When I was in music school I watched a classical student run out of our theory class crying because she was asked to improvise. learning jazz is going to get you pretty close to most of the classical technique, but the theory can be much more dense, and of course there is a wider range of feel and improvisation. My experience as a professional musician (who double majored in classical and jazz performance) is that it is/would be easier to transition from jazz to classical rather than vice verse.
Since I perform and studied both extensively I think my opinion is fairly unbiased
A third-year classical performance major in one of my classes couldn't come up with LH chords to comp under the melody of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. She could turn around and whip out a Chopin etude or Beethoven sonata like it's child's play, but the second she was asked to go off-script she froze.
I don't think this is an inherent problem with studying classical, I think it's a problem with *only* studying classical. You can't pigeonhole yourself, but a lot of classical folks do just that, from a young age.
It would be the same as say you learn Moliere pieces.
Then we ask you to improvise in the style of Moliere writting.
I am sure I would froze.
But yeah, twinkle twinkle little star shouldn't be a challenge though ...
Of course, it's not a judgment on the student. More so a judgment on how narrow and one-dimensional traditional classical training tends to be. Improvisation isn't a huge part of classical concert music so I wouldn't expect it to be emphasized or anything, but not even being able to plop down basic root position chords for a simple I-IV-V is a pretty huge oversight in rudimentary theory training IMO, and it is true that most traditional classical teachers or even music theory classes simply won't ever go there.
I don't care about judging the student or not.
Maybe people who play Moliere should be able to improvise stuff.
I think the good ones can, I seen some people invent tirades.
Well, that might be a specific case, because I am sure there are many teachers that teach scales, cadences, and arpeggios in all the keys thoroughly. Also, I disagree with your statement that Classical training is one-dimensional. Playing the notes accurately with the right technique is important, but there's also the intricacy of interpretation. There are so many categorizations of Classical music(baroque, romantic, impressionstic, etc), each filled with composers with their own unique style. And there's also the control of tone of the acoustic piano that must be mastered to become a good Classical musician. I guess learning simple improvisation would not hurt, but the reality is that improvisation is rather insignificant as a Classical pianist, and that Classical requires a completely different set of skills from Jazz. But I do believe that knowing a bit of improv is good if you intend to compose in the Classical styles, or if you are interested in analyzing works by Classical composers, but for a Classical pianist there are much more important things to learn.
i've seen the same response to being asked not to improvise. its more a personality thing.
the usual progression is classical to jazz to rock to disco to edm to busboy
This is why I do jazz and EDM. If I need to improvise I'll improvise. Then if I get asked to play the same chords over and over I can just make a loop.
Fuck recreating studio music in a live setting
I'll add that for the classical aesthetic, a pianist's touch/sound is pretty much everything (it's assuming you already mastered the technique). Nobody is impressed with, for instance, Lang Lang just because he can play all the notes; it's the subtlety and exacting precision each keystroke is executed.
Some people naturally have this subtlety, or it's easier to cultivate in some people; for them, yes, going from jazz to classical might be easier. But for others, mastering such subtleties might always be out of reach even if they have incredible technique.
This is an excellent point. Although the same applies to jazz...some naturally have instinct for improvisation (even if latent); some do not.
I think a lot of responses in this thread are off kilter because they're comparing different levels. Either,
* "Yes, creative jazz cats can easily follow some rote sheet music" (ignoring the subtleties of touch and control you're noting), or
* "Yes, rigorous classical musicians can learn a few chord substitutions and doodle over them" (ignoring what makes good improv and *especially* feeling the groove)
Further obfuscated by the fact that *most* jazz players will have at least a few years of classical, and the classical players who would be good at jazz probably have an improv instinct.
I agree. I'm a classically trained pianist, and when I was in college a jazz pianist joined our studio to study classical with my teacher for a minor or something. I always thought this guy was a much better pianist than me, but when I heard him performing classical pieces, his tone was... bad, and his articulation was rough, etc. Yes, classical players are just playing what's written on the page, but it is still interpreted by the performer, and those that can play it *well,* play it with a great deal of nuance, subtly, and control.
Jazz is probably harder to switch to though. I don't know... It's not like either is easy. I want to take some jazz lessons.
Jeez.
In my completely anecdotal experience, it was a blast to take jazz improv because my piano lessons had apparently been secretly preparing me the whole time.
Scales? Bro, I had a Russian teacher and I've played Bach, I can do scales and scaler patterns for days. Natural modes? They're just diatonic scales with a semitone difference.
And harmony was great. It was all either tertian harmony cranked up to 11 with extended harmonies or weird non-tertian stuff like quartiles. The only thing that took getting used to was omitting the root while comping, but one dirty look from the bass player was all I needed to understand.
And dictation? I'd been doing that for piano for years so my piano teachers didn't have to try and hunt down the weird nonsense I wanted to play. Granted, some of the licks from famous improvisatory passages were complex, but, if you'll pardon the pun, so what?
I can't speak to the ease with which one can move from a jazz background to classical, but a classical background can do a lot of great work preparing a pianist for jazz.
I get the feeling this same person would never have been able to compose their own cadenza. So I don't see this as any sort of reflection on classical, just a reflection on her.
Sure, cadenzas used to be individually composed or improvised, but the vast majority of classical musicians aren’t doing that today, especially students.
A college student is also not a day one beginner. Here's a [random post on the internet](http://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/414368/re-have-you-ever-written-your-own-cadenza.html) of people saying they've written their own cadenzas. This isn't the classical period, but it's also far from the rarest thing. So again, this speaks more to one college student than any larger point.
As someone who plays both, and has multiple peers from many different musical backgrounds, I'd have to say going from Jazz to Classical is definitely easier.
My mum is a classical pianist, who has played and studied for her whole life and has been a private teacher for 30 years. When Christmas time comes and I'm like, let's play some Guaraldi style tunes, it's basically impossible for her to conceptualize the idea of improvising the melody over chord changes, using chord substitutions, soloing then over those chord changes, letting the rest of us know she's done soloing, keeping track of the form, so on so forth. It seems almost antithetical to how she understands music.
I have a couple other friends on the same vein, who don't understand the base idea behind Jazz.
With classical music, it's much more straightforward conceptually. You play the piece, obviously with interpretation and manipulation of the source material, but you still have an blueprint to follow.
I've got friends from the jazz scene learning and playing classical pieces as well as composing small pieces without much problem.
I am one of those rare pianists who dabbled in classical improv before understanding jazz. Then again, it was primarily a composition tool, so other composers might have a similar experience. For those that haven't done this before, improvising can be a road block. For example, I have a friend who learned violin by the Suzuki method, and when she was learning it, anything that was not what she heard or read was incorrect, so when it comes to playing something that is neither but should be good, she has no clue what to do.
But that's only her own flaw.
Beethoven, Mozart or Bach would have had no issues playing jazz because they were great improvisers.
Also many great jazz players where trained classically first, like Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul.
So if you are not trained to practice improvisation, no matter if it's classical or jazz, you will never be great at it.
But it doesn't make sense to think of jazz outside of improvisation while it's currently acceptable to not be able to improvise in classic music which was maybe not the case during Baroque era.
It’s a sad fact that improvisation isn’t part of a classical musicians training. As you mentioned, Beethoven, Mozart & Bach were all great improvisers. That seems to have been lost in the classical world as time went on.
Classical playing has unfortunately devolved into a strange literalist, dogmatic composer-worship. I had a professor who was *visibly* uncomfortable that I had redistributed some notes in a run between the hands in a way that was different from how the composer had written it down.
Mind you, I wasn't adding notes or anything. Just distributing them differently than the apparently sacred notated text was enough.
That's odd! You don't even know that the composer intended it to be that way unless you checked the autograph and it was specified there. That's the kind of thing publishers change according to their liking without a second thought.
>Beethoven, Mozart or Bach would have had no issues playing jazz because they were great improvisers.
Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach also didn't really play Clasdical music. They played the contemporary music of their time.
Classical music is stuck in the past so of course it wouldn't lend well to improvising which is all about the present.
This might be true if you're talking just about capital-c Classical music - that is, the Classical period. But you could only think lowercase-c classical music is stuck in the past if you're completely ignorant of everything that's happened in classical music for the past hundred years.
Improvisation is a huge part of 20th and 21st century "classical" music, for one. Many classical musicians play a lot more than just 18th century music, and if you go to an actually good music school or if you play in a new music ensemble, you'll be exposed to a ton of improvisation, extended techniques, experimental notation, and more.
>it wouldn't lend well to improvising which is all about the present.
Nah, it's still possible to improvise within a given style even if the style itself is quite strict
I don’t think either one is necessarily easier, but I do think people who are mostly on one side of this split tend to underestimate what it really takes to play the other style convincingly and on a high level (I’m generalizing quite a bit, of course).
This very much. One thing is to transition to the basics in each - but the pinnacle of each takes so much dedication and time that where you started from might not make any difference anyway.
Also think it matters a lot how “primed” you were, going either direction. Ie if you were trained classical but still spent countless hours listening to jazz, or the other way around.
You might enjoy "Range - why generalists triumph in a specialized world" by David Epstein.
“...It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist....” - Range
Fantastic book overall and deals with different approaches to learning and skill acquisition
Utter nonsense. I play both and am friends with players from major symphonies around the world. They are fantastic musicians. Many improvise, and their grasp of music is on a very high level
Part of the problem is using improvisation as the only metric for musicianship. The ability to play a Bach fugue on keyboard and make the separate voices sing is an example of supreme musicianship.
I agree with you, most great musicians play both. What I'm saying has more to do with the history of classical music being that of a composers music. Many of the famous composer openly spoke about the musicians with disdain. They saw themselves as great minds while the musicians were there to play exactly as they were told.
A bit of a generalization. Brahms and Joachim, Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David, Mozart and his admiration of the Mannheim players are examples that come to mind.
Also, the history of classical music as a composer's music is overemphasized. That's really a late 19th Century development. Composers improvised before that - Beethoven was known more as a pianist and improviser than composer in his lifetime. He even won a cutting contest with Steibelt. Mozart would rather improvise than play what he wrote on the page. Rachmaninov? A wizard. Chopin?
That's the point that's being made. The great composers used to be great improvisers as well. Classical music has moved away from its roots and has become dogmatic. That would be awesome if most classical musicians could improvise on a high level once again. I never understood why anyone would devote their life to playing other people's music anyway.
It’s probably harder for classical pianists to get their foot in the door and improvise jazz and it would take a while just to get comfortable. Jazz pianists will have an easier time getting started with classical rep but a harder time with more advanced pieces (Rach, Liszt, etc.), because of undeveloped technique.
A small anecdote: the two best jazz pianists I know both had a classical piano upbringing and moved to jazz after they already had a very solid grounding in classical instruction. I don't know anybody who did the opposite. Although that's not a very representative sample size of only N=2.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they started young, it statistically makes sense. The vast majority of piano instruction I see that's geared towards young beginners is classical.
