During the recent ICMA General Assembly at the Liechtenstein Music Academy, violinist Chouchane Siranossian spoke about a new project that aims to implement new methods of teaching improvisation. Here is her slightly abridged speech.
First of all, thank you very much for the invitation. It is a real honour for me to be here presenting this new research project that we are working on. It’s called ‘Non Sei Solo’.Why Non Sei Solo? Of course, it’s a reference to Sei Solo, the sonatas and partitas of Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s a very tricky title because, first of all, if you see it as Italian title, Sei Solo, it’s actually a mistake because it would be Sei Soli. And why Sei Solo? Because it means also ‘you are alone’, and Johann Sebastian Bach was alone when he came back home after one of his few trips.
His wife had died, and suddenly he was alone, so maybe in 1720 he wrote this Sei Solo to say ‘You’re alone’. ‘Non Sei Solo’ is ‘You are not alone’, and the idea is about the harmony and everything what is behind. Bach’s sonatas and partitas are very particular because they are very polyphonic, and this is a way of writing that was quite new at that time.
Of course, you have in 17th century with Biber, with Westhoff, this kind of writing with chords for violin, but Bach’s sonatas and partitas are, of course, the achievement of this way of writing. I played them a lot since I was, eight, nine, like all violinists do. But one year ago I met a musicologist and composer, David Chappuis, who is teaching in Geneva at the high school.
He is teaching partimento, harmonization on the piano, and solmization. And when I was teaching in Geneva, my students were all the time speaking about this great teacher, about partimento, and so I thought: What is this partimento? I went to the lesson, and it was just incredible. I realized, actually, that there is a philosophy behind the way of writing that we sometimes forget as musicians, particularly musicians that are not playing the piano or the harpsichord. Our way of thinking is more melodic than harmonic.
I started to speak with Chappuis about the sonatas and partitas, because he was already working on them, but without really sharing his findings. So, we started to work together and to analyze the works. And for me, it was incredible.
Why? I know the score by heart, but I realized I had no idea what is behind it. Of course, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and Baroque music in general, is all about harmony. Sometimes, we violinists forget that.
So, I started to rediscover the sonatas and partitas with another eye. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t have any clue of harmony. Of course, when you play music, you have to know a little bit about harmony.
But suddenly, each note had a new place. So, if one note is a third in the chord, and suddenly it’s being the seventh or the second, the role of the note, the color, the savor of the note is changing. So, after working with David Chappuis on this sonata and partita in particular, we are progressing.
And we are going to play a concert at the Bachfest Leipzig in 2028, also with some master classes around it and some conferences to explain a little bit more about this project. But it is not only the sonatas and partitas, that we have to work on, because once you open this box, it is huge.
Johann Sebastian Bach actually wrote the method to play. He was even criticized for that back then. « Er schreibt die Methode zu spielen! » What does that mean? He writes down the improvisation.
Chouchane Siranossian
(c) Nikolaj Lund
And improvisation is a skill that we have nowadays totally lost. In the 17th or 18th century, all the musicians were also composers and, of course, improvising. And I remember when I had one of my first lessons with Reinhard Goebel, my teacher on baroque violin, he gave me a Handel sonata and he said: « Improvise on it! »
I was more than astonished. Coming from a background in modern education, we are so used to playing exactly what is written. From a certain period onwards, composers tried to control more and more.
Even in 19th century, Rossini wrote that he was so fed up with all these singers doing, you know, nonsense with his music. That means the ornaments or the improvisation were so bad that he was starting to write down everything.
Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the first to do that. We know that Leopold Mozart was also encouraging his son to write down always more the method to play. If you look at the concertos, even in classical time, you don’t have the cadenzas. We have luck to have some of Mozart’s cadenzas.
We have the Beethoven cadenza, for example, for the piano version of the violin concerto. But otherwise, that was the spot where the violinist or musician could just write his own cadenza or improvise. And I realized this is a skill we totally lost.
So why is that? Many musicians started playing in orchestras. In an orchestra, of course, you cannot improvise so much. You can do ornaments in the French style, of course. But when we speak about Italian ornaments that are really like composing and changing the notes. Then you have to have a clue about harmony. And I think the composers and the conductors were starting to control always more and more. What is the result? Nowadays, we think that the level of the musicians has never been as high as today, technically. But that skill of improvising, we have lost it. And this is a way of expression that is totally lost.
