This page describes my personal musical process.  

What I am exploring is free tonal improvisation on Paul Vidal's basses.  "Free" means only loosely referencing the form of the foundation bass.  "Tonal" means exploring from the basis of tonal harmony.  Paul Vidal's basses were used by Nadia Boulanger to teach her students, including Aaron Copeland and Philip Glass.  The first bass is reproduced below.

Here are three improvisations on the bass.  They are neither particularly well recorded nor very inspired.  Nonetheless, they illustrate the musical process.

This improvisation sticks pretty closely to the harmonic framework.

This improvisation mixes modes and plays around with harmonic rhythm and form, ignoring melody.

This is a free tonal improvisation on Bass 1.

Aryeh Nielsen, January 26, 2011