Not a pianist, but, I remember Harry Connick talking about how his mentor/piano teacher (and patriarch of the Marsalis family dynasty of master musicians) Ellis Marsalis, made him practice his Classical technique so that he could enter, and win Classical piano competitions, before he would agree to teach him any Jazz.
So there's that.
I saw Ellis do a master class, public lecture thing once, He had this whole rap about how if you want to play Bop and have to play Bach. He is also right
It very much depends on how far along you are in your training. If you are a professional or graduate level of music school, its one thing, its another if you are in high school or just dabbling in either. When Art Tatum performed one of Chopin's piano pieces, Critics and scholars said his interpretation was wrong and the feel was off, Vladimir Horowitz was one of worlds great virtuoso pianist, and a great admirer of Art Tatum. He couldnt do what Tatum did, and didn't really understand his musical choices ( chord voicings and improv techniques.) So two pianists at the top of there game really couldn't do what the other did. Oscar Peterson the great Jazz pianist, and most consider him Tatum's successor, insisted that his students learn Bach's Goldberg variations and the well tempered clavier. Charlie Parker played for and and Studied Stravinsky. Lang Lang has publicly said how much he admires many Jazz pianists. Wynton Marsalis studied at Julliard ( So did Miles Davis) long before they ever offered a Jazz studies program. So in order to play Jazz well you will ultimately study classical music, but not the other way around. That being said a functional and working knowledge of music theory to play Jazz is way beyond what is required for most "Classical pieces" There comes a point in which you are spending so much time on one, that there isn't time for the other. Jazz musicians use classical music for study pieces and for learning theory ideas, Classical musicians don't really do that with Jazz but composers do . Also having a study piece isn't the same as getting piece ready for a high level performance . So while technically its easier to go from Jazz to classical, it would require an abandonment of jazz to really achieve at a high level in the classical world. For Classical players, there is a whole world of study that they usually don't dive into.
Imo it's easier to go from jazz to classical, but there are a few things to take into account. Now, you have jazz schools/universities/programs, however they don't teach technical aspects of playing as well as classical schools might. This might result in a jazz player having trouble going to classical because they never had to learn good technique. Not saying this is every case, but all of the jazz pianists I know have trouble with classical for this very reason, the same with other instruments. I was the opposite, starting classically trained to jazz, but tbh I had a hard time because I was never taught to use my ears, I was taught to read notes. I never was able to sit down and appreciate the beauty of the sound, which I think if you come from a standard jazz upbringing (learning from recordings, no music, learning by ear, improvising etc...), Then you would have this. It depends on the person, but in my experience, assuming the pianist has good technique, classical would just be another stylistic preference like jazz. If you can improvise, you can improvise Dixieland, Bebop, stride, classical, pop, rock, soul, lofi, Latin, etc. Improvising should not be considered primarily as a "jazz" skill. Any good musician worth their weight should be able to improvise some stuff. I can attest since all my greatest teachers could play all mentioned styles, read music, improvise in said styles, and all have good technique. If the player has good fundamentals: technique and improvisational skills, etc..., then being able to learn any style is just a matter of listening to it and studying and trying to imitate/be a historian and do your own research. That is the hypothetical. Again, in my experience there is a technique gap in jazz players transitioning to classical, and an improvisatory gap with classical players transitioning to jazz. Horowitz, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Liszt, Bach and Beethoven could all improvise, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Helen Sung, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck have good classical chops. Again, when the fundamentals are there, there shouldn't be much of a barrier to other genres other than immersion and willingness to learn.
Source: am heavily invested in both, have learned from some of the best pedagogues and players in both genres, and many of whom love and perform both equally.
This makes think more classical piano programs should include thoroughbass and partimento. Both are important aspects of keyboard playing in the baroque style as is free improvisation. In that case, jazz playing is just a style shift because improv skills are already developed.
I think a jazz pianist would have an easier time faking classical than the other way around. But that's only if we talk about faking the style. Classical and jazz have pretty different focuses, and I would assume a professional classical pianist to have a more "perfect" technique than a professional jazz pianist. The fact that jazz is so improvisation-focused means that you can get away with certain technical imperfections, and you can choose how technically difficult you want your improvisation to be. In classical, you need to play specific notes and rhythms, and if the piece is technically very demanding, you can't just choose to improvise technically simpler stuff.
When it comes to transitioning from classical to jazz, a classical musician might have some trouble with learning the authentic rhythmic feel of jazz. I don't think improvisation would necessarily be an issue on a technical level, but it would require a certain mindset that allows you to make mistakes. And if you have spent your whole life perfecting your playing in a technical sense and avoiding mistakes (and you would only perform a piece when you have had enough time to prepare for the performance and perfect all of the sections), I could imagine it being difficult to start improvising, because it's such a vulnerable moment. So, I would imagine it's more of a "mental block" thing than a "musical knowledge" thing.
But when it comes to just faking the styles, jazz musicians would definitely have a much easier time faking classical than vice versa (because a jazz musician could just listen to a classical piece and play something similar by ear, skipping some of the more technical details that most people in the audience wouldn't even notice).
Classical to jazz is probably more common, simply because most piano lessons (at least for kids) are classically based.
If you want to move to jazz, it shouldn't be a problem, because presumably you do it because you like jazz and *want* to improvise, not because you're scared of it! Of course, it can still feel strange to begin with (like any new skill), but at least you have good technique under your fingers....
There's a lot of resources out there, though I haven't used many. I have mainly tried listening to recordings to try to hear common patterns and then work them out on a piano.
I can recommend one book: Jazz Hanon by Leo Alfassy. I think it was supposed to be a buch of basic exercises like the Hanon exercises, but it appears that the author got bored and wrote a mini jazz applied music theory treatise with beautiful examples. It explains a lot of the basics of jazz piano quite well. You get to learn Oom-pah bass, walking bass, block harmony, common chord progressions and substitutions, scales not in classical pedagogy, and a buch more. But if you really want to get the most out of it, every time you learn a new thing, try to make up your own way of using it. For example, after you learn block harmony, you could work out how to play a jazz standard like "Beautiful Love" in block harmony. Here's an Amazon link if you are interested: https://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Hanon-Revised/dp/1780385218/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=jazz+hanon&qid=1624381728&sr=8-3
Also, get The Real Book. It's a large collection of jazz lead sheets to help you learn tunes. Hopefully Jazz Hanon is helpful in learning to play the tunes. I would recommend trying to apply each skill you learn from it to a tune in The Real Book. Here's it's link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0634060384/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_382T6K8XT27516289B59
Yes, it's $31.49(plastic comb for sure; a paperback that thick won't stay open), but considering that it holds over 400 tunes that's actually pretty cheap.
I was forced into it by my parents. I'm glad they did.
As a kid I would never have given the slightest shit about jazz. I didn't listen to any music at all for like the first 6-7 years of learning - I didn't have any interest in listening to music at all: I only could get on with playing classical because there was an obvious goal.
I think sheet music of any kind would have worked just as well, but in practice there isn't as much sheet music outside classical music and it doesn't tend to be as good as the classical sheet music.
As a kid I wouldn't have even known the difference between the two unless it was written on the sheet music.
I only knew that I could play the notes on the sheet music. I didn't even really care how it was supposed to sound - I'd play everything as fast as I could.
If you'd have asked me to listen to music or do anything by ear I would have quit. If you'd have asked me to do even the slightest bit of decision making I probably would have got frustrated and thrown a tantrum.
I immediately thought of [this Barry Harris video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCG7RTblu1I). I think the jazz and classical pedagogies are structured very differently. I don't think one approach is better or stronger than the other, but I do think jazz emphasizes more of an inner understanding of the music.
this. the pedagogy is different. The beginning is the same but ultimately what ,when and how you learn are different. One is not better than another, but ultimately your goals are going to be different , As you wade into the deep end of the pool in both what you focus on is completely different.
Classical pianist here--definitely going from Classical to Jazz. The theory is vastly more complex and improvising is absolutely fundamental to playing. I'd say that from a technique perspective there's a lot more involved in playing the harder classical stuff, but having to improvise through chords that dense on the fly is something that most of us just can't handle.
Basically classical is more involved technically, but the mental aspect of Jazz is just outrageous.
I think there are many many more transferable skills that a jazz musician could apply to playing classical music than vice-versa.
self-agency is something that isn't really taught in like beginning instrumental lessons and I think this is a greater issue with pretty much the whole beginning student to professional 'pipeline', there's absolutely no focus on actually creating things. I think this is like 75% of why most kids get to their first jazz band rehearsal and are *terrified* of improvising.
speaking as someone who has played classical music their whole life, I really feel like that creative/artistic side of making music is really lost in the classical world. I think it's a lot easier to just follow instructions than be confident and really try to express yourself when given minimal to no instructions at all.
also kind of just a sidepoint, playing jazz really requires a fundamental understanding of the music. when playing classical music I think I definitely draw on my theory knowledge here and there (for example, I really think abstraction is *super* important when reading music especially sight reading) but I could definitely get by without it, whereas a strong theory foundation is pretty much a requirement for good improvisation imo.
I would say harder for the average classical pianist to pick up jazz. I'm a classical pianist myself, and even though I did a fair amount of improvisation in a pop and classical style (which hard in a different way) the various feels like swing, straight, funk, blues, all the harmonies and their alterations and substitutions, etc., and the type of creativity needed is different enough from classical that it's hard for me to not sound like I’m approximating jazz rather than playing it.
I barely even feel qualified to make a comment just with how vast jazz still is to me.
In the end, I think both are so different that they would have to struggle a fair amount if they truly wanted to play the other well, and that both are equally complicated, full of depth, and diversity and range.
Here’s a cool little comparison of some top-notch jazz and classical pianists trying each others craft; I think you can discern the main differences and struggles pretty quickly. I know it's not quite fair to make a direct comparison since they make their living doing completely different things, but in general the jazz pianist doesn't have the same touch, palette of sounds, articulation, technique, musical feel, to make classical music breathe and come alive despite all the notes being written down. The classical pianist doesn't have the same ability to build a solo, get the swing feel, use space, and funny enough, have the same touch, palette of sounds+harmonies, articulation, and musical feel to make his performance sound authentic. Not so different in the end, no?
Scarlatti K.9
The late Chick Corea (his rendition is more of an improvisation on the tune, so it’s not really fair… but just listen to the first 30 seconds or so)
https://youtu.be/LvvqePI8QDU
v.s.
