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A neighbor knocks on my door with his guitar and invites me to come over and jam with him. I am consumed by self-loathing and inadequacy.Classical musicians don’t do “jam” for a reason, if by that you mean sitting down and improvising. All my life, I’ve played with music in front of me (or memorized).  

People seem to think that because you have some level of mastery over an instrument, you can do anything on it. But the disciplines of jazz and classical are completely different, as different as a novelist (jazz) and a journalist (classical). They are both writers and work with words, but the skills required are very different. Jazz is a creative art, like a painter or sculptor: you buy a Miles Davis album; the tune he might be riffing on is not as important as who is doing the riffing.

Classical music is an interpretive art: I start out wanting to buy a Beethoven quartet and then look for what recordings are out there. It is the composer’s job to leave specific instructions as to how he wants his music to be performed; different interpretations arise because those instructions can’t ever be fully comprehensive. That said, a non-professional could be forgiven for having a hard time distinguishing between different recordings of Beethoven's 9th conducted by Bernstein, Karajan, or Ozawa.

In school, jazz musicians focus on finding their own unique voice. For classical musicians, the emphasis in conservatory is to hone their technique so that they can interpret the composer’s music; improvisation just isn’t a skillset we are trained in. It has a lot to do with approach: play a wrong note in a Mozart quartet and you've made a mistake. In jazz, there is a saying that a wrong note is an “opportunity.”

It wasn’t always this way. Bach was a legendary improviser as was Mozart. Then again, your barber used to double as doctor and surgeon. All in all, I’m fine with how things are currently.

This summer we have a living legend jazz pianist, Guthrie Ramsey, as Composer-in-Residence, writing us a piece for string quartet and jazz singer, his daughter, Bridget Ramsey. He’ll also be performing some pieces of his own with Bridget.  Whatever he does, we’ll need to be on our toes. Can’t wait!

‍David Yang, Artistic Director