The Potpourri as gateway drug to classical music (improvisation)

In the learning phase (1) there are two steps: a) develop the improvisatory pedagogies found in and inferred from 19th-century methods so that they can be applied to the improvisation of a potpourri. b) find out what ‘famous tunes’ could be used nowadays and memorise (some of) them. Point (a) is pretty straightforward, I have been underway with this for the last 2 years. It consists of learning typical harmonic progressions, typical ornamentation and variation techniques, typical forms and sentence structure and how to bridge from one moment to the next. All these elements can be found in instrumental methods from the 19th century, and have already been compiled by me ready to use. For the famous tunes (b) some research will be required. The first step will be to use the ‘famous tunes (themes favoris)’ in 19th-century instrumental methods, as first practice. I plan then to use various facebook groups and my YouTube channel to compile two lists of ‘modern tunes’. One would be for classical music audiences and the other for a more ‘general’ audience. In case the online response is low, there are also ‘best of’ lists online that could be used to pad out the data. (2) After having done my own learning I can construct a pedagogy which could work for people from many backgrounds. For Jazz musicians the fact that there are many known parts (sort of like standards) means that they have a stylistic framework around which to start getting into a classical style of improvisation. For classical musicians, the fact that there are already elements with a known harmony and a know melody greatly increases their willingness and joy in improvising. E.g. Pachelbel’s canon is one of the best ways to get such musicians to start improvising, although theoretically speaking it’s harder than simple bass progressions. Even people in Art of Sound and Sonology have experience with this idea of ‘patching’. It also introduces many improvisation techniques that are useful for next steps, like cadenza improvisation, ornamentation, variation and preluding. The basic approach will be one found in Corri’s Original System of Preluding, where particular building blocks are written-out and can be combined. This already makes for a nice-sounding full ‘improvisation’. Then we can learn to vary those blocks and eventually to make up some of the blocks ourselves.Finally in the performance phase (3) I want to research how to use these ideas to connect more to different types of audiences. As a first step I need to develop the ability to ask the audience for some ideas and use them in an improvisation as quickly as possible. I will first use my YouTube channel to do weekly Potpourri challenges to develop this skill from having a week to prepare and then decreasing this time over time. Here I can also experiment with the evaluation process proposed below and it is expectable that audiences will ask for more or less similar themes to improvise over. Learning them already at this stage will be very helpful to quickly react in the moment with real audiences. Finally, I want to set up mini-concerts around The Hague, as a ‘prelude’ to an already existing concert or as stand-alone small visits to community centres and libraries. In this small performance I will play a ‘normal piece’, a written potpourri with well-known melodies and improvise a potpourri based on proposals from the audience. I will use an app where people can write their immediate reactions as they come to them so that later on I can match the timing to what happened in the recording. Especially for improvisation I believe this will be an interesting insight in where attention is lost and what structural approaches work worse or better.