How Music Speaks Before Words: The Inner Experience of Improvising

Improvisation has become a way of expressing things that I can’t put into words, and there are times when the act of improvising at the piano becomes an irresistible urge — something I feel compelled to do at the expense of almost everything else. It’s like whatever needs saying, really needs saying and nothing is going to stop it until it has come out and made itself known. 

Sometimes one of my spontaneous compositions comes to me almost fully formed before I even start playing. I might be doing a mundane task like vacuuming (in fact it is often when I am doing housework! Perhaps this is some unconscious avoidance tactic…), and I find myself imagining the sound of a certain chord progression and/or combination of modes. I’ll usually think of very specific keys and tonal centres, for the individual colours and timbres that they tend to produce, and the feeling of their specific patterns of black and white keys under the fingers. Often the texture will form itself in my imagination too — broken chords/arpeggios, block chords, harmonic intervals.  Depending on the feeling that is making itself known at the time, the harmonies may be rich and complex, with full textures; or simple and sparse, because there is a desire to give breathing space to a melody that needs to sing. 

Then when I sit down to improvise something based on this structure that came to mind, the melody seems to play itself — like a very deep part of my subconscious mind speaking. It seems to communicate things I didn’t realise I wanted to say, until they are said, then suddenly they seem very real and meaningful. They seem to express aspects of me I wasn’t aware of. To quote one of my all time favourite composers, Franz Schubert:  “When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love.”  What I take from that is a reflection of how I feel — when I compose/improvise a piece of music, I sometimes find it says something I didn’t know I felt.

Sometimes when I sit down to improvise, I have fewer pre-formed ideas, except maybe a vague sense of which modal colour feels right in that moment. At these times, sometimes the harmonic progressions and structure take me to places I didn’t expect, like a map I didn’t know I was following. It often seems to tell a story I didn’t realise I knew, but it was deep in my subconscious somewhere. As music is metaphorical expression as opposed to literal, sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what I was trying to say. Sometimes it is clear — a Eureka moment when it reveals to me something I didn’t realise I felt, but then it makes so much sense.

Sometimes it speaks of contradictions, conflict and ambiguity; sometimes a recurring motif appears that I didn’t realise I was playing until I listen back afterwards, like a through-line tying it all together. A remnant of something essential and fundamental that persists through change. 

With both the more structured and the more exploratory improvisations, once I sit down to play, this is the moment when the piano pulls the inner voices to the surface, shaping sound before thought — an unspoken current. Ideas often move in cycles, orbiting the same unnamed feeling from different angles.

Either way — whether I sit down with some ideas already formed in my head, or I end up feeling my way through a narrative arc that forms itself in real time  — afterwards I often don’t remember much about the actual playing or what was going through my head at the time, so recording these improvisations is so important to me. Even when there are technical imperfections due to tired, over-practised fingers, it usually feels unrepeatable, whatever I end up “saying”. I guess the memory gap is down to that total absorption within flow state that so many musicians speak of. I lose myself in it, and I lose all sense of the passage of time. 

I find myself at a threshold – that liminal state where conscious intention dissolves into subconscious emergence.

Here are some examples of my recent improvisations:

Further Listening

Through Line – Improvisation in C Dorian, C Mixolydian ♭6, and C Lydian Dominant

Threshold in D – Piano Improvisation Through Shifting Modes

The Unspoken Current – Improvisation in D Phrygian, Eb Lydian and Ab Lydian