November 16, 2024
For a musician that aspires to write music, the most important milestone is once they start improvising.
My thesis is that this is true for all creative works. There is a moment when you realize you can start creating something new from scratch and that you can do it relatively quickly. It is at this moment that you experience an irreversible change in your growth as an artist.
Why is improvisation so important?
The first is self-explanatory: you cannot improvise unless you can “do the thing”.
The second is also straightforward. Before you can improvise, almost all your time is spent mechanically going through the motions of imitating what someone else has already done. In other words, all your practice reps are acts of replication (as opposed to acts of creation). When you start improvising, you finally get to learn how to come up with something new.
The third is more elaborate, but it boils down to four main ideas.
Because you don’t have much time to think when improvising, you have to hand off work that’s typically done in your conscious mind to your subconscious.
There’s a famous quote that says “Composition is just improvisation slowed down, and improvisation is just composition sped up”. Everything is happening so quickly that your conscious mind doesn’t have time to get involved. In fact, part of the beauty of improvisation is to deliberately remove conscious thought from the process.
By moving to your subconscious mind, you’re metaphorically using an entirely new engine to power your creative process that is much more powerful.
Improvising also forces you to open yourself up to embarrassment. But the more you do it, the more you realize it’s okay.
When you’re not afraid of being judged, you become fearless and can take increasingly more risks. This means moving faster, trying out crazier ideas, digging deeper into your subscious for inspiration, and overall having more novelty in your output.
One overlooked skill in improv is being able to turn a mistake into something beautiful.
While a good improviser can correct or ignore a mistake without letting it ruin their performance, a great improviser can lean into the mistake and use it to make their work even better.
Mistakes can give you ideas you otherwise wouldn’t have come up with.
The unexpected is proportional to innovation if you approach it with the right mindset.
The fourth is you learn to improvise with others. There is an act of giving and receiving that you can do with improv that you can’t do with just mechanical practice reps.
When you allow others into your creative process, they can come up with ideas that you couldn’t have. When you work with someone you trust, you can give them something incomplete and open-ended, a platform upon which they can elaborate.
The reverse is also true. You learn how to take something from another artist and add your own spin to it. Their work gives you inspiration that you couldn’t have willed on your own.
This back and forth is fundamental to writing great music.
To reiterate the thesis, I believe every craft has their own version of improvisation (even if the analogy isn’t perfect). Figure out what it is, and try to get there as soon as possible. Do it alone and do it with others. Do it a lot and do it without fear.