Improvising and practicing scales

After having written (and finished) more than sixty scale pieces since the beginning of 2021, I'm taking a break and spending time practicing "normal" scales and other music. For a while there I couldn't play a scale without stopping to write down a scale melody (there are so many possibilities) I had just discovered (or uncovered).

Yesterday I gave myself the luxury of playing through the Hrimaly series of three-octave scales that lives on my music stand. Today I found the process kind of mindless (though physically useful), so I decided to try something different. I started by improvising using scale fragements and arpeggio fragments in the key of C major. Then I thought about the F sharp that would happen in G major, the next key in the circle of fifths, and made my way, via that "new" F sharp, to the key of G. When ready I added the C sharp for the key of D, and so on all they way through C-sharp major/D-flat major, and down the circle by removing flats. This took a lot of "head space," in the keys with large numbers of sharps and flats, but I gave myself ample time to think.

Then I did the same with the minor keys, sticking with harmonic minor. Tomorrow I think I might go backwards, adding flats.

What I find most interesting about doing this is the way my awarness of modulations when playing solo music is heightened. The solo Bach pieces that have been etched in deep grooves in my brain for more than half a century become new vehicles for exploring the way scale passages work as well as an elevated vantage point for observing the possibilities of how well music can travel along the circle of fifths from one key to the next.

Perhaps I am "late to the party" with all of this, but I grew up and came of musical age during a time when (at least in Western European-oriented music) tonality was considered obsolete by composers of new music. It was a time when "improvisation" seemed to be connected almost exclusively with jazz, and if it wasn't connected with jazz it seemed to be concerned with sound (including extended techniques) not connected to a harmonic structure or framework.

Twenty-four of the sixty scale pieces are part of a collection that I put in the IMSLP, and the rest, two books of violin scale studies (one in the first position and the other that uses the whole range of the instrument) that are all named for animals that have scales, will be available from Mel Bay sometime later this year (I submitted the final books yesterday).

Just for fun I'm including one of the "Weights and Measures" pieces here. That is the name of the collection in the IMSLP.

Needless to say, I had a lot of punny fun working on this collection.