Chapter 1
Improvising
I am playing a concert of improvised electro-acoustic music in front of a small audience at Fylkingen in Stockholm as one part of the Zapruda Trio - Sten-Olof Hellström, Simon Vincent, our various computers, other contraptions and machineries completing the ensemble. It seems to me that a sudden interruption of the ongoing electronic textures by the amplified pieces of metal in front of me is called for. I make a series of expansive, aggressive, percussive gestures with respect to these various pieces of scrap and materials acquired from a modelling shop, culminating with a series of sharp blows from my bare hands. Of course, bursts of metallic and characteristically contact-mike-amplified sounds are heard. But alongside each one of the blows is something less impact-ful, more friction-al, not a squeak exactly, not that comic, a rubbing perhaps. I repeat a sharp blow watching my co-performers closely in case one of them is noticeably coordinating their production of the rubbing sound with my activity. Within the music, I am trying to investigate and diagnose the music. I am trying to find out what is making this sound by analysing a gesture which was involved in its production, all the while continuing to play and fold in my activity with that of the others. They give no sign of any gesture showing close synchrony with mine but, on another blow, one of the hand-held electric fans I have been using falls from the table to the floor. I notice that the rubber wheels at the base of the table are gently moving and that subject to my assault the whole table has lurched several centimetres towards the audience. It is these wheels against the Fylkingen cushioned floor which are making the friction sound. My contact mikes are picking up the vibration through the frame of the table. An unintended instrument has appeared. I move the table around, playing the rubbing sounds, varying their pitch, squeakiness and duration. Sten-Olof quickly finds a synthesiser patch derived from a physical model of friction sounds and the electro and the acoustic engage for a while. I bring the table back to its original position, quickly check my wiring, and look for something else to do.
Incidents like this compress many of the features of improvised music often held to be attractive. For Derek Bailey, it is "the accidental, the coincidental, the occasion" which appeal to him in improvised music making and which particularly derive from interactions with co-performers (Martin 1996). To use a more sociological discourse, improvised music making seems to revel in what Garfinkel (1967) calls the "awesome contingency of everyday life". The Fylkingen vignette involved accidents and coincidences to be sure but these needed to be folded into the music making both in terms of what I was engaged in myself and in how this was coordinated with the contributions of others. There is further contingency here. The unanticipated rubbing sound did not cause the music to stop, but could have done. The movement of the table did not cause the contact mikes to become unplugged, but that too could have happened. The sound could have passed unnoticed or undiagnosed or unexploited or have been ignored by co-performers. On this occasion, these outcomes did not occur and instead the sound became a musical material.
It is improvisation as a practically organised form of music making that is the subject of the current work. I am interested in the contingencies - the haeccities if you will - of performance and how these are managed, negotiated and capitalised upon by performers. I am interested in whether music produced under these practical circumstances comes to have characteristic forms. That is, I am interested in relating musical-formal considerations to the practical activities of music makers. In particular, I am concerned with how electronic and computational technologies for improvised music making should be understood from this perspective and designed accordingly. Electro-acoustic music is particularly prominent for study as it ties together technology and music performance in intimate ways, as well as happening to be the music that I work in. Throughout, I try to effect a three-way balance between an engagement with the music literature on improvisation and electro-acoustic music, alongside technical-constructional work, and accounts of practical experience. I hope that the current work has a conceptual, technical and practical yield, albeit of a preliminary sort, but nevertheless one which can enable further developments by myself and others. Along the way, I want to make some passing - yet hopefully suggestive - comments about a number of other topics which you may have also detected in the Fylkingen incident: notions of musical gesture, interaction, texture, interruption, performance as an embodied practice, 'emergent' instruments, the relationship between electronic and acoustic sound sources, physical models and metaphors in music and so forth.
Improvisation: The Very Idea
The improvisation of electro-acoustic music and technologies for it, practically understood, serves as my topic. But this seems to be a string of problematic terms which become no less problematic in their conjunction. Questions seem to be already begged about the notion of improvisation, what can count as a technology, how theory and practice are to be interrelated, not to mention what electro-acoustic music might be. Fully addressing all these matters is beyond the remit of this work but some clarifications are in order. In particular, the rest of this chapter is devoted to the notion of improvisation in music and what conceptually and practically we are to make of it. Matters to do with the nature of music technology and its design and use in electro-acoustic music are more in focus in the next chapter.
Definition is not an innocent act. Whenever an author engages with terms like 'improvisation', which can be found in both member's discourse (that is, in improvisors' talk) as well in the various and contested theorisations of musicological study, any act of definition will also involve taking sides. Indeed, from time to time, various explicit educational, social, moral and political agendas have been read into improvisation both as a concept and as a practice. To avoid this situation, scholars sometimes take a path of abstraction and seek a notion of improvisation which is designed to fit all occasions. Unfortunately, this runs the risk of offering rather bland elucidations which lose their musical specificity and analytic usefulness.
