A Dream about Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons

by Ben Folds

An RTB, like any freestyling, is an event, not a final product. Music that is highly crafted, considered, professionally performed and packaged is, of course, the norm—it’s modern music. We love that. But you can hijack this modern apparatus, the musicians, the technology, even a large audience, to celebrate a spontaneous moment and take a detour from the regularly scheduled program, to make up a song on the spot. Now, that’s exciting. It’s off-book, unplanned, unrehearsed, with no guarantees or safety net. It’s breaking the law! Rap musicians understand the power of spontaneous songwriting. Freestyling is still essential to the art form of rap, while classical music has left freestyling behind for the most part. But it used to be the way a classical musician earned his stripes. Nineteenth-century composers regularly dueled with other pianists at what were called “salons.” They created pieces from thin air on the spot, as they tried to outdo one another creatively and technically. The jazzers have taken improvisation to a high art, but I wouldn’t quite call it freestyling. Jazz musicians generally improvise over already existing song structures, which they call “the head.” They might play one pass of “Someday My Prince Will Come” and then continue the chord structure as they take turns improvising over it. But the kind of freestyling that connects Biggie to Beethoven requires creating the whole ball of wax in the moment. When it’s over, poof, it’s gone. Next.