Category: Creative Practice

Playing with Inspiration: A Transcription from Clara Schumann

Not many of Clara Schumann’s piano works lend themselves to solo guitar, but I recently came across one piece that does – the hauntingly beautiful Larghetto that begins her Quatre Pièces fugitives (Four Fleeting Pieces), op.15. Here is my transcription:

Clara Schumann, Larghetto, op.15 no.1: download the score in PDF (see resources for this and other scores)

IMSLP has the original piano score. It has been recorded a few times by pianists: YouTube has a beautiful live performance of the whole set by Michelle Cann:

In my last post, I focused on the transcription process in a piece by Mendelssohn. This time, let’s look at a couple of features of the piece and how they might shape your practice. Learning a piece of music is a creative activity – half system, half experimentation. But one principle is always worth bearing in mind: to learn a complex piece, first make it simpler. We’ll look at two ways of simplifying the music to aid learning: 

  1. simplifying a passage to its basic harmonies
  2. simplifying a passage to its basic motive
Continue reading “Playing with Inspiration: A Transcription from Clara Schumann”

Classical Improvisation

An interview with Nikhil Hogan

It was an honor to be interviewed by Nikhil Hogan recently. His YouTube channel, the Nikhil Hogan Show, contains a trove of fascinating interviews with many acclaimed musicians. Nikhil is a very acute musician and thinker who is now focusing his series on early music, music history, classical improvisation and elements of early-music pedagogy (such as partimento, hexachordal solfeggio, counterpoint and schemata). I learned a great deal from the conversation and the messages we exchanged afterwards.

In this interview, we touch on a lot of things, but the focus is on classical improvisation at the guitar. I share some ideas on how classical guitarists might think of improvisation and how to get started in a very simple way. I recommend some materials and strategies for Baroque improvisation in particular.

For yet more on improvisation and how we can incorporate it into the way we learn and practise notated scores, see Guitar, chapter 8, ‘Creative Practice’.