Sheet music

(The text below comes directly from my book "Ergonomic guitar technique")

A practical example of improvisational supplements

This is my own transcription of the first part of J.S. Bach’s minuet from Cello suite no 1. In original, this piece is divided into two sections with repeats of both the first and the second sections, but instead of playing each section exactly the same way twice, we may play the repeat of each section more freely. I have therefore omitted the repeat signs and notated a way of playing the second section using improvisational supplements.

The aim of this example is only to illustrate how small improvisational variations may be used to complement a particular piece of music – it is not supposed to serve as an actual improvisation. Improvisation is always improvised – not written out as in the following pages.

Click on the Menuet to download it as a PDF!

More about improvisation

All music has its origin in improvisation, and it is believed that polyphony was developed as a result of musicians improvising additional parts over existing melodies. Musical notation has its origin in Western Europe around year 800, but it was not until the 1500s it was to be used on a regular basis. The lot of the classical composers we know today, i.e. Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin etc., was in fact more famous as masters of improvisation rather than composers, and during their times, a great ability to improvise was rule rather than exception.

What further complicates our modern view of early music, especially the music of the baroque era, is the fact that the notated music of the time was to be embellished with many improvisational supplements during a performance, which may perhaps be difficult to imagine today when we look upon the music in its notated form. In other words, the transcribed music of, for example, J.S. Bach only represents a small number of all the tones that made a natural part of a live performance. The notated music from this period represents only one of many different, equally adequate, ways of performing the music. Moreover, the performance of a particular piece was always played in a different manner each time. When performing music during early times, the reproduction of the particular affect was considered the most important – not to play every note exactly as notated, as we tend to focus on today. In fact, a musician that merely played exactly what was written was considered an amateur at best.

During later periods, the music in its notated form and the live performance were to come closer to each other as a result of the composers’ employment of dynamic, text  and graphical markings to explain how the music should be executed. Consequently, improvisation was to make up a smaller and smaller part of performances, as musicians began to follow the composers’ markings instead of interpreting the music more freely.

This way of notating music in detail in order to influence the execution has also influenced the notation of adaptations and transcriptions of earlier music. This is often clearly seen if we compare the layout of music directly from Bach’s own hand with the layout of later transcriptions of the same pieces, for example by Andrés Segovia. J.S. Bach’s way of notating his music is clean and often completely without dynamic markings, while the transcriptions by Segovia often is cluttered with a multitude of dynamic markings, text and musical signs – sometimes there is even alterations made in the actual pitch of notes! Although Segovia’s transcriptions of Bach’s music often sound very good, they are rather examples of how Segovia, personally, played Bach’s music, not examples of how baroque music “should” be played. In other words, such transcriptions should perhaps be considered the notated result of an “interesting meeting between two great artists with equal influence on the music” rather than “the correct way of performing the music by Bach”. Today, improvisations are extremely rare in performances of classical music – especially in baroque music, although it, by today’s standards, always was meant to be performed with an extremely “open mind” regarding the details – perhaps in much the same way as the performances by Segovia.