Improvisation and Composition
For example, numerous approaches to improvisation counterpose it to composition. Notoriously from time to time, this has been done to devalue improvisation by a number of prominent composers and theorists. Adorno (1936/1989) is often taken as devaluing improvisation relative to the serious painstaking work of composition as part of his attack on jazz. Certainly, Adorno seeks to discredit any claim that might be made on behalf of jazz as embodying a sense of musical freedom or offering any foreshadowing of potential political liberation. The mere adornments of jazz do not produce a music separate from its basis in the popular tunes of the culture industry, still less one which could serve as a critique of the administered life. In the 1936 essay Adorno is principally concerned with debunking those who would have exaggerated pretensions for jazz with regard to the value of improvisation, rather than debunking improvisation per se. Nevertheless, his treatment of jazz makes for a strong contrast with his detailed analyses of the composers he admires (Beethoven, Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg), all of whom are presented as grappling with complex musical ideas in a protracted painstaking activity of compositional work (see also Witkin 1998).
The composer and bass player Gavin Bryars in an interview with Derek Bailey in the second edition of Bailey's Improvisation book (1992) gives a similar picture of composition in relation to improvisation. Bryars admits being to being a lapsed improvisor because he is now interested in ideas which require formulation and working through outside of the real time of performance. Bryars does so without prejudice to improvisation and indeed more recently (1998) he and Bailey have reformed the improvising trio Joseph Holbrooke with percussionist Tony Oxley. Nevertheless, he along with Adorno counterposes improvisation with composition in terms of the nature and complexity of the ideas which can be worked with.
In a lecture attended by the author, a well known electro-acoustic music composer who is also known for occasional improvisations expressed the concern that his improvisations can be a species of "showing off" whose "arrogance" contrasts with the hard work and modesty of compositional work. While the composer confessed to feeling flattered by the applause given to his improvisations, he was distrustful of it and its effects on him. For these reasons, a practice of "forensic" composition where the inner workings of recorded sound are studied and manipulated in detail was to be preferred.
For Schoenberg (1967), improvisation has a role in compositional work - but privately so, as the composer formulates, refines and works through "the musical idea", which will be ultimately realised by necessity as a notated work. This notion of improvisation or extemporisation as part of 'pre-composition' is commonly heard. For some writers, such activities are an acceptable part of the hard work of composition but, if left as an end in themselves, might engender primitive musics. In the third edition of Grove's (1935), H. C. Colles has it that extemporisation is "the primitive act of music-making, existing from the moment that the untutored individual obeys the impulse to relieve his feelings by bursting into song. Accordingly, therefore, amongst all primitive peoples musical composition consists of extemporisation subsequently memorised" (also quoted in Nettl 1998).
Also unsympathetic to claims of musical value in improvisation and, perhaps surprisingly echoing Colles, Boulez (1976) suggests that improvisations will be confined to a stereotypical "curve of invention: excitement-relaxation-excitement-relaxation", "a sequence of negations". "Inadequate memory" is blamed for these structures and it is claimed that "the mind is incapable of mixing certain elements". Forms and structures which are realised over longer periods of musical time, such as those associated with late and post-serialist composition, would exceed the limits of memory and have to be thought through outside of performance and realised notationally. Otherwise Boulez claims only music will arise which is reminiscent of that in the rituals of "so-called primitive societiesÉ whose relatively simple form involves a building-up of psychological tension followed by relaxation". Boulez' polemic continues aggressively:
Instrumentalists do not possess invention - otherwise they would be composersÉ True invention entails reflection on problems that in principle have never been posedÉ and reflection upon the act of creation implies an obstacle to be overcome. Instrumentalists are not superhuman, and their response to the phenomenon of invention is normally to manipulate what is stored in memory. They recall what has already been played, in order to manipulate it and transform it.
Underlying many of these positions - no matter how cultural imperialist, polemical or straightforwardly insulting they may be - are some core commitments of modernist music. Music is the expression of musical ideas. Properly radical modernist ideas are not easy to formulate, refine or materialise. It needs hard work. This hard work, composition, cannot take place in the real time of performance before an audience. Hence, music which does get created before the very ears of an audience might be novel in its appearance but not in its essence, in the ideas it expresses. As it cannot be modern, it must be primitive.
Presenting improvisation as marginal or parasitical to composition or sometimes a feature of the interpretation of composed works (e.g. Haas 1931) has been common in musicology. In part, this has been for methodological reasons. A musicology which founds itself on documents - be those published scores, surviving sketchbooks, diaries or recorded reminiscences - would find activities which leave no or little historical trace rather enigmatic (Nettl 1998). Best to marginalise them and prioritise the study of that which is held to be fully the subject of the mature intention of the composer, the notated performable work. However, it is well known that many composers central to the cannon of orthodox musicology were also great improvisors: Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven for example. A common treatment here, though, is to present their improvisations as uncannily well realised, highly disciplined works with recognisable forms - sonata-like or whatever. Moser (1955), for example, claims that Bach and Handel's improvisations, though based on themes given to them by their audience, had the appearance of composed forms. Even if such claims are true, it is easy to see that these moves leave improvisation at the margins of musicological study: those recognisable composed forms can remain the primary focus. As we shall see, contemporary musicological study which takes improvised musics as a serious topic has had to abandon moves of this sort (Nettl and Russell 1998).
