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uf | 8 years ago

I think you are oversimplifying this.

Many classically trained pianists are excellent at improvisation. Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart were respected pianists. Wagner wrote the Hollander by improvising on the piano reciting the lyrics. Beethoven was feared by other pianists for his level of skill at improvisation. Mozart improvised most of his piano sonatas as far as I remember.

Gould made a recording of Strauss songs I think. The singer said in an interview, that Gould just started to improvise in Strauss' style and harmonics (Strauss is pretty damn difficult).

Contemporary pianists often know both. Anecdotal evidence: A colleague of mine from music university studied classical piano and was a regular at jazz clubs in Dusseldorf.

It is very interesting to see differences in brain structure from classical to jazz pianists. Maybe a hint at how (muscle-)memory and motion planning is stored? A hint at how volatile brain structure is? It would be interesting to see, if e.g. a classically trained pianist switching to jazz exclusively also has a significant restructuring of his brain.

Edit: Now that I've read the article and the abstract of the paper (the paper is behind Elsevier's paywall), I understand that jazz pianists are quicker at planning new movements (a.k.a. Chord progressions) with the downside of making making more mistakes, while classically trained pianists are slower here, but faster at recognizing and repeating unlearned ("unusual") finger movements.

Would be interesting to see a comparison to pianists doing both jazz and classical music.

discuss

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dgsb|8 years ago

> Many classically trained pianists are excellent at improvisation.

I would not say that, the example you give are the most reknown composer of all times. I think they are more the exception than the reality of professional musicians. Not every one is able to reach such level of genius. It seems, proficiency in both style seems rather rare. I don't think I could name a single current world class contemporary jazz player which could reach the same level in classical music interpretation.

Regarding jazz improvistion, from my little experience of amateur player, jazz musicians mostly improvise together as a band, this is not a solo activity.

uf|8 years ago

And as my top poster dharma noted: Jazz and "classical music" share many similarities. Definitely true. Think of Scriabin piano somata No 5 written in 1907. Or even go back to Beethoven No 32, 2nd movement.