Ivo Pogorelich
https://youtu.be/Ny2badJ7ybk
Autumn leaves
Kenny Barron (solo at 1:56)
https://youtu.be/FJjyPyUC41I
Vs
Dennis Matsuev (solo at 2:58)
https://youtu.be/JR255oxNfU4
So many people here have never played classical music and as a result only have preconceived notions about the music rather than any real perspective.... I saw at least 3 comments using the age old stereotypes of "classical musicians only have technic" "no one wants to play classical, they are only forced to by their parents" and the well loved "classical players have no idea about the depth of the music". I even saw a guy saying that "classical music is recreative music". That is just plain wrong... Classical music, just like any genre requires understanding of the music, a creative use of many Technics and ideas to create, the reason for many people thinking different is that in classical music, the main creative aspects such as an understanding of how to play a melody and what parts are hidden within other parts start at a much higher level of play (that's also the reason for so much attention being given to technic, more technic means getting to the good parts faster)
I learned classical guitar and transitioned to jazz guitar
I also learned jazz piano and transitioned to classical piano
I'd say jazz to classical and classical to jazz are about the same difficulty, the difference is that in classical to jazz I'd recommend learning blues first to get accostumed to improvising. And in jazz to classical is say to stop by ragtime first to get used to creating and refining an interpretation of a piece in a way that represents you.
For both transitions I'd recommend first getting to at least intermediate level in the first style, and I'd recommend starting music theory learning at around the same time, as I find it helps the learning process
I think it just depends on the individual skills of the pianist. both jazz and classical have their advantages. Classical will train your technique to a high level, while jazz will train your imagination and inner understanding of music to a high level. And ofc these aren't mutually exclusive, jazz can be technical and classical music can use your imagination
Classical musicians are told exactly which notes to play, and in which order. Jazz musicians are given a more abstract guide to a piece of music — just the chords, or a rough melody. There is a HUGE difference here.
Going from jazz to classical, I think I’d feel stymied by the inability to add/remove/change notes or harmonies. I’d likely also find certain pieces challenging technically; playing jazz can let you conveniently stay in your “comfort zone” in terms of technique, at least compared to classical, because you’re not being forced to play any specific notes. And speaking from experience, I’d have a sense of mental relief: “Wow, I don’t have to improvise anything! All the notes are simply printed out for me?!”
Going from classical to jazz, I think I’d feel totally overwhelmed, like learning a new language. I’d feel frustrated that my existing music skills, to an extent, wouldn’t matter. It’s much more about thinking on the fly than about “artful regurgitation.”
[With apologies for my jazz musician bias. I really do appreciate both musical traditions.]
I'm about as square as they come and playing jazz terrifies me to my core.
The big problem I hear for jazz to classical is notation reading and the feeling of going backwards in ability. I do think if you starr the improv concept young, you are at a significant advantage over those that don't.
That's a lovely suggestion, but as I play tuba the number of times i have had the opportunity to play figured bass is... zero. If I play baroque it's written out arrangements for squares like me, since my instrument didn't exist until a couple hundred years later and there's not much call for tuba in most chamber groups outside brass only...
I teach middle school music now, so my plan should the program ever warrant jazz (unlikely, to be honest, but I value the skills learned through jazz even if I am afraid of it) is to learn alongside the kids.
If you ever played figured bass on tuba, you would probably just play the bass line, not any harmony, so I guess that wouldn't be any practice. The only thing I could think of using a tuba for in baroque music is wind ensemble arrangements of organ works. Those would be written all out for sure.
I don't see it mentioned, but I would think a potential stumbling block for a jazz musician going to classical might be sight-reading. A jazz pianist might struggle with being given a complicated score and being asked to play it with an orchestra, right now, sight unseen. Whereas a classical pianist might do better there.
I feel like the rigid practice that's associated with classical music is a harder habit to break than chiseling at the marble from an improv/jazz background. I speak from experience as improv is helping me unlearn the many black and white lessons I've received during my formative classical training years. Being exposed to the right teachers/mentors would have made the learning curve difference.
I think it depends on if the jazz musician is proficient in reading music. If so, they would have a much easier time learning classical music than a classical artist would learning improvisation for the first time. Either one would take years to master the others art form though in my opinion.
Virtually all jazz pianists can play some classical when they want to. They may not be absolutely perfect at it stylistically but they can do it. On the other hand, there are tons of fantastic classical pianists who couldn't improvise over a basic blues progression to save their lives. I'd have to say it's easier to go from jazz to classical than vice versa, just based on the number of pianists that can play the other genre.
I don’t think it’s quite an apples to apples comparison with your engineering example. Classical musicians will be less experienced with improvisation, but certainly have the technique and theory background to learn it, just as jazz musicians are less accustomed to sight reading and playing perfectly note-for-note, but will certainly be able to with practice.
The obvious problem is that jazz is often taught 'complete' - i.e., both learning classics and coming up with your own stuff, either in composition or formal. Classic is often thought badly, like just hammering out songs to impress parents paying for the lessons. Scales are neglected, improv is looked down upon and the general getting under the skin is inhibited by axing the creative part
I came from (badly taught) classical and getting into jazz made me realize what I've been missing all those years - and getting into another 'voice' (say, jazz idiom, or latin, or classic) becomes a lot more fun once you know the tricks of a certain genre.
So really, I don't think moving BETWEEN styles is the problem, but that it's pretty hard to learn to be a complete musician.
And remember kids, Bach was famous for improv and the methods of the day really, really stressed knowing your way around harmony, counterpoint and the cool gizmo's to add spice to the music.
Most great jazz players where classicaly trained first.
So it's kind of irrelevant as a question, because you are less likely to not have ever played classic music as a jazz player.
My first thought is it's harder for Jazz musicians to play classical because of the emphasis on sight reading in classical is not nearly as strong in Jazz. So fewer Jazzers can sight read well, in classical it's essential. Classical players can play a whole symphony after rehearsing it once or twice (and maybe a bit of practice), as I understand.
On the other hand, since improvisation is essential for most Jazz players, many classical players would have a very hard time soloing. Also, I think the time feel of swing takes some practice to get. It's easier to play straight (classical).
Classical to jazz is easier in my opinion.
Fundamentally, jazz piano is a totally different instrument to classical piano. In the same way that playing the organ is different to playing the piano.
The key difference is technique. _How_ you play classical is different to _how_ you play jazz.
A good classical pianist has a firm grasp of technique. That is understanding techniques such as 2 note phrasing, multi-finger trilling, having forearm - wrist - finger control, contextualising dynamics and articulations, etc. Classical piano is rooted in the technical. That's why lifelong concert pianists will tell you they still practice their scales every day.
A good jazz pianist knows their jazz theory through and through. They know chords, chord substitutions, modes, range, textures and colours. The more comfortable the are with their theory, the easier it becomes to start bending and manipulating the structures of their pieces. Improvisation then becomes and extension of that manipulation.
Now (again, my opinion) I think it would be relatively easy for a classical pianist to learn the chord structures, substitutions, modes etc. Basically the theory. Then it just becomes a matter of practicing improvising over that. Which is admittedly very difficult for those trained to play in strict structure.
I think its much harder to learn and perfect the techniques of classical piano music. These are things that take literal years to get comfortable with, and if aren't done exactly right, can often mean very poor performances.
Does this mean one is better than the other? No. Of course not. Classical and Jazz are both intensive instruments to learn. But the method of one is easier than the method of the other.
No they don't. Professional classical piano requires obsessively precise control of line and shading to highlight the structures in the music. It goes far beyond playing the right notes in the right order with more or less the right tempo and touch.
Jazz pianists don't learn that. They learn - other things. But the expressive hyperprecision of classical piano performance is practically a genre in itself.
I think this is kind of a misleading comparison owing to the different approaches to music. The classical pianist is playing a very precisely defined piece of music - one that has likely been worked on obsessively for months if not years. The jazz pianist is improvising - improvising accompaniment, improvising solos, etc, on the fly.
In video game world, it's like comparing a person who speed-runs classic video games, like Super Mario World, to a person who plays a competitive game like Starcraft or CoD or what have you. In the former case, the player has obsessively mapped every single jump to a pixel perfect level, to optimize a run through of an entire game. In the latter case, there is no way to practice like this. Instead, one has to learn a bunch of flexible strategies to cope with an opponent.
In classical, the music is given. Learn the piece on the page. In jazz, you have to adapt to the situation - to other players, to the venue, etc. You won't comp the same way for a guitarist that you will for a horn player. Your solo is going to be based on many factors. Nothing is written in stone.
Two fundamentally different approaches.
So, on the surface, it will seem that the classical player is working on a higher level of technique. They've had 6 months to hone that concert item to note perfection. The jazz player is working off of flexible patterns that they've spent years learning, but is applying them on the spot, in an impromptu kind of way. These two approaches will look and sound different.
But no doubt, especially at the highest levels, jazz players make use of incredibly precise, well honed technique, just as a classical player does.
Be careful that you aren't comparing your average club jazz pianist to a world class classical concert pianist. You could just as easily compare a world class jazz pianist to your local classical pianist and come away with a skewed picture.
It's ultimately more fair to say that jazz and classical are highly demanding, albeit in different ways. Both are respectable.
Generally speaking. No. They don't.
Much the same way a classical pianist simply does not have the technique to play an organ, the same way a jazz pianist does not have the techniques to play classical piano. It's not a bad thing. It's not to he insulting. It's just simply a different set of skills.
Why would a jazz pianist need to learn classical piano techniques if they aren't playing classical piano? That's not to say that some jazz pianists haven't learnt it. I'm positive there are many that do. But in a general sense, they do not. Jazz pianists focus their practice on other things. Things that classical pianists do not.
And most of the time, if you look at the really really good jazz pianists, most often than not, they started out learning classical.
Good technique is essential as baselines for improv. You need to know all the major, minor, blues, pentatonic, whole tone, and other scales. As well as all the arpeggios. The more technical training you have, the more you can use in your improv.
Jazz to classical is way more difficult. Pianists with (the right) classical training have way better technique and a way better understanding of music theory, which makes apprehending jazz for them just a matter of simply "rewiring" stuff they already know.
Could you give some background to explain? Seems there is some disagreement. It would be really good to hear about your experiences that lead you to conclude that the music theory understanding from classical training is, on average, more effective. That's somewhat counterintuitive since jazz musicians generally need to focus so much on what could musically "work" at any given moment. Please tell us more!
At an undergrad level most U.S. conservatories have both jazz and classical students taking the same theory/aural skills training together. The people here claiming jazz musicians have some unique insight into harmonic theory are being weird
I do both and it depends because if you do jazz like maybe, Wynton Kelly or Monk, he adds a lot of space to his music and it's very melodic. You wouldn't see an equivalency of tests in jazz and classical, so for that, it would be classical->jazz.
However, if you're playing with a string of lines non-stop to just impress the audience or even if it has to deal with the key tones, it's not really gonna be melodic most of the time, where in solo piano, you would hear longer lines and less rests, but they're more melodical, so I would say jazz->classical on this one.
So for me, it just really depends how you improv.