Recently, it has become notable for various musicians to take as their avowed topic the hinterland between composition and improvisation. Fred Frith, Bob Ostertag and Simon H. Fell are all examples of improvisor-composers who wish to examine this area. Fell's quintet pieces, for example, often involve intricate solos which commonly sound like improvised jazz but which are in fact notated in detail. The listener may have her suspicions that all may not be as it appears when such a solo suddenly gives way to tutti playing as a transformed serial theme returns. For his part, Frith (interviewed by Fehrenbach 2002) dates his interest in the interplay between composition and improvisation from how recordings of improvised material were (tape) edited together in making the Henry Cow albums he played guitar on through the 1970s.
Using the recording studio in this fashion was not new to Henry Cow of course, not even if we confine ourselves to electric-jazz-related musics. For example, Miles Davis aroused especial controversy for 1970's Bitches' Brew, not just for its extensive use of electric instruments but also for the 19 edits (so few!?) of the opening track Pharaoh's Dance. The Fender Rhodes and the razor blade again combine on the album's title track when the 'back half' of a section already compiled from several takes is used to begin the track, the first half of that section appearing nearly 15 minutes later, with another excerpt from the back half closing the track. A formal AÉAÉA structure is accomplished not only with materials not initially played with that formal role in mind but with their actual played order being reversed on first to second appearance and back again.
Fell (Kelly 1998) uses the term 'xenochronicity' to refer to such practices of excerption from original played contexts. I would suggest, though, that a contrast can be made between Fell's (especially) and Davis' use of such techniques. The razor blade produces a familiar form out of unusual materials in Bitches' Brew. Many (but by no means all!) of the edits on Pharaoh's Dance are not noticeable with ordinary listening. They produce coordinated transitions as if they had been scored or pre-agreed. In Fell's work, transitions often jar expectation. The effect is not one of seamless editing but of discomforting juxtaposition. Whatever the musical outcome, in all these examples some counterposition of compositional and improvisatory practices is being experimented with. Whether the goal is seamlessness, radical juxtaposition or irony, it is important to note that such strategies depend upon a relatively stable understanding on the part of musicians and listeners of what composition and improvisation consist of in the musical idioms being worked with. An irony will not be brought off, a juxtaposition not noticed, a compositional form will not be achieved from improvised materials unless the elements have recognisable features which make this element be or sound composed and that element be or sound improvised. In short, heterodox practices like Fell's, Ostertag's and Frith's depend upon orthodox understandings - in particular, orthodox understandings which maintain a distinction between improvisatory and compositional musical practices.
Improvisation and Critique
Durant (1989, p252) opens the symptomatically entitled essay Improvisation in the Political Economy of Music with:
Perhaps more than any other aspect of music-making today, improvisation questions dominant directions of musical changeÉ As a procedure, it raises fundamental issues by putting continuously into question - moment by moment, within the activity of music-making itself - the processes of deciding what to play and how to organise or shape musical events or performances. As a social practice, through its challenge to the production and distribution of music in commodified forms, it questions how relationships of music-making are to be represented: economically, legally and aestheticallyÉ
And continues (p253):
As something people do for themselves, too, improvisation stresses independent activity rather than passive consumptionÉ The challenge posed by improvised music might thus be though to have large-scale political or epochal reverberations, linked to the circumstances in which music is produced, circulated and heard.
In addition to the title and the explicit claims made by Durant here, his whole discourse is one of thinking about improvisation politically and in a spirit of critique. Improvisation "questions dominant" cultural themes and institutions. Improvisation is situated in relationship to the political economic categories of production and distribution of commodities. Improvisation raises questions of "representation", a political category in this context, and is seen in opposition to "passive consumption". Durant is explicit about the kind of improvisation he has in mind (p252-253):
During the last 25 years of Western music, improvisation has emerged from its role of being merely one dimension of music which is for the most part composed and notated, to become a specific form in itself: improvised music, 'free collective improvisation', 'free jazz'. Over two decades, it has opposed tendencies which conceive of music less as a social process than in terms of kinds of resulting representation or 'text': as a series of compositions, records, videos.
Throughout these passages, the political value of improvisation is intrinsically linked to its opposition to dominant categories of composition, text, commodity and the institutions and economic relations which support and circulate their material manifestations. That is, improvisation opposes institutionally ingrained musics and its critical political value derives from this oppositional relationship. Improvisation, on this account, effects a negative critique upon imposed-composed commodity forms. There is a sense in which claiming this possibility for a political value for improvisation mirrors the heterodox impro-compositional practices of Fell and the others discussed above. The values - be they political or musical - derive from negating or juxtaposing recognisable existing practices surrounding composition. Not surprisingly then, on closer examination, Durant goes on to register scepticism about a number of the political claims for improvised music. For example, against a notion of 'improvisation as liberation', especially in its more anarchic variants, Durant argues (p271):
Without structuring differences and distinctions, meanings of any kind are impossible. A politics of 'liberation' is one of counter-identification and can signal directions for relative change, but it cannot be a condition to which to aspire.
And against a formulation of 'improvisation as discovery [i.e. as productive of novelty]' (p273):
É as regards developing a politics of improvised music on the grounds of 'novelty' and the possibility of escaping strictures on conventional sound associations, what seems clear is that novelty exists only in situationally specific relationships of transgression and transformation of existing codes, rather than as some 'pure' alternative to them: there is no new musical realm to discover that isn't at the same time a restructuring or reconstruction of the old.
