even though you guys can improvise and compose jazz, do you guys  have the knowledge, theory and experience to improvise and compose classical music?  

have you ever thought about creating a classical piece of music like chopin? or was it when you were a kid, you tried to compose a piece of music or two when you weren't as serious about music as you are now?

i know pianists used to improvise classical music in 1890's or so and it was all part of the classical skill set, but today, classical pianists are being lazy and reading sheet music of the great composers instead of improvising in a way like jazz musicians do. i was just wondering what your thoughts and opinions were?
There are 3 comments, leave a comment.
classical music is a form.  it is possible to improvise on that form
and that goes back at least to js bach.
some recent artists include steve reich and phillip glass.
while i received private piano lessons at my university, i found that you sometimes need to improvise to play classical music.

when playing bach, for instance, you are dealing with music that was written for clavier or harpsichord, so bach didn't really write for a piano, and it is up to you to give your own spin of how the music may sound. if you listen to different recordings of bach's piano pieces you may find them to be very different from each other both in the interpretation, and even the music itself as the "ornaments" are usually also left to the interpreter.  

at the highest level of piano-playing, you will also encounter pieces (piano concertos in particular), where you play cadenzas. a cadenza, most of the time, is the classical composer telling the pianist "improvise here". the composer writes an "optional" cadenza, and other classical composer's also sometimes wrote cadenzas themselves for concertos of earlier composers. it can be up to the pianist, however, to play one of those, or just come up with something different.  

finally, i agree with jmkarns that classical music is a form and you can always improvise within it. movies of the life of mozart will usually feature his uncanny ability to improvise, which he would do so at very young age to the delight of his audiences.  

this is a great article on the subject:
https://www.npr.org/programs/specials/milestones/991124.motm.improv.html
i enjoy pulling out some classical style counterpoint (two, sometimes three voices) improvisation on certain tunes i'm playing.  most recently i did it with the tune... ugh, that most popular of latin tunes everyone plays... black orpheus.
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