New Book: Improv Games for One Player by Jeffrey Agrell

Back at the 2009 Southeast Horn Workshop I purchased a copy of the recent book by hornist Jeffrey Agrell, Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians. He has followed this big (354 page) and very interesting book up with a more concise publication, Improv Games for One Player. The publisher describes it as

…an addictive book of musical games designed to help you be more expressive and musical in your music-making. This slender book should fit in just about every case with enough room to transport a sheet of music paper, but still contains plenty of games to enliven and enrich a player’s daily technical and musical practice. About half of this material is drawn from the original Improvisational Games for Classical Musicians, and half from new, previously unpublished material collected and invented by the author.

Agrell describes it further in his blog, with this quote giving a good sense of what he was aiming for.

The main purpose for this book is to enliven the instrumentalist’s daily routine, both musical and technical. The good thing about routines is that it gets things done: a warm-up routine is a set content that is meant to be played the same way every day. The dangerous thing about a routine is that it can become boring; the mind can go to sleep. Also, the way we’ve all been trained, we’re not accustomed to adjusting the routine – we play the set sequence no matter how our chops are today, no matter what our needs are. Life is not really like that. Things change. Times change. Chops change. We are a little different every day, every time we play the horn. Flexibility is a great musical virtue that is not normally built into a classical player’s approach to technique. This book is meant to do something about that by offering a variety of ways to do the same stuff we always do, i.e. scales, arpeggios, and other elements of basic technique.

It looks like it should be a very interesting publication for not only all horn players but also for all musicians and is available from GIA Music.