But I realize now, doing this research, that my way of playing has totally changed.
When, before, in a sonata, I wanted, for example, to go from a tonality to another, I was asking the harspsichord player: « Can you do a little interlude here? » Now I’m not asking anymore. I’m doing it myself. And this is such a liberty and such a fantastic way of expression on stage. It is like in jazz! Of course there are patterns that you repeat. And this is all in your memory.
But this is like learning a language. All these words and these patterns that I have in my head and my fingers, I have to find a way to put them together to do a phrase.
So you have different kind of improvisation. You have, of course, the improvisation senza basso. A few weeks ago I was playing just the Bach Chaconne, and I found it a bit dry to just start with it. So I just played a little prelude that I improvised on stage. It was something in D minor, not something very complicated. You come on stage and you present yourself with this few phrases. Of course, I didn’t play it in the Dodecaphonic style or something rocky. It was Baroque style, of course, in the language of Johann Sebastian Bach. But it was really a way to present the piece.
A few years ago, we recorded the Tartini concerti with Andrea Marcon. I’m speaking about it because I had the immense honour to have an ICMA prize for that CD.
I studied Tartini’s ornamentation technique because he wrote a book about it. It is a very special language indeed. Of course, all composers have their own language. And for Tartini, for two years, I was really studying his way of writing down ornaments. And at the end, I was able to make ornaments in his style, in his slow movements. But that was still not really improvisation, that was ornamentation.
(…) And I remember one of the first lessons I had with David Chappuis, he just gave me a line of bass, and he told me, to play the upper part, and even without the numbers, and I was totally lost. (…) Back in the Baroque era, the children used to learn improvising already when they were very small. That was a part of their language.
They were really starting to learn music in that way. Today, we learn right away technical things on the instrument, but back then, it was different, because you had the solfeggi, you had the partimenti, you had all these things that, by repeating, repeating, repeating, the children were learning, and it was normal for them to improvise and to do all this kind of stuff. (…)
At the end of Locatelli’s capricci, there are always a few bars where it’s written cadenza, and he has not written it down. There, the violinist or the musician should be able to do his own thing, to show what he’s actually able to do, or whatever he wants to share, and in Baroque music, you see many, many examples where you have just a corona, and you just have to improvise. It can be just a little phrase, just a riff or whatever, but this is one of the normal skills.
So we decided with David Chappuis to research for a few years, and at the end, make a book about how to learn this skill, even for the children. It is a huge work we are doing now, and it will be especially for violinists, flutists…, all the instruments that are not harmonic. I don’t have the luck to have learned piano when I was a child. I really regret that. So I had to find a way to give this possibility to other musicians to learn and to understand harmony, because in a way, when you have that harmony in your body, you understand music. I am sure that the vibration of the harmony has an influence on your way to play.
This research work is done together with the High School of Geneva, Zurich, Porto, and Nuremberg.
We are going to meet soon in Royaumont to make a brainstorming during three days, to see where we can exactly go, because the subject is so huge. So we have the topic of the sonatas and partitas, where we are really working on, and we have this method for improvisation. And now, when I’m teaching, I’m already testing it a little bit that with the students.
In Geneva, we are also going to work with some children to see how they can work on that. An example: We do every day scales for the intonation, for the technique, and so on. But actually, when you do scales, you can try already to think about the rule of the octava.
What does that mean? It’s like the harmonization of a scale. So what pattern are you going to do to go from the first note to the second, to the third, to the fourth, and really to work on scales by also doing this pattern. Of course, at the beginning, you do the patterns that are given from the books and from the teachers. But at the end, you are able to do your own patterns.
With the methods used today by the normal high school education for violin you just learn to repeat what’s written.
But when you have to do something of your own, you don’t have the skill to do that. So this is now our idea to try to define a method. I don’t want to say that we have the solution. Of course not. It is just that I discovered this big hole that I have in my education and in my knowledge, to understand the music of the 18th century, and now I think that it is really important to have this skill to understand harmony and improvisation, so that when you’re on stage, Non sei solo.