It is worth noting that the same remarks can be made against any situationally non-specific claims to novelty. The politics of modernism in Boulez and some of the other composers discussed above can meet with the very same objection. Invention and novelty with respect to what criteria, to be evaluated in what context? As long as concepts like 'novelty' free-float without explication, any practice and its negation can be legitimated in symmetrical terms. Without contextual and criterial specification, attempts to stage critical engagements between different practices will involve all parties talking past each other or invoking strikingly similar arguments for seemingly opposite ends.
Prévost's (1995) No Sound is Innocent is a forceful and at times elegantly written advocacy of improvisation in the tradition identified by Durant. Prévost too is engaged in a form of musical-cultural-institutional critique in the name of improvisation. In various places in the text, he endorses quite clear distinctions between the activities of composition and improvisation.
The reality of a [sic] improvisation is not that of composition; the concerns of composition are not compatible - and not competitive - with improvisationÉ Composition and improvisation are different categories of music. Each is weakened when the principles of the other are introduced. When jazz is overly scored then it risks losing its identity as jazz no matter how good the ensuing music might be. Conversely, when composers include passages that are not specific in pitch, position or movement, then they are being dishonest if they do not acknowledge the creative contribution of the improvisors. In such cases the musician should be treated as co-creators and co-copyright holders!
Total improvisation (which admits all sounds and all possible performance strategies) is a process foreign, and perhaps abhorrent, to the conventionally trained musicianÉ The improvisor throws himself into the moment, into some unknown realm of experienceÉ There is no comparable situation for the classical musician, whose skills and disposition are designed to achieve the opposite - to deliver a measured accuracy and a pre-designed expression. (p73-4)
There seems to me to be a tension in this writing between wanting to acknowledge a difference and incommensurability between activities (their relation is "not competitive") while characterising the activities in ways which make one seem most unappealing. While the improvisor is throwing herself into the unknown, the classical musician is a mechanical functionary of the score. In the above quote, the ellipsis I inserted before "There is no comparable situation for the classical musician" actually contains (p74):
And in the midst of performance a great struggle will be going on, with the musician constantly reorienting himself, making instantaneous adjustments to an evolving psycho-musical situation - which is out of any person's control. Out of the controlled accident arises a music which can transcend surface logic, that is, the apparent sense of order in the sound. The skittering helter-skelter of a frenzied ensemble passage will force the musician to performance responses hitherto unthought of, whilst the emptiness of silence will dramatise every involuntary movement.
It is all that which is denied the classically trained musician. All that frenzy, all that existential precariousness and thrill. The considerable rhetorical asymmetry in Prévost's writing lies uneasily against the thesis that we are merely dealing with two different activities. One is presented in an irresistible fashion, the other as an empty pathology. It is as if Prévost wants to denounce composition and all the institutions that support it but can't always bring himself to. There are less ambivalent passages however.
Composition I argue is not simply (the most advanced?) medium for prescribing a performance, but a subtle prescription for a network of power relations. (p5)
It seems to me no coincidence that just as private property is the basis for the ideology of possessive individualism, so the musical composition has become a cipher for creative genius. Private property and composition are the bases of their respective systems and perhaps they share a similar socio-economic propulsion. (p169)
These remarks place composition squarely in the political economy of music and open up a space for its negation to be revalued. In particular, Prévost argues for what he variably calls 'dialogical heurism' or 'heuristic dialogue' as a positive organising principle for improvisation: improvisors find things out (the heuristic part) in dialogue. These formulations are attractive but without further specification, they are open to the objections we have already seen Durant raise. Whether something is 'found out' (or discovered) needs to be appraised in a context and with criteria. Without that further specification, there seems to be no in principle difference between Prévost's improvisor and Boulez' problem solving composer - both are doing things heuristically. Durant (1989) sees similar difficulties with the 'improvisation as dialogue' formulation.
É in a procedural description of improvisation such as 'improvisation as dialogue' or 'improvisation as problem-solving' there are no guidelines concerning what will be a 'problem' or what might constitute a resolution of any such problemÉ the attractiveness of the activity - as well as its claims to stand as a liberating 'free' alternative, or as a way of discovering new sounds and new musical 'meanings' - lies precisely in not having pre-ordained objectives. (p274)
In fact, though, Durant detects that sometimes:
É there is a determining, broader theoretical or ideological assumption in the 'improvisation as dialogue' view: a view of the nature of desirable human relationships and interactions (e.g. co-operativeness, freedom from aggression, etc). And such a view may perfectly well be shared by particular groups of improvisors or by any audience group. In this case, though, the music itself merely dramatises and endorses an already established framework of values, rather than constructing or investigating them. (p275)
I can find no direct engagement with objections like these in Prévost's book - even though Durant seems to be targeting an account of improvisation which Prévost is prominently associated with.
