The Discourse of Free Improvisation; A Rhetorical Perspective on Free Improvised Music (original) (raw)
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The various practices of improvising with technology have grown up defining themselves against existing cultural structures; they are not the production of scores, they are not jazz, they challenge mechanical reproduction, take their electroacoustic care over every sample and are then willing to do violence to it should musical truth demand, they argue with ownership, they even try to escape from music into other media or modes of performance at every opportunity. The real badge is of course to have a piece of custom performance kit – generally unreproduced if not unreproducible (a generalisation, but the image is not uncommon). The main point is that the mode of performance tends not to afford participation in a particular practice; it is overtly individualised. I caricature, but there is a degree of self-caricaturing in the practice. I hope to show that rather than being in any way alternative, such a mode of music-making represents a central paradigm of musical activity and understanding. This paper will therefore suggest: • That the interactive improvised work might be acknowledged as a central cultural paradigm – but to do that we need to understand what kind of thing it might be • That to do that we need to sophisticate our understanding of how such activity is distributed through time and space • That in particular we need to see where knowledge arises and how we recognise it • That because technology requires us to be explicit, we need to consider the mechanisms for self-knowledge Definitions What music is at issue here? Lets start by spreading the net too wide: technological not as in plugged-in, amplified or processed but as in a sound surface made possible by technology – and it is only just too far to think of the phonographic listening of Mahler or the additive orchestration of Ravel. Here we're talking about technology that transforms time and memory, causality, the scope of physical and imaginative intentionality. Improvised not as in the arbitrary, the mechanistic or the therapeutic – but in the meaningful determining of the direction of a musical argument during performance. Interactive is the not unproblematic term often used. What kind of work are we dealing with? These questions relate to properties common to all musical 'texts', from Guido to Miles or Karlheinz: the mode, locus and moment of inscription. What modes of inscription are proper to our historical situation? (Score-following, for example, may well turn out to be a non-problem of transition.) How then can we characterise works that characterise themselves by their lack of definition on one hand and individuality on the other? Models for the work – locus and moment Works for performance can be 'thick' or 'thin' in their constitutive properties. If it is thick, the work's determinative properties are comparatively few in number and most of the qualities of a performance are aspects of the performer's interpretation, not of the work as such. The thinner they are, the thinner is the performer to control aspects of the performance. … if the work is thick, a great many of the properties heard in a performance are crucial to its identity and must be reproduced in a fully faithful rendition of the work. The thicker the work, the more the composer controls the sonic detail of its accurate instances. (Davies 2001, 20) Now of course deriving a default model of composition from the status of the nineteenth century score is like understanding architecture on the basis of the pyramids. Tape music offered an alternative pyramid, one that can be erected by one man – an inflatable. But to extend a human-geographical metaphor they cast a long shadow, and it may be us, the peasants trying to work out a means for survival in the noisy musical third world suburbs that can offer an alternative – but to be culturally useful it needs to understand itself better. Recently working on a survey chapter on the psychology of composition I continuously assumed I was missing something – in fact there's precious little of relevance. Sloboda (1985, 118) proposes a model of the process which has validity but looks something like an optimisation algorithm for the solution of a creative problem using available technical means. What is interesting is the way it passes in and out of consciousness. We might define this process thus: Composition is a reflexive, iterative process of inscription. The work, once identified as such and externalisable to some degree, passes circularly between inner and outer states. It passes through internal and external representations – mostly
2017
This portfolio of work explores alternative methods of musical composition that question the distinction between composer and performer, presenting an integrated and interdisciplinary artistic approach that aims to engage a broader public in the production of experimental music. The seventeen pieces in the portfolio are playful outcomes of a practice that, whilst rooted in musical concerns, does not privilege the sounding result. In the accompanying commentary the heritage of experimental music and Fluxus is used as a starting point to reconsider the traditionally separate roles of composer and performer. I assert that these roles currently remain distinct and separate in contemporary practice, despite the challenge that experimental music and Fluxus posed to conventional music-making. In order to address this I reconfigure the relationships between composer, performer and listener through an interpretation of a diagram by experimental composer George Brecht, and develop a framework in which the act of composition can be performed through ‘reading’, ‘character’ and ‘playing’.
The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music , Bruce Ellis Benson
Critical Studies in Improvisation Etudes Critiques En Improvisation, 2014
s The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue is a significant addition to the scholarship on the philosophy of music, and specifically that of musical improvisation. It is a provocative work that challenges many of the assumptions of the musical work-concept that has so influenced musical practices in the Western world over the last two hundred or so years. In this regard, it can be understood as an improvisation-focused companion to Lydia Goehr's widely influential work, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, on the history and consequences of the work-concept. Although Goehr addresses improvisation a number of times-for example, pointing out how its value and practice diminished through the 19 th century in seemingly direct proportion to the increasing power of the work-concept that insisted on performer fidelity to its notated exemplar-it is not her primary focus (232-34). Instead, she concentrates on historicizing the work-concept (Werktreue) ideal of performer fidelity to scores in opposition to those who would posit its seemingly timeless, universal applicability to music of the Western art tradition, thereby "dismantling the force of [its] regulative concept" (271).