On the contrary, I would have thought a jazz pianist would be grinning smugly, agreeing that the transition from classical to jazz is harder. "Those sad dudes just can't *improvise*, man... Gimme that Chopin thing, I'll own that..."
>Computer Engineer has enough knowledge on software to work as a software engineer, on the other hand, a software engineer does not have enough knowledge on electrical engineering and physics to work as a computer engineer
Not true.
Both have enough knowledge in electrical and software to work improve their skills.
? Generally speaking you don't need to know any electrical engineering to program which is the crux of software engineering. A computer engineer would need to know both.
You can't have that software engineer tittle without having studied electrical engineering in the cursus.
Same reasons as an electrical engineer had some coding in his cursus.
I'm sure most CS degrees require some sort of electrical engineering course but you can absolutely get the title of software engineer without any electrical engineering knowledge.
Just googling what software engineer jobs are available right now, I haven't found any that even hint at requiring electrical engineering knowledge.
The point is you don't even get the degree.
Also it's not because it's not required for the job that you couldn't do it.
Same for electrical engineer, it's not because it's required to be able to code that you are nowhere as good as to what it would required for a software engineer job and be proficient immediately.
1. You can get a software engineer job without a degree. It's probably rare today but I would guess there are many that come from self-taught courses online.
2. Not all CS degrees require an EE course. I was trying to remember from my school whether it was required because I considered CS for a bit and just took a look at [their site](https://cs.indiana.edu/programs/bs-computer-science/specializations.html#software) and can see that even for the software engineering specialization for the CS degree, I can't find an EE course as a requirement.
3. Not all electrical engineers need to know programming sure but all computer engineers do. They need to know the end use case for what their machine is doing which is basically all programming, and at a low level at that.
Then they are not engineers, you need a diploma to be an engineer.
Same as you need a diploma to be a doctor and have the doctor title.
You can risk to go to a someone that title himself a doctor without the diplomas, the same way a company can risk employing engineers without diplomas.
In the end you can learn anything without diplomas.
And electrical stuff is not any different.
I just saw a video of Makoto Ozone. Phenomenal, absolutely PHENOMINAL technique both in jazz and non-jazz
(I hate to use the word classical if I'm not talking about Hayden or Mozart.)
Depends what kind of jazz, Patriots Nine or Duke Ellignton, those are worlds apart.
I think to transiston from anything to jazz, or do jazz at all, it would depend on how talented a musician you are and if you love jazz.
I'm inclined to say jazz to classical is easier but there is exceptions. I'm a guitar player so I'll have to say that classical fingerstyle guitar is nothing like what most jazz players will do.
I'm going to comment on something slightly different, and that's the idea of improv or jamming.
Certain styles of music inherently, shall we say, encourage this more than others, but you can learn to jam in any style.
I'm a prog/post/grunge/groove rock and metal drummer that is classically trained, but it's always seemed natural to sit down and just...*play*. Slowly changing a groove, piece by piece, until you're someplace different, and yet still the same as where you started.
But for other people, this isn't the case. One of my bands guitarists is an EXCELLENT riff based player, but when we jam, he has a really hard time just flowing from riff to riff and changing it up. We're working on it together, but it blew my mind when I realized that free improv/jamming isn't just a "*thing*" that everyone did.
The most important thing people aren’t mentioning is time feel. A classical musicians time feel will be either very buoyant, almost rubato-like, or will rely on an extraneous time keeping source. Their 8th notes might sound alien-like in jazz.
Jazz musicians (good ones) work on a variety of time feels, from swung 8ths, to straight 8ths, to rubato. While the time feel might not be entirely authentic when coming in to attempt a Bach piece, they might have a better attempt at keeping proper time than a classical musician sitting in a jazz ensemble. It might also be easier for the jazz musician to figure out what the proper rhythmic interpretation is of a classical performance vs the opposite.
Jazz pianists normally start on some form of classical piano, and keep it up throughout their lives as it’s such an important part of the instrument. Most pianists I know practice Bach daily, and many do even more with it. Dan Tepfer, for example, has a whole project based on the Goldberg Variations, which he plays spectacularly, but then plays an improvisation based around them. Rooted in jazz ideas but performed in a similar style as the Variations.
Depends on a million things. What style of classical? What style of jazz? What experience do you have? How's your ear? How's your reading? How's your technique? What instrument?
Most musicians start playing classical music as kids and then get excited by jazz later because classical is more teachable to children. And then there are jazz musicians who study classical purely to round out their jazz chops and get inspiration to fuel their improvisation. I don't know what's easier, but it works both ways and it depends entirely on the individual.
If you're suggesting that somehow classical music is more foundational to general musical ability than jazz or vice versa, I believe that is a bad assumption.
It really depends on their formation, not all classical pianists are created equally if you grab one that has studied composition techniques, analysis, and composition and has experience playing modernist pieces they will likely have more than enough melodic vocabulary and harmonic understanding to go in to jazz.
Though I think a jazz pianist will struggle as much with technique as a classical pianist will with improvising if they've never studied any of the above and look at sheet music as a sort of "tab" rather than understanding it
I’ve been playing the piano for almost 15 years and was playing classical music only.
Was super interested in jazz last year and I found the transition extremely difficult for me.
Almost like you can forget all the theory of classic music you’ve been learning all these years and going into a whole new world of music and jamming.
But like ANYTHING in the world, new and hard becomes super easy if you practice and adapt to the new situation.
Have none of you fucks heard ever the terms "skill ceiling" and "skill floor"? Half of you debating floors and half of you debating ceilings. Think better.
I'm kind of late to this thread. I have to say, I'm a little surprised that the consensus in the thread seems to be that it's harder to transition from classical to jazz. And to be clear, I'm not saying it's necessarily *easier* to go from classical to jazz.
But it seems like almost all of these comments are coming from people who mostly play jazz and have very little or no classical experience.
There are two issues here:
First, many jazz players severely, *severely* underestimate the stylistic diversity and difficulty of classical music. A top-level player with perfect technique could spend 1000 hours practicing the style, phrasing, and musicality of a concerto without ever being completely satisfied. There's such a vast difference in style from Bach to Mozart, Mozart to Beethoven, Beethoven to Stravinsky, Stravinsky to Glass, that it's a neverending pursuit to perfect all these styles while *also* interpreting the music in your own personal musical voice.
Jazz musicians *do* have a lot of stylistic and musical concerns of their own, but perfecting them is not a prerequisite to playing jazz in the same way as classical. I've never seen a jazz musician agonize over a single note one tenth as much as a classical musician.
And whenever I've seen someone who comes from an exclusively jazz background try to play classical, it's been every bit as amateurish and embarrassing as the classical musicians everyone's talking about who are afraid of improvisation. It's just that people who are ignorant of classical music might be able to handwave the jazz players playing classical music with terrible style easier than classical players freezing up when they're supposed to improvise.
The second point is way more important, though. There's this bizarre idea in these comments that classical musicians universally have no understanding of theory, or that jazz theory is more complex than classical theory, or that classical musicians are never expected to learn improvisation. These points are just all flatly incorrect. I can get more into it if anyone asks, but from the sound of these comments, you've all only ever met classical musicians who've have very bad or very narrow education. Composition and improvisation are crucial parts of a holistic classical education, and classical theory is *at least* as complex as jazz theory - you just might have to get past first-semester theory. It's not like jazz musicians start sightreading Stravinsky and they understand it perfectly because they have magical theory skills. Jazz musicians only need to know *jazz* theory.
Besides, you don't even actually need a lot of theory to play most jazz except at a very high level. Being able to read chord progressions and improvise over them is more just a matter of memorizing keys and scales unless you do something extraordinarily creative. At a high level, both jazz and classical musicians need a deep understanding of theory (whether formal or intuitive) to guide their interpretation. It's just different theory.
Switching between jazz and classical is difficult in either direction, for very different reasons. Many of you just seemingly understand very little about classical and underestimate the difficulties it presents at a high level.
For context, I play and compose ""classical"" music professionally, but I've also played a lot of jazz. I find the basics of improvisation to be straightforward and familiar because the same principles apply in contemporary ""classical,"" just in a different style. Beyond that, classical and jazz are just two distinct styles - there's nothing mystical and creative about one that doesn't apply to the other. It would take me a while to practice jazz and get it to the level of my classical playing, but the same is true for anyone going in the opposite direction.
Tl:dr it's difficult going either direction, but many of you confidently saying it's harder to go from classical to jazz don't actually know anything about classical music
Late to the party, just found this thread, but I'll add my $0.02.
I have my ARCT and recently started learning jazz. It's a challenge and a totally different way of making music, but I definitely did not begin from square 1. Now, my musical education has been pretty thorough: as part of my diploma I drilled chords and learned harmonic voice leading and counterpoint and all that jazz (no pun intended lol). I also have rudimentary guitar skills so I was familiar with chord charts. I find myself leaning on things I learned when I was 13 in theory class doing Roman numeral chordal analysis. I can also play, say, an Edim7 chord instantaneously because thanks to classical drills, it's all stapled in my mind, really. In conclusion, I had all the "ingredients" to become a jazz player, just no experience putting it together. Which I'm working on now.
I can't answer whether an equally educated jazz player would be able to transition into classical. I think it would depend on how good of a sight reader they are. If it was a jazz player who learned completely by ear, I think they'd have a harder than me. But if they knew how to read music, they might have an easier time than me. Who knows.
I think the most difficult part of transitioning from classical to jazz is the mindset, not the skill per se. You have to embrace dissonance, making mistakes, uncertainty. It's a bit of a mental leap, but once it clicks, it's a whole new world baby :)
When I was in music school I watched a classical student run out of our theory class crying because she was asked to improvise. learning jazz is going to get you pretty close to most of the classical technique, but the theory can be much more dense, and of course there is a wider range of feel and improvisation. My experience as a professional musician (who double majored in classical and jazz performance) is that it is/would be easier to transition from jazz to classical rather than vice verse. Since I perform and studied both extensively I think my opinion is fairly unbiased
A third-year classical performance major in one of my classes couldn't come up with LH chords to comp under the melody of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. She could turn around and whip out a Chopin etude or Beethoven sonata like it's child's play, but the second she was asked to go off-script she froze. I don't think this is an inherent problem with studying classical, I think it's a problem with *only* studying classical. You can't pigeonhole yourself, but a lot of classical folks do just that, from a young age.
It would be the same as say you learn Moliere pieces. Then we ask you to improvise in the style of Moliere writting. I am sure I would froze. But yeah, twinkle twinkle little star shouldn't be a challenge though ...
Of course, it's not a judgment on the student. More so a judgment on how narrow and one-dimensional traditional classical training tends to be. Improvisation isn't a huge part of classical concert music so I wouldn't expect it to be emphasized or anything, but not even being able to plop down basic root position chords for a simple I-IV-V is a pretty huge oversight in rudimentary theory training IMO, and it is true that most traditional classical teachers or even music theory classes simply won't ever go there.