A core difficulty in these various attempts at understanding improvisation in the political economy of music is not, to my mind, that music is thought of politically. I am not arguing for a position which sees no role for political debate in musical studies. Rather, I feel that those who advocate improvisation as a politically oppositional cultural form are expecting too much of the music per se or are conducting their arguments as if the music alone has a valorised political status or potential effects. Improvised music may be a politically and culturally progressive form, it depends (once again) on context and criteria. It also depends on how the music is taken up, that is, on what role it has in settings and activities which are unambiguously political in nature. These are completely open and historically contingent questions. I can imagine contexts in which the soundtrack of revolution will be improvised. I can imagine contexts where it will be sung by The Sugarbabes or maybe a curious Bob Dylan revival will take place. I can also imagine (contra Durant) a revolutionary cell gaining strength and confidence from their "already established framework of values" being played back to them in a concert of performers in heuristic dialogue just before they engage in sedition against a fascist oppressor. I can imagine all that but I know that the Nazi occupiers demanded the confiscation of radios from the Dutch people (it is claimed) to stop them listening to swing music. It seems arguable that swing, no matter how composed a music, no matter how trifling a product of the culture industry, had a role in popular resistance to fascism in occupied Holland. Indeed, this seems rather more arguable and trading on a clearer sense of 'the political' than the 'in principle' advocacies of improvisation as cultural opposition within the political economy of music that we have reviewed.
A second core difficulty with many of the arguments we have examined is their persistence with an oppositional construction between composition and improvisation and taking this to map the whole field of debate. The rhetorics often present these activities as uniform and undifferentiated. We have seen little of the variety of activities and strategies which may constitute composition and improvisation. We have not been in an informed position to assess questions of their relation except abstractly or intuitively. A priori we have a limited repertoire of possibilities. Two activities seem to be either compatible, in competition, or incommensurate. Equally we have been presenting debates about improvisation and composition, but improvisation and composition of what? Much of the discussion of this section has been about a certain form of improvisation (see Durant's characterisation) in relationship to modernist Western art-music composition (Durant cites the composers Berio and Boulez and refers generically to the Darmstadt School). This is a rather factional dispute when one considers all the musics of the world and the varied senses in which they can be said to be improvised, composed or created some other way.
Dissolving Improvisation
In the face of arguments like these it is tempting to dissolve the categories of improvisation or composition in definitions like the following (Munthe, n.d.):
Improvisation is the activity of, to some extent, creating and constructing a piece of music in the same time as it is being performed. Improvisation in this wide sense is a necessity in all performed music whether it is called arrangement, interpretation, ornamentation, reading or something else.
Nettl (1998) takes a sample of definitions from music scholarship and finds a surprising and monotonous agreement on this core feature of the synchronicity of creation and performance even if there is disagreement about the value to be attributed to such activity.
In related fashion in an article primarily about music education, Rosenboom (1995) writes:
My definitions for composition and improvisation are quite simple:
A composer is simply, a creative music maker.
Improvisation is simply, composition which is immediately heard, rather than subsequently heard.
Any mixture of these is perfectly feasible. Creative music makers may include creative performers, composers, analysts, historians, philosophers, writers, thinkers, producers, technicians, programmers, designers, and listeners - and maybe most importantly, listeners.
What is striking is how the invocation of this single allegedly self-evident feature of improvisation (creation and performance as coeval phenomena) licenses massively inclusive treatments of improvisation and composition. Suddenly, everyone is a composer (Rosenboom) and all performance involves improvisation (Munthe). Making concepts massively inclusive and eroding differences - no matter how attractive it might appear from a liberal standpoint (and Rosenboom develops a classically liberal inclusive approach to music education in his piece accordingly) - are strategies which remove any analytic value the concepts might have had.
In an interview with Gabriel Fehrenbach (2002), Fred Frith explores a number of different ways of talking about improvisation and composition:
Fehrenbach: Improvisation and composition is [sic] normally seen as something different. You said once, that it's rather nearly similar. Now Digital Wildlife show [sic] something like a hierarchy between improvisation and composition. The process of composition, was it a rational one, which was confronted against the moment of improvisation or did itself has [sic] also a moment of coincidence?
Frith: Well you know all the clichés - improvising is 'instant composition', 'spontaneous composition', and so on; interestingly the same kinds of expressions don't exist in the other direction. We don't hear people talk about composition as 'improvisation in slow motion'! Of course there are also prevalent political and economic reasons for that. Existing economic structures privilege composition; and I have a theory that improvisation disappeared from classical music as a result of the creation of copyright laws! I do think that composition and improvisation are different aspects of the same process. What interests me in your question is the use of the word 'rational' - does this imply that improvisation is irrational? Are these words useful in this context? I think the process of creating just about anything involves combinations of rational thought, intuitive choice, ingrained memory, and desire. I could apply all of those words to both composition and improvisation. The process is different, and occupies different time frames, but other aspects are essentially similar.
Frith argues interestingly that the formulation of improvisation as a limit case of composition in terms of the temporality the process is not an innocent affair. That we do not talk about composition as slow improvisation suggests an asymmetry in the discourse and a residual parasitism in these formulations of improvisation upon composition. For Frith, this discursive asymmetry has a material basis. In responding to the interviewer's questions about the rationality of composition, Frith moves to an inclusive way of thinking about creativity. His assertion "I think the process of creating just about anything involves combinations of rational thought, intuitive choice, ingrained memory, and desire" may seem easy to agree with but the important questions are begged: but how? and in what activities? These questions are begged, not answered by Frith's response. This becomes doubly problematic if we begin to suspect that what counts as choice, intuition, memory and desire might also be contextually variable affairs. The exact constitution of activities which can be regarded as improvisatory is a proper topic for an empirically grounded musicology and ethnomusicology of improvisation, not a matter to assume answers to on a priori grounds.
