concerto for anybody
Andrea La Rose
About this work:
It is an unfortunate casualty that improvisation is not normally a part of one's classical music training. It certainly was not part of mine and I often feel that it takes a great effort to make up for that loss in pedagogy. As much as I love jazz, I am bothered by the fact that it has practically become synonymous with improvisation. We classical folk of today owe a lot to the jazz innovators who kept improvisation alive in modern society, for showing the "industrial state" a key ingredient missing in their values-system. Without them, improvisation might have really died in the western world with the early-Romantic tradition (or the last church organist).Yet, what seems to happen is that classical folk feel that they can't learn to improvise unless they enroll in the school of bebop. Nothing wrong with the school of bebop, either, but that's only one of many ways of swinging, as it were. I think it's important to use what you know to get at what you don't; we classical folk have a lot of musical material and skills to bring to the improvisation table, so why not start with that instead of starting all over? This piece is an attempt to get that ball rolling.
The duration is actually completely open, but performances on the average have been about 12 minutes.
Year composed: 2001
Duration: 00:12:00
Ensemble type: Unspecified Instrument(s):Ensemble
Instrumentation: