Ethan Hein on "How to learn to jam", a brief thought as a classical guitarist on how inimical much classical music education has become to the idea of jamming

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/how-to-learn-to-jam/

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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. 

Ethan Hein's "Free Improvisation" reminded me of all the books I've read that showed how improvisation was normative within "classical music" until European guys in the 19th century said "This cannot be!"

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/free-improvisation/

Free improvisation

Posted by Ethan February 16, 2026

 

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It’s strange to think of improvisation as a thing you can teach, because the mythology is that you just open your mouth and, like, let it flow, man. But people who can improvise effortlessly have been immersed in a certain musical vocabulary, and they know the standard riffs, the cliches and tropes. These are the raw material that makes spontaneous expression possible. If improv exercises creates a motivation in the kids to develop a vocabulary of the riffs and tropes, then I am doing my job. Beyond aural skills class, improvisation is a necessary skill for any would-be songwriters, producers, and performers of many pop styles where nobody is handing out charts or telling you what to play. But it’s also an opportunity for creative growth more generally, and for the personal growth that comes with it.

 

One of the things I’ve noticed in the last twenty or so years of reading about classical music is how it keeps coming up that in earlier periods it was not only normal to expect improvisation in performance, it was expected in basically every era until the mid-19^th century onward.  The great English Renaissance composer William Byrd couldn’t have been reprimanded for improvising too much if nobody was improvising.  Improvising over stock bass lines was intrinsic to the Italian partimento tradition.  Partimento even included approaches to fugue.  Musicians during the Baroque era were certainly expected to improvise.  There’s even a book out there on how to approach improvisation within medieval music. Jazz partisans need to understand that when it comes to improvisation there’s all the evidence in the world that people within “classical music” improvised and jammed right up to about the time that the big dogs of 19^th century “serious music” forbade improvisation.

 

As Taruskin put it in The Ox, the 19^th century concert music tradition took away as much as it gave and whether what we lost should have been deserves to be a live and seriously discussed and debated question.

Adam Neely and Ethan Hein discuss the absence of rappers covering rappers--a sideways thought on Robert Gjerdingen's excavation of Neapolitan partimento as a tradition in which kids jammed on existing bass lines as part of learning to master the craft of music

First, Ethan Hein has a post and video discussion about rap covers and how, although there are covers of rap songs rappers do not cover each other's work and how there is a norm against "biting" other rappers.  

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2020/adam-neely-video-on-rap-covers/#more-21425

For me one of the most memorable "Major Interpretation" covers of this century was Johnny Cash covering Trent Reznor's "Hurt".  At the risk of a digression, the line between major and minor interpretation can depend a lot on reception history.  Stripping down a song in terms of instrumentation is one of the patterns that shows up, such as Cash covering Reznor but his example is just of many potential case studies.  Anyone remember the cover of "Mad World" by Tears for Fears at the end of Donnie Darko?  I suspect that the difference between "major" and "minor" may depend on popular music being what Theodore Gracyk described as "ontologically thick", which is to say that this timbre created by playing this guitar through that amp with these settings through these pick-ups is important. I haven't played the Telecaster in a while but I know the Tele and a Gibson hollow-body have VERY different sounds and you'll want one sound for one kind of song and the other sound for another.  But I've digressed pretty early into this post ... .

This is fascinating to hear about because there have been anti-rap polemics that have argued that sampling shows a lack of musical creativity (this was my stance twenty-five years ago when I was a teenager and first heard rap). I have, over the course of twenty years, come to a point where hip hop isn't exactly my favorite style of music but, you will note, I have referred to it as music, which it is.  As Leonard Meyer used to put it, a democracy doesn't mean everyone will like the same thing but it means that everyone can and should be prefer to like the music that they like.