Improvisation as an Ethnomusicological Topic
Musicological and ethnomusicological interest in improvisation is growing. A landmark collection of research on the topic is Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell's (1998) In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation. For the contributors to this collection, improvisation is less a concept to be defined or advocated as the name of an empirical research programme. Consistent with an anthropologically-inspired ethnographic orientation to cross-cultural research, many of the authors do not take the concept of improvisation for granted as picking out a unitary set of phenomena. They are sensitive to the possibility that members of the various musical cultures studied may not use the notion of improvisation or anything like it. Indeed, it is the explication of the categories that members do use and understanding the social practices in which those categories are in play which is the proper topic of the ethnographic material in this collection. Accordingly in what follows, I highlight three contributions to this volume to the extent that they justify a turn to improvisation as an empirical topic to be understood in terms of the practices of incarnate musicians. It is this orientation which I will further develop in my treatment of improvisation in electro-acoustic music.
From Persia to Beethoven
Blum (1998) notes that discussions of improvisation in Near Eastern writings commonly emphasise the appropriateness and timeliness of a musician's response to a given performance situation. However, what counts as appropriateness and timeliness must be understood in relation to the kind of performance (e.g. poetry or singing and instrumental music) and the details of the situation (e.g. a performance before a princely patron and a small gathering of guests or a ceremonial occasion). Quoting various Persian sources most dating from the 10th to 12th century, Blum notes that patrons would be likely to highly esteem the improvisatory skills poet-singers able to create new verses on request rather than to present familiar ones. The appropriateness of a performance would often be shaped by a request to respond to the avowed emotional state of the patron. Accordingly, a number of instruction manuals insist that part of a musician's skill is to be able to ignore his own emotional state and chose a melody type which suits the time, the season and the temperament of any listener who is prepared to reward the performance. The ability to spontaneously invent entertaining or inspirational verses before esteemed invited guests would enhance the prestige of performer and patron alike. The values attached to performance are not confined to prestige and reward, though. In many of the ceremonies of Sufism, performance and carefully crafted listening invite the reception of gifts from God.
Blum's main contribution, for our purposes, is to point to the kinds of criteria members employ in their practical appreciation of an improvised performance as appropriate to its situation. These are to do with historically and culturally specific systems of patronage, prestige, reward and understanding divine influence on earthly affairs. In a second part to his piece, Blum continues this theme in an examination of varied and different ways improvisation has been discussed in European music over the last three centuries or so. Blum endeavours to recapture the richness of the vocabularies that have existed in Latin, French, German and English for describing the quite different phenomena we are tempted to treat together under an inclusive concept of improvisation. Different terms would be used to describe activities in different settings (domestic, religious, concert) or whether the performance was vocal or instrumental. The composer Grétry in 1797 commends "young unmarried womenÉ to improvise [improviser] on a full instrument, such as the piano, the harp etc., [as] a source of happiness for lively imaginations"; indeed, a young women's modesty "is never compromised by unfurling her entire soul in the language of melody" unlike, presumably, what might happen in the case of song. Improvisation here is a discrete, domestic activity in which the sexuality of young women can find a regulated expression. The form of the activity, its setting, the gender of participants, their marital status and the choice of instrument all enter into its characterisation: improviser rather than impromptu (Blum 1998, p37-38). Being sensitive to the specifics of linguistic usage enables Blum to be rigorous in understanding a remark of Beethoven's written in 1807 or 1808:
Man fantasirt eigentlich nur wenn man gar nicht acht giebt, was man spieltÉ
"One is actually improvising only when one is heedless of what one plays" is at best an approximate translation which might miss Beethoven's emphasis on a particular kind of performance - a 'fantasy': man fantasirt. For Beethoven here, a fantasy also requires the musician to have a particular kind of relationship to audience response: ignore it.
Javanese Gamelan
Although Javanese Gamelan music is often held to be improvised, one must again be careful in identifying the precise sense in which this might be so. For one thing, the term improvisasi is a relatively recent borrowed word in Indonesian and plays little role in the member categories Gamelan players would routinely use amongst each other to discuss their music. Anderson Sutton (1998) presents a nuanced picture concerning improvisation in Gamelan. To be sure, musicians make selections between alternative patterns and they can do this in performance and without prior preparation or discussion. However, a good Gamelan performance does not require such of the moment activity. Indeed, Anderson Sutton presents transcriptions of recordings of his own Gamelan teacher Suhardi made over a period of 21 years which show remarkable similarity across performances of pieces. In Suhardi's own accounts of his practice, he claims not to strive to create new variasi but might accidentally or inadvertently play one, or may be forced to play one recovering from error or helping a co-performer out of difficulties. Variasi which are found to be attractive might well be retained and played again. (Parenthetically, it is interesting that a borrowed term, variasi, is used to describe such activity.) Perlman (1993, p363) presents the contrasting case of a much younger musician Sukamso who described himself as "still searching, still lacking a large enough vocabulary" and willing to imitate others and experiment at rehearsals. The impression one gets from this work is that such experimentation is part of becoming a mature Gamelan player but is less noticeable once a degree of mastery has been achieved. Anderson Sutton (1998, p87) concludes:
[We] must concede that Javanese musicians improvise, but would we wish to characterise Javanese music as improvisatory? I would say not, for the aesthetic emphasis is not on originality, spontaneity, or even planned variability, though for many of the garapan parts some degree of variation is both normal and expected. I would conclude simply by positing that we view Gamelan music performance as the combination of individually composed parts, with relatively little determined spontaneously during performance and hardly anything presented without prior planning. It would not be a contradiction, then, to say that Javanese musicians improvise, but that Javanese music is not improvisatory.
