Re: Repertoire - good thing or bad thing
I have a trick memory for lyrics and melodies (I can still sing advertising jingles from 60 years ago -- stop me if you don't want to hear "Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Charlie"). So I have a "repertoire" in my head of several hundred songs, not organized and not always universally accessible. I have a file drawer of paper copies of music, chord charts and lyrics of songs and tunes, and a bookshelf of Reprints From Sing Out! and other sources -- Sandburg's American Songbag, the Burl Ives Song Book, Norm Cohen's Long Steel Rail book of railroad songs -- you name it.
But now there's YouTube, and the last few dozen times I've been working up new material, that's where I've gone to hear songs. I can pick up by ear lyrics, melodies and chord changes, and I usually listen to a line, pause the video, keyboard the lyrics, then listen to the next line. The act of putting the words on paper tends to fix them in my head, and there's the printed lyric sheet for reference while I learn the song.
Don't think there needs to be a hard line drawn between "repertoire" and "improvisation," though. If by improvisation, you mean making up music totally out of whole cloth, with no reference to any pre-existing music, that's one thing. But the way you play a particular piece of music, whether you composed it or adapted it from another's performance and/or arrangement, is yours. Even if you try to copy note-by-note, your performance will be different, in larger or smaller ways.
My feeling is that except for the truly original among us, most of us will at times be playing music we did not totally compose or improvise ourselves. Heck, if you play Happy Birthday to You for Grandma, it still won't sound just like any other's performance -- though it would take a reckless person indeed to claim authorship.
Whether you want to consciously learn a repertoire of music, organize and access it however you please, and perform it for your private, or others' public, enjoyment (?), is of course a personal decision. I like playing out, and the audiences for whom I perform want to hear some familiar numbers (plus, I don't write originals), so I keep playing (and learning) music from other sources.
Allen Hopkins
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