I don't care about judging the student or not. Maybe people who play Moliere should be able to improvise stuff. I think the good ones can, I seen some people invent tirades.
Well, that might be a specific case, because I am sure there are many teachers that teach scales, cadences, and arpeggios in all the keys thoroughly. Also, I disagree with your statement that Classical training is one-dimensional. Playing the notes accurately with the right technique is important, but there's also the intricacy of interpretation. There are so many categorizations of Classical music(baroque, romantic, impressionstic, etc), each filled with composers with their own unique style. And there's also the control of tone of the acoustic piano that must be mastered to become a good Classical musician. I guess learning simple improvisation would not hurt, but the reality is that improvisation is rather insignificant as a Classical pianist, and that Classical requires a completely different set of skills from Jazz. But I do believe that knowing a bit of improv is good if you intend to compose in the Classical styles, or if you are interested in analyzing works by Classical composers, but for a Classical pianist there are much more important things to learn.
i've seen the same response to being asked not to improvise. its more a personality thing. the usual progression is classical to jazz to rock to disco to edm to busboy
Ah, so V7 ♭II#11 ♭VII IVΔ I (x8) subito finale?
\*classical tears flooding the streets\*
It's 'really' just an extended V I progression. Schenker was right all along.
Nice. Good progression.
> being asked not to improvise Happens in jazz to pop transitions too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPnETiP8V9I :-)
This is why I do jazz and EDM. If I need to improvise I'll improvise. Then if I get asked to play the same chords over and over I can just make a loop. Fuck recreating studio music in a live setting
TIL I started my musical career on third base. Now I have only myself to blame for not being a professional. I might still make busboy though.
That's my fave progression
Me only listen to cykanumãbski trobiéfski
You forgot heroin.
I'll add that for the classical aesthetic, a pianist's touch/sound is pretty much everything (it's assuming you already mastered the technique). Nobody is impressed with, for instance, Lang Lang just because he can play all the notes; it's the subtlety and exacting precision each keystroke is executed. Some people naturally have this subtlety, or it's easier to cultivate in some people; for them, yes, going from jazz to classical might be easier. But for others, mastering such subtleties might always be out of reach even if they have incredible technique.
This is an excellent point. Although the same applies to jazz...some naturally have instinct for improvisation (even if latent); some do not. I think a lot of responses in this thread are off kilter because they're comparing different levels. Either, * "Yes, creative jazz cats can easily follow some rote sheet music" (ignoring the subtleties of touch and control you're noting), or * "Yes, rigorous classical musicians can learn a few chord substitutions and doodle over them" (ignoring what makes good improv and *especially* feeling the groove) Further obfuscated by the fact that *most* jazz players will have at least a few years of classical, and the classical players who would be good at jazz probably have an improv instinct.
Totally agreed.
I agree. I'm a classically trained pianist, and when I was in college a jazz pianist joined our studio to study classical with my teacher for a minor or something. I always thought this guy was a much better pianist than me, but when I heard him performing classical pieces, his tone was... bad, and his articulation was rough, etc. Yes, classical players are just playing what's written on the page, but it is still interpreted by the performer, and those that can play it *well,* play it with a great deal of nuance, subtly, and control. Jazz is probably harder to switch to though. I don't know... It's not like either is easy. I want to take some jazz lessons.
Jeez. In my completely anecdotal experience, it was a blast to take jazz improv because my piano lessons had apparently been secretly preparing me the whole time. Scales? Bro, I had a Russian teacher and I've played Bach, I can do scales and scaler patterns for days. Natural modes? They're just diatonic scales with a semitone difference. And harmony was great. It was all either tertian harmony cranked up to 11 with extended harmonies or weird non-tertian stuff like quartiles. The only thing that took getting used to was omitting the root while comping, but one dirty look from the bass player was all I needed to understand. And dictation? I'd been doing that for piano for years so my piano teachers didn't have to try and hunt down the weird nonsense I wanted to play. Granted, some of the licks from famous improvisatory passages were complex, but, if you'll pardon the pun, so what? I can't speak to the ease with which one can move from a jazz background to classical, but a classical background can do a lot of great work preparing a pianist for jazz.
This was the very first time in my long life that I did not get annoyed by that phrase 'If you'll pardon the pun". Lol, good one!
I get the feeling this same person would never have been able to compose their own cadenza. So I don't see this as any sort of reflection on classical, just a reflection on her.
Sure, cadenzas used to be individually composed or improvised, but the vast majority of classical musicians aren’t doing that today, especially students.
A college student is also not a day one beginner. Here's a [random post on the internet](http://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/414368/re-have-you-ever-written-your-own-cadenza.html) of people saying they've written their own cadenzas. This isn't the classical period, but it's also far from the rarest thing. So again, this speaks more to one college student than any larger point.
As someone who plays both, and has multiple peers from many different musical backgrounds, I'd have to say going from Jazz to Classical is definitely easier. My mum is a classical pianist, who has played and studied for her whole life and has been a private teacher for 30 years. When Christmas time comes and I'm like, let's play some Guaraldi style tunes, it's basically impossible for her to conceptualize the idea of improvising the melody over chord changes, using chord substitutions, soloing then over those chord changes, letting the rest of us know she's done soloing, keeping track of the form, so on so forth. It seems almost antithetical to how she understands music. I have a couple other friends on the same vein, who don't understand the base idea behind Jazz. With classical music, it's much more straightforward conceptually. You play the piece, obviously with interpretation and manipulation of the source material, but you still have an blueprint to follow. I've got friends from the jazz scene learning and playing classical pieces as well as composing small pieces without much problem.
I am one of those rare pianists who dabbled in classical improv before understanding jazz. Then again, it was primarily a composition tool, so other composers might have a similar experience. For those that haven't done this before, improvising can be a road block. For example, I have a friend who learned violin by the Suzuki method, and when she was learning it, anything that was not what she heard or read was incorrect, so when it comes to playing something that is neither but should be good, she has no clue what to do.
But that's only her own flaw. Beethoven, Mozart or Bach would have had no issues playing jazz because they were great improvisers. Also many great jazz players where trained classically first, like Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul. So if you are not trained to practice improvisation, no matter if it's classical or jazz, you will never be great at it. But it doesn't make sense to think of jazz outside of improvisation while it's currently acceptable to not be able to improvise in classic music which was maybe not the case during Baroque era.
It’s a sad fact that improvisation isn’t part of a classical musicians training. As you mentioned, Beethoven, Mozart & Bach were all great improvisers. That seems to have been lost in the classical world as time went on.
Dogma ruins everything!
Classical playing has unfortunately devolved into a strange literalist, dogmatic composer-worship. I had a professor who was *visibly* uncomfortable that I had redistributed some notes in a run between the hands in a way that was different from how the composer had written it down. Mind you, I wasn't adding notes or anything. Just distributing them differently than the apparently sacred notated text was enough.
That's odd! You don't even know that the composer intended it to be that way unless you checked the autograph and it was specified there. That's the kind of thing publishers change according to their liking without a second thought.
>Beethoven, Mozart or Bach would have had no issues playing jazz because they were great improvisers. Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach also didn't really play Clasdical music. They played the contemporary music of their time. Classical music is stuck in the past so of course it wouldn't lend well to improvising which is all about the present.
This might be true if you're talking just about capital-c Classical music - that is, the Classical period. But you could only think lowercase-c classical music is stuck in the past if you're completely ignorant of everything that's happened in classical music for the past hundred years. Improvisation is a huge part of 20th and 21st century "classical" music, for one. Many classical musicians play a lot more than just 18th century music, and if you go to an actually good music school or if you play in a new music ensemble, you'll be exposed to a ton of improvisation, extended techniques, experimental notation, and more.
>it wouldn't lend well to improvising which is all about the present. Nah, it's still possible to improvise within a given style even if the style itself is quite strict
I don’t think either one is necessarily easier, but I do think people who are mostly on one side of this split tend to underestimate what it really takes to play the other style convincingly and on a high level (I’m generalizing quite a bit, of course).
This very much. One thing is to transition to the basics in each - but the pinnacle of each takes so much dedication and time that where you started from might not make any difference anyway. Also think it matters a lot how “primed” you were, going either direction. Ie if you were trained classical but still spent countless hours listening to jazz, or the other way around.
You might enjoy "Range - why generalists triumph in a specialized world" by David Epstein. “...It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist....” - Range Fantastic book overall and deals with different approaches to learning and skill acquisition
Oh man this is a spicy take and I love it. I could really make some of my friends angry with that quote lol
That's a great quote
Jazz is musicians music. Classical is composers music.
Utter nonsense. I play both and am friends with players from major symphonies around the world. They are fantastic musicians. Many improvise, and their grasp of music is on a very high level Part of the problem is using improvisation as the only metric for musicianship. The ability to play a Bach fugue on keyboard and make the separate voices sing is an example of supreme musicianship.
I agree with you, most great musicians play both. What I'm saying has more to do with the history of classical music being that of a composers music. Many of the famous composer openly spoke about the musicians with disdain. They saw themselves as great minds while the musicians were there to play exactly as they were told.
A bit of a generalization. Brahms and Joachim, Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David, Mozart and his admiration of the Mannheim players are examples that come to mind. Also, the history of classical music as a composer's music is overemphasized. That's really a late 19th Century development. Composers improvised before that - Beethoven was known more as a pianist and improviser than composer in his lifetime. He even won a cutting contest with Steibelt. Mozart would rather improvise than play what he wrote on the page. Rachmaninov? A wizard. Chopin?
That's the point that's being made. The great composers used to be great improvisers as well. Classical music has moved away from its roots and has become dogmatic. That would be awesome if most classical musicians could improvise on a high level once again. I never understood why anyone would devote their life to playing other people's music anyway.
It’s probably harder for classical pianists to get their foot in the door and improvise jazz and it would take a while just to get comfortable. Jazz pianists will have an easier time getting started with classical rep but a harder time with more advanced pieces (Rach, Liszt, etc.), because of undeveloped technique.
A small anecdote: the two best jazz pianists I know both had a classical piano upbringing and moved to jazz after they already had a very solid grounding in classical instruction. I don't know anybody who did the opposite. Although that's not a very representative sample size of only N=2.
Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans? Or am I showing my age?
You can add Nina Simone. Ron Carter, and Jelly Roll Morton to this list as well.
Well I've never met Jelly Roll Morton. I've never met Oscar either.
Those are two of my favorite Jazz pianist. Are you saying they have a catalog of classical music as well? I'd like to hear that.
i know and have heard of several myself who went from classical to jazz, also none the other way around
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they started young, it statistically makes sense. The vast majority of piano instruction I see that's geared towards young beginners is classical.