Ecstatic Feedback
While Beethoven's sense of improvising a fantasy discounts an acknowledgement of the audience and the on-the-spot selection of parts seems inessential to Javanese Gamelan, these two features are jointly negated in Ali Jihad Racy's notion of 'ecstatic feedback' as applied to Arabic (Racy 1991) and Hindustani (Slaweek 1998) music. Racy argues that for many traditional Arabic musics a condition of 'creative ecstasy' is required for performers and audience alike and many features of a performance and its preparation are concerned with ensuring that participants will experience and communicate it. A detailed vocabulary is available in Arabic for musicians to distinguish different ecstatic states and discuss how to engender them. The production of ecstasy relates to all aspects of the practice of musicianship: training, rehearsal, choice of venue and material, and the conduct of performance before an enlightened audience. The singer Sabah Fakhri told Racy (1998, p95):
I feel delighted when I see the people understanding me and judiciously following what I am performingÉ Of course, I sense people's reactions from their movements and by observing their responses to what I am singing. In order for me to perform best, first I have to be sure that I am physically in good condition and that I am accompanied by good musicians as well as equipped with an appropriate sound system, one that I have tried out and adjusted in advance. Beyond that it is the audience that plays the most significant role in bringing the performance to a higher plateau of creativityÉ I like the lights in the performance hall to remain on so that I can see the listeners and interact with them. If they respond I become inspired to give more. Of course, the performer has also to be in a state of ecstasy in order to perform in the most inspired fashionÉ In a large measure, this state emanates from the audience.
The Arabic musical culture which Fakhri inhabits has no word that can be adequately translated as improvisation. Interestingly, Racy claims that there is a sense in which it does not matter to a musical culture which accepts flexibility and spontaneity as norms of musical creativity whether an aspect of the music is precomposed or of the moment. Naturally, though, as a practical concern, it is important that a musician has a wide range of strategies available to develop the music and respond in a timely way to the audience in their co-production of musical ecstasy. And it is these strategies, rather than any global notion of improvisation, which form the subject of treatises and musician's talk.
Slaweek (1998) endorses Racy's notion of ecstatic feedback in the context of Hindustani instrumental music. He notes too that "musicians crave ongoing audience approval in the form of verbalisations of praise, bodily gestures, and facial expressions of rapture" (p337). It would be wrong to think of these 'cravings' as mere self-indulgence on the part of exploitative performers as again a flexible improvisatory form of music making engendered by musicians in an uninhibited state of ecstatic creativity and responsive to an audience is thought to be constitutive of the performance situation as such. Uninhibited here does not mean without musical precedent. On the contrary, the various musical 'models' of Hindustani music, of which the raga are the most well known, are precisely the means by which a large repertoire of working musical possibilities can be rapidly worked with as the performers follow the imperative to "keep it going" (Slaweek 1998).
Interim Reflections
Let us take stock of the arguments so far. First, I want to claim that 'improvisation' is not always a member category - even in musics which do seem to be invented on the spot or in which alternatives are selected without prior agreement. Second, when we can identify something akin to the notions of improvisation we might have posited on a priori grounds its role and significance varies widely across the world's musics as well as within the recent history of Western art music. The questions of the relationship of performer to audience, the role of training, preparation and rehearsal, the significance of instruments and venues are all variable matters. Third, viable contrasts or comparisons with composition are also not always available because composition might not be a member category either. Still further: using phrases like spontaneous composition to describe, for example, Hindustani music would be an unfortunate and analytically insensitive imposition of an inappropriate conjunction of inappropriate categories. Fourth, the musical practices we have touched upon all point to the intimate ties that exist between the music and the social organisation of the various parties to it. It would be misleading to articulate this in terms of music having a social role, function or aspect. The very contours of a singer's improvisation in relation to an emotional state avowed by a princely patron are part of how the singer recognisably demonstrates his competence as a singer and as a subject. The ability of a singer to respond to the indications of an audience, and reciprocally the audience to the singer, in the co-production of ecstasy is a reflexive part of the musical-spiritual culture of the participants to such events. Fifth, as an alternative to stipulating definitions of improvisation or composition on a priori grounds and valorising one term or the other to justify or criticise a practice, improvisation can be made a matter of empirical study and practical reflection. My intention is to be consistent with this orientation in developing an understanding of what improvised electro-acoustic music might be or become. Before grappling with this in the next chapter, a further area of background scholarship needs to be reckoned with.
