Some things in life are meant to be planned. As the saying goes, “if we fail to plan, we plan to fail.” For example, dieting, traveling, teaching, concert performance, and public speaking are pursuits that require planning. Preparing one’s food for a nutritious diet, organizing a travel itinerary ahead of time, writing up lesson plans, practicing one’s music repertoire, and composing a speech are ways that can help one achieve the strongest results.

Yet, other situations in life  call for playing by ear, improvising and figuring things out as one goes along.

Or better yet, some people are not that great at planning. They prefer to have a loose plan and then kind of wing it when the time comes. Just figure things out as we go along. Kind of make it work. 

I am that kind of person. I like to have a general structure in my personal and professional life. But within that structure, I like to play around with things. It works for me.

When I was younger, I was much more structured, and rule oriented. I learned all the rules, followed them, and went pretty much by the book. But over time, I began rely on the rules as back-up, but have done my own thing in between.  And by now – I figure that’s the benefit of being in my  (mature) 50’s, is knowing when and where to bend the rules.

In music, the art of improvising is when one plays a piece of music for the first time, and figures things out on an instrument as he or she goes along. This may be a song that is already known by the performer, who is simply playing it in a creative way that is being figured out on the spot. Or it may be an original composition that is being played on the spot on the instrument without any music notation having been written beforehand. Or it can be a duet with one person singing and the other person improvising a particular rhythm on the drums to accompany the song.

Being able to improvise requires a lot of creativity, risk taking and trust. In music, I”m not that great at improvising. Well, that’s not entirely true; let’s just say I got better over the years. I used to be very “attached” to the score, and played from music most of the time. I became a rather good sight reader, until one piano teacher told me, “Miriam, liberate yourself from the music. Memorize it.”

When we have memorized the melodies and harmonies so well that we can play it all by heart, then we are free to make it sound more interesting and creative. We are free to really stretch the harmonies,  live the music, feel it in our bodies and make it sound so much better.

And maybe change things around here and there as we go along – in ways that improve the music.

Bach, Mozart and Beethoven loved improvisation. They often wrote the basic notation as the score and expected the performer to “realize” the musical arrangement in her own way.

Some of the well known cantors have improvised their liturgical tunes during prayer services. It worked for them, because they knew the music cold – backwards and forwards, inside and out – and so they were able to play around with the little expressions here and there as they went along. All to make the music more beautiful.

In other words, if playing a piece of music exactly as written is called following the rules, then  improvising or playing by ear is a form of “breaking the rules.”  For those who wish to break the rules, it behooves them to learn those rules really well to begin with.

It’s probably okay to improvise and jazz up one’s music, if and only if one has been classically trained as a musician.

And that is the theme in life. We  start out with structure in our day to day life. That is our anchor, our safety net that we can always have to fall back on. But within that structure, it is fun to  play around and make things a little more interesting for ourselves and others.  And our day to day routines and relationships are infused with richer harmonies and rhythms. And of course…if need be, we always have the structure to fall back on.