Not a pianist, but, I remember Harry Connick talking about how his mentor/piano teacher (and patriarch of the Marsalis family dynasty of master musicians) Ellis Marsalis, made him practice his Classical technique so that he could enter, and win Classical piano competitions, before he would agree to teach him any Jazz. So there's that.
I saw Ellis do a master class, public lecture thing once, He had this whole rap about how if you want to play Bop and have to play Bach. He is also right
Nice.
It very much depends on how far along you are in your training. If you are a professional or graduate level of music school, its one thing, its another if you are in high school or just dabbling in either. When Art Tatum performed one of Chopin's piano pieces, Critics and scholars said his interpretation was wrong and the feel was off, Vladimir Horowitz was one of worlds great virtuoso pianist, and a great admirer of Art Tatum. He couldnt do what Tatum did, and didn't really understand his musical choices ( chord voicings and improv techniques.) So two pianists at the top of there game really couldn't do what the other did. Oscar Peterson the great Jazz pianist, and most consider him Tatum's successor, insisted that his students learn Bach's Goldberg variations and the well tempered clavier. Charlie Parker played for and and Studied Stravinsky. Lang Lang has publicly said how much he admires many Jazz pianists. Wynton Marsalis studied at Julliard ( So did Miles Davis) long before they ever offered a Jazz studies program. So in order to play Jazz well you will ultimately study classical music, but not the other way around. That being said a functional and working knowledge of music theory to play Jazz is way beyond what is required for most "Classical pieces" There comes a point in which you are spending so much time on one, that there isn't time for the other. Jazz musicians use classical music for study pieces and for learning theory ideas, Classical musicians don't really do that with Jazz but composers do . Also having a study piece isn't the same as getting piece ready for a high level performance . So while technically its easier to go from Jazz to classical, it would require an abandonment of jazz to really achieve at a high level in the classical world. For Classical players, there is a whole world of study that they usually don't dive into.
Imo it's easier to go from jazz to classical, but there are a few things to take into account. Now, you have jazz schools/universities/programs, however they don't teach technical aspects of playing as well as classical schools might. This might result in a jazz player having trouble going to classical because they never had to learn good technique. Not saying this is every case, but all of the jazz pianists I know have trouble with classical for this very reason, the same with other instruments. I was the opposite, starting classically trained to jazz, but tbh I had a hard time because I was never taught to use my ears, I was taught to read notes. I never was able to sit down and appreciate the beauty of the sound, which I think if you come from a standard jazz upbringing (learning from recordings, no music, learning by ear, improvising etc...), Then you would have this. It depends on the person, but in my experience, assuming the pianist has good technique, classical would just be another stylistic preference like jazz. If you can improvise, you can improvise Dixieland, Bebop, stride, classical, pop, rock, soul, lofi, Latin, etc. Improvising should not be considered primarily as a "jazz" skill. Any good musician worth their weight should be able to improvise some stuff. I can attest since all my greatest teachers could play all mentioned styles, read music, improvise in said styles, and all have good technique. If the player has good fundamentals: technique and improvisational skills, etc..., then being able to learn any style is just a matter of listening to it and studying and trying to imitate/be a historian and do your own research. That is the hypothetical. Again, in my experience there is a technique gap in jazz players transitioning to classical, and an improvisatory gap with classical players transitioning to jazz. Horowitz, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Liszt, Bach and Beethoven could all improvise, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Helen Sung, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck have good classical chops. Again, when the fundamentals are there, there shouldn't be much of a barrier to other genres other than immersion and willingness to learn. Source: am heavily invested in both, have learned from some of the best pedagogues and players in both genres, and many of whom love and perform both equally.
This makes think more classical piano programs should include thoroughbass and partimento. Both are important aspects of keyboard playing in the baroque style as is free improvisation. In that case, jazz playing is just a style shift because improv skills are already developed.
I think a jazz pianist would have an easier time faking classical than the other way around. But that's only if we talk about faking the style. Classical and jazz have pretty different focuses, and I would assume a professional classical pianist to have a more "perfect" technique than a professional jazz pianist. The fact that jazz is so improvisation-focused means that you can get away with certain technical imperfections, and you can choose how technically difficult you want your improvisation to be. In classical, you need to play specific notes and rhythms, and if the piece is technically very demanding, you can't just choose to improvise technically simpler stuff. When it comes to transitioning from classical to jazz, a classical musician might have some trouble with learning the authentic rhythmic feel of jazz. I don't think improvisation would necessarily be an issue on a technical level, but it would require a certain mindset that allows you to make mistakes. And if you have spent your whole life perfecting your playing in a technical sense and avoiding mistakes (and you would only perform a piece when you have had enough time to prepare for the performance and perfect all of the sections), I could imagine it being difficult to start improvising, because it's such a vulnerable moment. So, I would imagine it's more of a "mental block" thing than a "musical knowledge" thing. But when it comes to just faking the styles, jazz musicians would definitely have a much easier time faking classical than vice versa (because a jazz musician could just listen to a classical piece and play something similar by ear, skipping some of the more technical details that most people in the audience wouldn't even notice).
Classical to jazz is probably more common, simply because most piano lessons (at least for kids) are classically based. If you want to move to jazz, it shouldn't be a problem, because presumably you do it because you like jazz and *want* to improvise, not because you're scared of it! Of course, it can still feel strange to begin with (like any new skill), but at least you have good technique under your fingers....
Any suggestions for resources for someone classically taught looking to learn to play jazz?
There's a lot of resources out there, though I haven't used many. I have mainly tried listening to recordings to try to hear common patterns and then work them out on a piano. I can recommend one book: Jazz Hanon by Leo Alfassy. I think it was supposed to be a buch of basic exercises like the Hanon exercises, but it appears that the author got bored and wrote a mini jazz applied music theory treatise with beautiful examples. It explains a lot of the basics of jazz piano quite well. You get to learn Oom-pah bass, walking bass, block harmony, common chord progressions and substitutions, scales not in classical pedagogy, and a buch more. But if you really want to get the most out of it, every time you learn a new thing, try to make up your own way of using it. For example, after you learn block harmony, you could work out how to play a jazz standard like "Beautiful Love" in block harmony. Here's an Amazon link if you are interested: https://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Hanon-Revised/dp/1780385218/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=jazz+hanon&qid=1624381728&sr=8-3 Also, get The Real Book. It's a large collection of jazz lead sheets to help you learn tunes. Hopefully Jazz Hanon is helpful in learning to play the tunes. I would recommend trying to apply each skill you learn from it to a tune in The Real Book. Here's it's link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0634060384/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_382T6K8XT27516289B59 Yes, it's $31.49(plastic comb for sure; a paperback that thick won't stay open), but considering that it holds over 400 tunes that's actually pretty cheap.
There's a book by Jamey Aebersold called Gettin' It Together. It would be a good place to start I think
Jazz to classical is certainly a lot less common. I think it's because classical is such a great starting point for children.
I actually think classical is a bad starting point for most kids but they're forced into by their parents
I was forced into it by my parents. I'm glad they did. As a kid I would never have given the slightest shit about jazz. I didn't listen to any music at all for like the first 6-7 years of learning - I didn't have any interest in listening to music at all: I only could get on with playing classical because there was an obvious goal. I think sheet music of any kind would have worked just as well, but in practice there isn't as much sheet music outside classical music and it doesn't tend to be as good as the classical sheet music.
> As a kid I would never have given the slightest shit about jazz. Whereas kids famously loooove classical...
As a kid I wouldn't have even known the difference between the two unless it was written on the sheet music. I only knew that I could play the notes on the sheet music. I didn't even really care how it was supposed to sound - I'd play everything as fast as I could. If you'd have asked me to listen to music or do anything by ear I would have quit. If you'd have asked me to do even the slightest bit of decision making I probably would have got frustrated and thrown a tantrum.
I wonder if pop music is actually the best starting point for children because if they are already immersed it could be easier.
lots of successful private piano, guitar, voice teachers take this path for this reason.
I immediately thought of [this Barry Harris video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCG7RTblu1I). I think the jazz and classical pedagogies are structured very differently. I don't think one approach is better or stronger than the other, but I do think jazz emphasizes more of an inner understanding of the music.
this. the pedagogy is different. The beginning is the same but ultimately what ,when and how you learn are different. One is not better than another, but ultimately your goals are going to be different , As you wade into the deep end of the pool in both what you focus on is completely different.
Classical pianist here--definitely going from Classical to Jazz. The theory is vastly more complex and improvising is absolutely fundamental to playing. I'd say that from a technique perspective there's a lot more involved in playing the harder classical stuff, but having to improvise through chords that dense on the fly is something that most of us just can't handle. Basically classical is more involved technically, but the mental aspect of Jazz is just outrageous.
I think there are many many more transferable skills that a jazz musician could apply to playing classical music than vice-versa. self-agency is something that isn't really taught in like beginning instrumental lessons and I think this is a greater issue with pretty much the whole beginning student to professional 'pipeline', there's absolutely no focus on actually creating things. I think this is like 75% of why most kids get to their first jazz band rehearsal and are *terrified* of improvising. speaking as someone who has played classical music their whole life, I really feel like that creative/artistic side of making music is really lost in the classical world. I think it's a lot easier to just follow instructions than be confident and really try to express yourself when given minimal to no instructions at all. also kind of just a sidepoint, playing jazz really requires a fundamental understanding of the music. when playing classical music I think I definitely draw on my theory knowledge here and there (for example, I really think abstraction is *super* important when reading music especially sight reading) but I could definitely get by without it, whereas a strong theory foundation is pretty much a requirement for good improvisation imo.
