https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/how-to-learn-to-jam/
…
The best scaffolding is
a participatory music community. For a present-day American, this can be
difficult to find. Some subcultures are richly supportive of participatory
improvisational music: the Black church, hip-hop cyphers, Latin percussionists,
jazz jams, blues jams, bluegrass jams, the old-time music scene, the video game
music scene. For other styles of music, though, you are probably on your own …
Paul Hindemith would propose, obviously enough, that a
family interested in making music together would be a good option … if you have
that.
I am reminded once again of Robert O. Gjerdingen's Child Composers in the Old
Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians and Dana Gooley's Fantasies of Improvisation: Free
Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music.
One of many reasons I dissent from Ted Gioia’s “we need a new
Romanticism” is the history of Romanticism being against improvisation and
jamming in “serious music”. If anything
Ted Gioia the jazz historian should be aghast at the prospect of a new Romantic
era when Germanophile Art Religion and the cult of Beethoven played such
outsized roles in purging classical music concerts of improvisation.
But I have often thought over the last ten to twenty years
about how if you look at the isolated elements of avant garde movements in classical
music it can seem as though each avant garde movement sought to transform one
ingredient into a whole loaf of bread.
Let me extend the metaphor a bit. Let’s take microtonality. Composers like Wyschnegradsky, Haba and
others on through Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Easley Blackwood and Ben Johnston
and Kyle Gann have experimented with the microtonal path. Stochastic processes? Xenakis.
Free improvisation? Eh …
Anyway, my idea I float for mere consideration is that a
European avant garde movement would crop up pinning everything on some one
element. Conversely, in American popular
music any and all of those constituent ingredients would already be all over
the place in pop music. You can hear
microtonal inflections, flexible approaches to tonality, modal mixture and
modal mutation. I read Herbert Pauls’ Two
Centuries in One book that was mentioned by John Borstlap over the years. Pauls mentioned that the musical language of
Romanticism and late Romanticism survived and thrived in popular music and jazz
after post World War II avant gardists declared that those antiquated chords
and scales were yesterday’s news.
So when I try to sit
through some guitar duet by Brian Ferneyhough I can’t help but think that it’s
more fun to listen to Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Charley Patton and Blind
Willie Johnson than to listen to some guitar duo use slides to screech all over
the strings of classical guitars.
A feat worth trying to accomplish, if only a tiny bit,
would be to develop ways of writing music that could encourage classical
musicians to feel like they actually can jam.
In reality classical musicians have been jamming but not
necessarily in “classical” settings.
Brass players can switch from Hindemith to Monk and guitarists might
switch from Sor and Britten to whatever strikes their fancy.
UPDATE
6-26-2026
I have been thinking over how the score has been so sacralized in classical music that there must be some way to steer between Cagey aleatory or Xenakis stuff and cult of Beethoven specificity. Suppose a composer wrote a sonata form in which there were, say, two different recapitulations? Performers with little to no experience jamming could pick one recapitulation or the other and a path toward being able to jam could lay in learning both recapitulations and simply toggling between them, taking some elements from Recap 1 and other elements from Recap 2 but getting to the end and playing what is, technically, fleshed out in the score. After centuries of Romantic and post-Romantic fealty to notes on the page asking people to just "jam here" is likely a bit much. Yet throwing a chart of globs of music a la some Stockhausen scores where you pick fragments 4, 5, 2, 7, 8 and 11 of 12, for instance, most certainly won't teach a performer how to jam.
But writing out a score and setting aside 20 to 25 percent of it with instructions to jam if you want? That might work.
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