ariel_improv.m4a |
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“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again. And then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.”
The goal of improvisation, in any context, is to capture the essence of a moment’s emotions and to express them musically. When I read this scene, where Ariel plays such enchanting music that the other characters are nearly bewitched, I wondered to myself ‘what sort of music could be both so surprising and so calming, so bewitching and so free? What sort of music would a spirit play?’. With these adjectives summarizing a mood, I sat down and thought about how I could make the music be familiar yet entrancing. So, I chose the key of C Major, which shares a key signature with A minor, because C major is a fundamentally simple key signature - often the one new music players will learn first because of its simplicity and lack of black notes - yet also has so many possibilities for quiet surprise.
It is hard to know exactly what went through my mind while playing this piece, because if I did know, I could play it again, and unfortunately I can never play the same improvisational thing twice. However, I can say for certain that it was based around the sound of “sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”. In musical language, I translated this to a major key that resolves to another major key, in this case resolving the key of C major to F major. I tried to focus on the abstract nature of the beauty of this song, a song that will make you “sleep” one moment and drop “riches” on you the next, and accomplished this by making heavy use of the 9th interval (in the key of C, this means placing the note ‘D’ on top of any chords in the right hand), an interval that is mysterious but also charming. This musical ‘summarization’ of the passage actually helped me understand Ariel better in my own way. When reading the passage, I wondered what Ariel’s music would sound like, but never pursued my curiosity, and so my perception of Ariel as a character was left incomplete, as in the setting of a play (as Shakespeare intended) we would hear the music, but just by reading the script we could not even begin to understand it. I highly recommend that everyone try and adapt this piece for themselves, or listen to how the professional directors hear it in their heads by watching clips of professional shows, because without it I really think Ariel is incomplete as a character, and in my mind now he is truly whole.