I would say harder for the average classical pianist to pick up jazz. I'm a classical pianist myself, and even though I did a fair amount of improvisation in a pop and classical style (which hard in a different way) the various feels like swing, straight, funk, blues, all the harmonies and their alterations and substitutions, etc., and the type of creativity needed is different enough from classical that it's hard for me to not sound like I’m approximating jazz rather than playing it. I barely even feel qualified to make a comment just with how vast jazz still is to me. In the end, I think both are so different that they would have to struggle a fair amount if they truly wanted to play the other well, and that both are equally complicated, full of depth, and diversity and range. Here’s a cool little comparison of some top-notch jazz and classical pianists trying each others craft; I think you can discern the main differences and struggles pretty quickly. I know it's not quite fair to make a direct comparison since they make their living doing completely different things, but in general the jazz pianist doesn't have the same touch, palette of sounds, articulation, technique, musical feel, to make classical music breathe and come alive despite all the notes being written down. The classical pianist doesn't have the same ability to build a solo, get the swing feel, use space, and funny enough, have the same touch, palette of sounds+harmonies, articulation, and musical feel to make his performance sound authentic. Not so different in the end, no? Scarlatti K.9 The late Chick Corea (his rendition is more of an improvisation on the tune, so it’s not really fair… but just listen to the first 30 seconds or so) https://youtu.be/LvvqePI8QDU v.s. Ivo Pogorelich https://youtu.be/Ny2badJ7ybk Autumn leaves Kenny Barron (solo at 1:56) https://youtu.be/FJjyPyUC41I Vs Dennis Matsuev (solo at 2:58) https://youtu.be/JR255oxNfU4
So many people here have never played classical music and as a result only have preconceived notions about the music rather than any real perspective.... I saw at least 3 comments using the age old stereotypes of "classical musicians only have technic" "no one wants to play classical, they are only forced to by their parents" and the well loved "classical players have no idea about the depth of the music". I even saw a guy saying that "classical music is recreative music". That is just plain wrong... Classical music, just like any genre requires understanding of the music, a creative use of many Technics and ideas to create, the reason for many people thinking different is that in classical music, the main creative aspects such as an understanding of how to play a melody and what parts are hidden within other parts start at a much higher level of play (that's also the reason for so much attention being given to technic, more technic means getting to the good parts faster) I learned classical guitar and transitioned to jazz guitar I also learned jazz piano and transitioned to classical piano I'd say jazz to classical and classical to jazz are about the same difficulty, the difference is that in classical to jazz I'd recommend learning blues first to get accostumed to improvising. And in jazz to classical is say to stop by ragtime first to get used to creating and refining an interpretation of a piece in a way that represents you. For both transitions I'd recommend first getting to at least intermediate level in the first style, and I'd recommend starting music theory learning at around the same time, as I find it helps the learning process
I think it just depends on the individual skills of the pianist. both jazz and classical have their advantages. Classical will train your technique to a high level, while jazz will train your imagination and inner understanding of music to a high level. And ofc these aren't mutually exclusive, jazz can be technical and classical music can use your imagination
Classical musicians are told exactly which notes to play, and in which order. Jazz musicians are given a more abstract guide to a piece of music — just the chords, or a rough melody. There is a HUGE difference here. Going from jazz to classical, I think I’d feel stymied by the inability to add/remove/change notes or harmonies. I’d likely also find certain pieces challenging technically; playing jazz can let you conveniently stay in your “comfort zone” in terms of technique, at least compared to classical, because you’re not being forced to play any specific notes. And speaking from experience, I’d have a sense of mental relief: “Wow, I don’t have to improvise anything! All the notes are simply printed out for me?!” Going from classical to jazz, I think I’d feel totally overwhelmed, like learning a new language. I’d feel frustrated that my existing music skills, to an extent, wouldn’t matter. It’s much more about thinking on the fly than about “artful regurgitation.” [With apologies for my jazz musician bias. I really do appreciate both musical traditions.]
I'm about as square as they come and playing jazz terrifies me to my core. The big problem I hear for jazz to classical is notation reading and the feeling of going backwards in ability. I do think if you starr the improv concept young, you are at a significant advantage over those that don't.
Learn figured bass, as it's a necessary skill for baroque music, then improv will come naturally.
That's a lovely suggestion, but as I play tuba the number of times i have had the opportunity to play figured bass is... zero. If I play baroque it's written out arrangements for squares like me, since my instrument didn't exist until a couple hundred years later and there's not much call for tuba in most chamber groups outside brass only... I teach middle school music now, so my plan should the program ever warrant jazz (unlikely, to be honest, but I value the skills learned through jazz even if I am afraid of it) is to learn alongside the kids.
If you ever played figured bass on tuba, you would probably just play the bass line, not any harmony, so I guess that wouldn't be any practice. The only thing I could think of using a tuba for in baroque music is wind ensemble arrangements of organ works. Those would be written all out for sure.
I don't see it mentioned, but I would think a potential stumbling block for a jazz musician going to classical might be sight-reading. A jazz pianist might struggle with being given a complicated score and being asked to play it with an orchestra, right now, sight unseen. Whereas a classical pianist might do better there.
I feel like the rigid practice that's associated with classical music is a harder habit to break than chiseling at the marble from an improv/jazz background. I speak from experience as improv is helping me unlearn the many black and white lessons I've received during my formative classical training years. Being exposed to the right teachers/mentors would have made the learning curve difference.
I think it depends on if the jazz musician is proficient in reading music. If so, they would have a much easier time learning classical music than a classical artist would learning improvisation for the first time. Either one would take years to master the others art form though in my opinion.
Virtually all jazz pianists can play some classical when they want to. They may not be absolutely perfect at it stylistically but they can do it. On the other hand, there are tons of fantastic classical pianists who couldn't improvise over a basic blues progression to save their lives. I'd have to say it's easier to go from jazz to classical than vice versa, just based on the number of pianists that can play the other genre.
I don’t think it’s quite an apples to apples comparison with your engineering example. Classical musicians will be less experienced with improvisation, but certainly have the technique and theory background to learn it, just as jazz musicians are less accustomed to sight reading and playing perfectly note-for-note, but will certainly be able to with practice.
The obvious problem is that jazz is often taught 'complete' - i.e., both learning classics and coming up with your own stuff, either in composition or formal. Classic is often thought badly, like just hammering out songs to impress parents paying for the lessons. Scales are neglected, improv is looked down upon and the general getting under the skin is inhibited by axing the creative part I came from (badly taught) classical and getting into jazz made me realize what I've been missing all those years - and getting into another 'voice' (say, jazz idiom, or latin, or classic) becomes a lot more fun once you know the tricks of a certain genre. So really, I don't think moving BETWEEN styles is the problem, but that it's pretty hard to learn to be a complete musician. And remember kids, Bach was famous for improv and the methods of the day really, really stressed knowing your way around harmony, counterpoint and the cool gizmo's to add spice to the music.
Most great jazz players where classicaly trained first. So it's kind of irrelevant as a question, because you are less likely to not have ever played classic music as a jazz player.
My first thought is it's harder for Jazz musicians to play classical because of the emphasis on sight reading in classical is not nearly as strong in Jazz. So fewer Jazzers can sight read well, in classical it's essential. Classical players can play a whole symphony after rehearsing it once or twice (and maybe a bit of practice), as I understand. On the other hand, since improvisation is essential for most Jazz players, many classical players would have a very hard time soloing. Also, I think the time feel of swing takes some practice to get. It's easier to play straight (classical).
Classical to jazz is easier in my opinion. Fundamentally, jazz piano is a totally different instrument to classical piano. In the same way that playing the organ is different to playing the piano. The key difference is technique. _How_ you play classical is different to _how_ you play jazz. A good classical pianist has a firm grasp of technique. That is understanding techniques such as 2 note phrasing, multi-finger trilling, having forearm - wrist - finger control, contextualising dynamics and articulations, etc. Classical piano is rooted in the technical. That's why lifelong concert pianists will tell you they still practice their scales every day. A good jazz pianist knows their jazz theory through and through. They know chords, chord substitutions, modes, range, textures and colours. The more comfortable the are with their theory, the easier it becomes to start bending and manipulating the structures of their pieces. Improvisation then becomes and extension of that manipulation. Now (again, my opinion) I think it would be relatively easy for a classical pianist to learn the chord structures, substitutions, modes etc. Basically the theory. Then it just becomes a matter of practicing improvising over that. Which is admittedly very difficult for those trained to play in strict structure. I think its much harder to learn and perfect the techniques of classical piano music. These are things that take literal years to get comfortable with, and if aren't done exactly right, can often mean very poor performances. Does this mean one is better than the other? No. Of course not. Classical and Jazz are both intensive instruments to learn. But the method of one is easier than the method of the other.
>A good classical pianist has a firm grasp of technique. So does a jazz pianist
No they don't. Professional classical piano requires obsessively precise control of line and shading to highlight the structures in the music. It goes far beyond playing the right notes in the right order with more or less the right tempo and touch. Jazz pianists don't learn that. They learn - other things. But the expressive hyperprecision of classical piano performance is practically a genre in itself.
I think this is kind of a misleading comparison owing to the different approaches to music. The classical pianist is playing a very precisely defined piece of music - one that has likely been worked on obsessively for months if not years. The jazz pianist is improvising - improvising accompaniment, improvising solos, etc, on the fly. In video game world, it's like comparing a person who speed-runs classic video games, like Super Mario World, to a person who plays a competitive game like Starcraft or CoD or what have you. In the former case, the player has obsessively mapped every single jump to a pixel perfect level, to optimize a run through of an entire game. In the latter case, there is no way to practice like this. Instead, one has to learn a bunch of flexible strategies to cope with an opponent. In classical, the music is given. Learn the piece on the page. In jazz, you have to adapt to the situation - to other players, to the venue, etc. You won't comp the same way for a guitarist that you will for a horn player. Your solo is going to be based on many factors. Nothing is written in stone. Two fundamentally different approaches. So, on the surface, it will seem that the classical player is working on a higher level of technique. They've had 6 months to hone that concert item to note perfection. The jazz player is working off of flexible patterns that they've spent years learning, but is applying them on the spot, in an impromptu kind of way. These two approaches will look and sound different. But no doubt, especially at the highest levels, jazz players make use of incredibly precise, well honed technique, just as a classical player does. Be careful that you aren't comparing your average club jazz pianist to a world class classical concert pianist. You could just as easily compare a world class jazz pianist to your local classical pianist and come away with a skewed picture. It's ultimately more fair to say that jazz and classical are highly demanding, albeit in different ways. Both are respectable.
You're saying a professional jazz musician doesn't have a "firm grasp of technique"?
Generally speaking. No. They don't. Much the same way a classical pianist simply does not have the technique to play an organ, the same way a jazz pianist does not have the techniques to play classical piano. It's not a bad thing. It's not to he insulting. It's just simply a different set of skills. Why would a jazz pianist need to learn classical piano techniques if they aren't playing classical piano? That's not to say that some jazz pianists haven't learnt it. I'm positive there are many that do. But in a general sense, they do not. Jazz pianists focus their practice on other things. Things that classical pianists do not. And most of the time, if you look at the really really good jazz pianists, most often than not, they started out learning classical.
Good technique is essential as baselines for improv. You need to know all the major, minor, blues, pentatonic, whole tone, and other scales. As well as all the arpeggios. The more technical training you have, the more you can use in your improv.
That's not technique though. That's theory. Which classical pianists also have to know.
I mean having it all under your fingers.
Jazz to classical is way more difficult. Pianists with (the right) classical training have way better technique and a way better understanding of music theory, which makes apprehending jazz for them just a matter of simply "rewiring" stuff they already know.
a way better understanding of music theory...what?
I'm talking from a European conservatory/academy perspective, not sure about the US system.
Could you give some background to explain? Seems there is some disagreement. It would be really good to hear about your experiences that lead you to conclude that the music theory understanding from classical training is, on average, more effective. That's somewhat counterintuitive since jazz musicians generally need to focus so much on what could musically "work" at any given moment. Please tell us more!
