Nina Moske, at left, plays the flute with Duke University’s New Music Ensemble during one of the group’s improv sessions. Photo courtesy of Nina Moske/Handout.
In Sunday’s (4/13) Washington Post, Nina Moske, a senior at Duke University, writes, “The cellist was improvising. She sat alone with no music stand before her, devising a new composition…. The piece was not recorded and would never be replicated. I recently joined her as a member of Duke University’s New Music Ensemble. There are eight of us: a pianist, a cellist, a violinist, a clarinetist, a guitarist, a flautist, a percussionist and a conductor. The group performs experimental pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries, and we improvise. As a classically trained flutist, I expected to feel unmoored without structure. But improvisation has made space for a freedom I didn’t know I needed: timelessness. College students like me treat time as a finite resource—something to harness for maximum gain…. My own white-knuckled grip on time stems, in part, from my years of musical training. Classical ensembles prize precision … There’s real artistry in the craft of classical music, but I was lost in the minutiae…. I now improvise once or twice each week with my group and have tried to implement the practice on my own, too. My days are no less busy, but even a few minutes of extemporizing clear my head.”
