hoping my music will speak to some in this way. Just email me to talk about it further.

7) Do you want feedback? or take requests?

Definitely. If you liked one but not another, tell me. If your requests are in line with my goals, great, but I won’t improvise variations on, say, “Holiday in Cambodia”, as much as I like the song.

How do you make the recordings?

Nothing fancy. I connect an mp3 player to the line out on my Roland digital piano - far lovelier in sound and feel than any other brand I tried, incidentally - and go. Sometimes I do a second take, just like a reality show.