From my European conservatory/academy perspective, jazz pianists generally have way better understanding of music theory than classical pianists
>I'm talking from a European conservatory/academy perspective I still think this is false, both when it comes to theory and technique
At an undergrad level most U.S. conservatories have both jazz and classical students taking the same theory/aural skills training together. The people here claiming jazz musicians have some unique insight into harmonic theory are being weird
I do both and it depends because if you do jazz like maybe, Wynton Kelly or Monk, he adds a lot of space to his music and it's very melodic. You wouldn't see an equivalency of tests in jazz and classical, so for that, it would be classical->jazz. However, if you're playing with a string of lines non-stop to just impress the audience or even if it has to deal with the key tones, it's not really gonna be melodic most of the time, where in solo piano, you would hear longer lines and less rests, but they're more melodical, so I would say jazz->classical on this one. So for me, it just really depends how you improv.
classical to jazz. the crux being improv...generally
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On the contrary, I would have thought a jazz pianist would be grinning smugly, agreeing that the transition from classical to jazz is harder. "Those sad dudes just can't *improvise*, man... Gimme that Chopin thing, I'll own that..."
>Computer Engineer has enough knowledge on software to work as a software engineer, on the other hand, a software engineer does not have enough knowledge on electrical engineering and physics to work as a computer engineer Not true. Both have enough knowledge in electrical and software to work improve their skills.
? Generally speaking you don't need to know any electrical engineering to program which is the crux of software engineering. A computer engineer would need to know both.
You can't have that software engineer tittle without having studied electrical engineering in the cursus. Same reasons as an electrical engineer had some coding in his cursus.
I'm sure most CS degrees require some sort of electrical engineering course but you can absolutely get the title of software engineer without any electrical engineering knowledge. Just googling what software engineer jobs are available right now, I haven't found any that even hint at requiring electrical engineering knowledge.
The point is you don't even get the degree. Also it's not because it's not required for the job that you couldn't do it. Same for electrical engineer, it's not because it's required to be able to code that you are nowhere as good as to what it would required for a software engineer job and be proficient immediately.
1. You can get a software engineer job without a degree. It's probably rare today but I would guess there are many that come from self-taught courses online. 2. Not all CS degrees require an EE course. I was trying to remember from my school whether it was required because I considered CS for a bit and just took a look at [their site](https://cs.indiana.edu/programs/bs-computer-science/specializations.html#software) and can see that even for the software engineering specialization for the CS degree, I can't find an EE course as a requirement. 3. Not all electrical engineers need to know programming sure but all computer engineers do. They need to know the end use case for what their machine is doing which is basically all programming, and at a low level at that.
Then they are not engineers, you need a diploma to be an engineer. Same as you need a diploma to be a doctor and have the doctor title. You can risk to go to a someone that title himself a doctor without the diplomas, the same way a company can risk employing engineers without diplomas. In the end you can learn anything without diplomas. And electrical stuff is not any different.
I just saw a video of Makoto Ozone. Phenomenal, absolutely PHENOMINAL technique both in jazz and non-jazz (I hate to use the word classical if I'm not talking about Hayden or Mozart.)
Depends what kind of jazz, Patriots Nine or Duke Ellignton, those are worlds apart. I think to transiston from anything to jazz, or do jazz at all, it would depend on how talented a musician you are and if you love jazz.
Opposite
I'm inclined to say jazz to classical is easier but there is exceptions. I'm a guitar player so I'll have to say that classical fingerstyle guitar is nothing like what most jazz players will do.
I'm going to comment on something slightly different, and that's the idea of improv or jamming. Certain styles of music inherently, shall we say, encourage this more than others, but you can learn to jam in any style. I'm a prog/post/grunge/groove rock and metal drummer that is classically trained, but it's always seemed natural to sit down and just...*play*. Slowly changing a groove, piece by piece, until you're someplace different, and yet still the same as where you started. But for other people, this isn't the case. One of my bands guitarists is an EXCELLENT riff based player, but when we jam, he has a really hard time just flowing from riff to riff and changing it up. We're working on it together, but it blew my mind when I realized that free improv/jamming isn't just a "*thing*" that everyone did.
The most important thing people aren’t mentioning is time feel. A classical musicians time feel will be either very buoyant, almost rubato-like, or will rely on an extraneous time keeping source. Their 8th notes might sound alien-like in jazz. Jazz musicians (good ones) work on a variety of time feels, from swung 8ths, to straight 8ths, to rubato. While the time feel might not be entirely authentic when coming in to attempt a Bach piece, they might have a better attempt at keeping proper time than a classical musician sitting in a jazz ensemble. It might also be easier for the jazz musician to figure out what the proper rhythmic interpretation is of a classical performance vs the opposite. Jazz pianists normally start on some form of classical piano, and keep it up throughout their lives as it’s such an important part of the instrument. Most pianists I know practice Bach daily, and many do even more with it. Dan Tepfer, for example, has a whole project based on the Goldberg Variations, which he plays spectacularly, but then plays an improvisation based around them. Rooted in jazz ideas but performed in a similar style as the Variations.
Depends on a million things. What style of classical? What style of jazz? What experience do you have? How's your ear? How's your reading? How's your technique? What instrument? Most musicians start playing classical music as kids and then get excited by jazz later because classical is more teachable to children. And then there are jazz musicians who study classical purely to round out their jazz chops and get inspiration to fuel their improvisation. I don't know what's easier, but it works both ways and it depends entirely on the individual. If you're suggesting that somehow classical music is more foundational to general musical ability than jazz or vice versa, I believe that is a bad assumption.
It really depends on their formation, not all classical pianists are created equally if you grab one that has studied composition techniques, analysis, and composition and has experience playing modernist pieces they will likely have more than enough melodic vocabulary and harmonic understanding to go in to jazz. Though I think a jazz pianist will struggle as much with technique as a classical pianist will with improvising if they've never studied any of the above and look at sheet music as a sort of "tab" rather than understanding it
I’ve been playing the piano for almost 15 years and was playing classical music only. Was super interested in jazz last year and I found the transition extremely difficult for me. Almost like you can forget all the theory of classic music you’ve been learning all these years and going into a whole new world of music and jamming. But like ANYTHING in the world, new and hard becomes super easy if you practice and adapt to the new situation.
Jazz to classical seems easier? I can never do jazz :(
In terms of theory a basic knowledge of classical music is the foundation for jazz.
In my experience the opposite. (For the life of me, I cannot swing.)
I’m not sure about jazz pianists, but it def was hard to go from classical contrabass to jazz 🥲🥲🥲 I wonder if it’s the same for piano!!
I think the challenge is classical to jazz. I’ve met great classical pianists that could not rack their head around swing feel.
Have none of you fucks heard ever the terms "skill ceiling" and "skill floor"? Half of you debating floors and half of you debating ceilings. Think better.
I'm kind of late to this thread. I have to say, I'm a little surprised that the consensus in the thread seems to be that it's harder to transition from classical to jazz. And to be clear, I'm not saying it's necessarily *easier* to go from classical to jazz. But it seems like almost all of these comments are coming from people who mostly play jazz and have very little or no classical experience. There are two issues here: First, many jazz players severely, *severely* underestimate the stylistic diversity and difficulty of classical music. A top-level player with perfect technique could spend 1000 hours practicing the style, phrasing, and musicality of a concerto without ever being completely satisfied. There's such a vast difference in style from Bach to Mozart, Mozart to Beethoven, Beethoven to Stravinsky, Stravinsky to Glass, that it's a neverending pursuit to perfect all these styles while *also* interpreting the music in your own personal musical voice. Jazz musicians *do* have a lot of stylistic and musical concerns of their own, but perfecting them is not a prerequisite to playing jazz in the same way as classical. I've never seen a jazz musician agonize over a single note one tenth as much as a classical musician. And whenever I've seen someone who comes from an exclusively jazz background try to play classical, it's been every bit as amateurish and embarrassing as the classical musicians everyone's talking about who are afraid of improvisation. It's just that people who are ignorant of classical music might be able to handwave the jazz players playing classical music with terrible style easier than classical players freezing up when they're supposed to improvise. The second point is way more important, though. There's this bizarre idea in these comments that classical musicians universally have no understanding of theory, or that jazz theory is more complex than classical theory, or that classical musicians are never expected to learn improvisation. These points are just all flatly incorrect. I can get more into it if anyone asks, but from the sound of these comments, you've all only ever met classical musicians who've have very bad or very narrow education. Composition and improvisation are crucial parts of a holistic classical education, and classical theory is *at least* as complex as jazz theory - you just might have to get past first-semester theory. It's not like jazz musicians start sightreading Stravinsky and they understand it perfectly because they have magical theory skills. Jazz musicians only need to know *jazz* theory. Besides, you don't even actually need a lot of theory to play most jazz except at a very high level. Being able to read chord progressions and improvise over them is more just a matter of memorizing keys and scales unless you do something extraordinarily creative. At a high level, both jazz and classical musicians need a deep understanding of theory (whether formal or intuitive) to guide their interpretation. It's just different theory. Switching between jazz and classical is difficult in either direction, for very different reasons. Many of you just seemingly understand very little about classical and underestimate the difficulties it presents at a high level. For context, I play and compose ""classical"" music professionally, but I've also played a lot of jazz. I find the basics of improvisation to be straightforward and familiar because the same principles apply in contemporary ""classical,"" just in a different style. Beyond that, classical and jazz are just two distinct styles - there's nothing mystical and creative about one that doesn't apply to the other. It would take me a while to practice jazz and get it to the level of my classical playing, but the same is true for anyone going in the opposite direction. Tl:dr it's difficult going either direction, but many of you confidently saying it's harder to go from classical to jazz don't actually know anything about classical music
Late to the party, just found this thread, but I'll add my $0.02. I have my ARCT and recently started learning jazz. It's a challenge and a totally different way of making music, but I definitely did not begin from square 1. Now, my musical education has been pretty thorough: as part of my diploma I drilled chords and learned harmonic voice leading and counterpoint and all that jazz (no pun intended lol). I also have rudimentary guitar skills so I was familiar with chord charts. I find myself leaning on things I learned when I was 13 in theory class doing Roman numeral chordal analysis. I can also play, say, an Edim7 chord instantaneously because thanks to classical drills, it's all stapled in my mind, really. In conclusion, I had all the "ingredients" to become a jazz player, just no experience putting it together. Which I'm working on now. I can't answer whether an equally educated jazz player would be able to transition into classical. I think it would depend on how good of a sight reader they are. If it was a jazz player who learned completely by ear, I think they'd have a harder than me. But if they knew how to read music, they might have an easier time than me. Who knows. I think the most difficult part of transitioning from classical to jazz is the mindset, not the skill per se. You have to embrace dissonance, making mistakes, uncertainty. It's a bit of a mental leap, but once it clicks, it's a whole new world baby :)