Jazz
It is jazz studies of course. A full treatment of the musicological literature on jazz would be impossible in a work of the current scale. Instead, I chose to focus on jazz studies which are consistent with the orientation to understanding improvisation which is beginning to emerge; that is, one which emphasises its practical and social interactional constitution. From this perspective the musicological literature on jazz is surprisingly thin. Most studies are devoted to analysing the musical products of jazz with conventional concerns: melody, harmony, rhythm and so forth. Rarely are these aspects of the music analysed as the social interactional accomplishments they so clearly are. The core role of improvisation in jazz - especially jazz from bebop onwards - cannot be denied. Indeed, here is a form of music where improvisation is a member category and where the relationships between any precomposed material which might form the starting point for a performance and the improvisation which takes place in relation to it are core to its musical specificity. It might seem curious, then, that the majority of musicological work does not take the interactional improvisational production of the music as its core research topic.
A pioneering study like Jost's (1975) Free Jazz is largely concerned with the melodic construction of the soloing work of musicians such as Coltrane, Coleman, Shepp and others. These musicians are presented as progressively developing increased freedom in their improvisations. 'Freedom' in Jost's work is especially melodic and harmonic freedom as he charts developments from the modal playing of Coltrane through to Sun Ra's embracing of electronics, textured improvisation and mystical spectacle. That the book ends with Sun Ra is perhaps symptomatic. It ends with the figure of all those discussed who perhaps most resists comprehension in terms of a narrow musicological study of melodic and harmonic variation. This is not to say that Jost's book is narrow in its sympathies. Rather, the methods of melodic analysis so thoroughly on view in the treatment of Coltrane find much less a place in discussions of Sun Ra - where musicological analysis of transcribed notated solos largely gives way to biographical and sociological accounts. Throughout, though, the interactional production of melody and harmony as real time accomplishments in the improvisational moment is not Jost's topic.
It is only very recently that detailed studies of interaction in jazz have appeared. I am not saying that musicologists have failed to acknowledge that jazz is produced in the interaction of (a typically small) ensemble of musicians. Not at all. Rather, it is only with work like Berliner (1994) and Monson (1996) that how this takes place is the topic of musicological analysis. In short, it is the mechanics of jazz interaction which becomes the topic for these recent writers. Melody, harmony, rhythm, overall formal affairs are analysed against this background. Of course, these writers were not the first to have an interest in jazz in terms of the methods musicians employ in their real time accomplishment of improvised performances. Sudnow's (1978/2002) Ways of the Hand presents a detailed ethnomethodological and phenomenological analysis of the author's own acquisition of skill as a jazz pianist. From the very different perspective of cognitive science, Pressing (e.g. 1984) has studied jazz improvisation in terms of putative psychological mechanisms involved in its conduct. However, neither of these authors prioritise interaction within jazz ensembles as their topic which, as I hope to show, is a decisive departure for musicological studies of jazz and one which is especially formative of the perspectives on improvised electro-acoustic music which I will develop.
For the purposes of the current work, I will especially discuss Ingrid Monson's (1966) ethnographic and musical-analytic study Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction as this author offers interesting connections between a certain characterisation of jazz as an interactional production and its significance in Afro-American culture.
Grooving
Compared with Jost's studies of the progressive melodic invention of individual jazz players, Monson begins with a methodological inversion: it is the collective production of rhythm and how this is accomplished by the bass, piano and drums which is her starting point (1996, p26-72). Each of these instruments is introduced in turn before any discussion of the melodic activities of soloists. Indeed, Monson's informants insist on the melodic and harmonic potential of each instrument in the rhythm section. A 'walking' bassist can break the pattern to echo or vary one of the 'front line's' melodies. A 'comping' pianist can bring out right hand melodies from an otherwise chordal accompaniment. A drummer can select particular drums to shift the harmonic register of the ensemble or can play short sequences of pitches (e.g. on carefully tuned toms). In short, each instrumentalist has a melodic-rhythmic flexibility which enables varied relationships to be taken to each other and to any soloist who might be playing at the time.
For nearly all of Monson's informants it is the collective production of a groove which makes for effective jazz ensemble playing. The groove is an aesthetic ideal but it is also a matter of practical coordination between players. It would be misleading to abstract a single 'rhythm line' and treat this as the groove when it is the coordinated activity which matters. For example, clarinettist Don Byron tells Monson that grooving is "a euphoria that comes from playing good time with somebody" (p68). Being able to groove, or swing, is an essential feature of properly improvised jazz ensemble performance and can be destroyed with an excessive reliance on prepared parts. Byron again (p84):
I hate hearing them bands where likeÉ one cat's playing some shit that he practiced. Another cat's playing some shit that he practiced. Everybody's playing some stuff that they practicedÉ On a certain level there's like a feeling, "well, I like playing with you," but I mean, what does that mean?É You know, we didn't play shit together. We didn't do nothing together. I played my stuff, you played your stuff, we didn't screw up the time.
In both of these quotes playing in good time without screwing up is a minimal accomplishment compared with grooving as a band which only comes with flexible responsiveness to others.
Soloing arises on the basis of an already established complex musical sociality established by the groove. Indeed, many of Monson's informants praised admired soloists for their ability to 'colour' the rhythm with pitch choice or to work with a very restricted range of pitches to bring out different aspects of the ongoing rhythmic texture. While a solo changes the relationship between instrumentalists, the groove and its demand for careful listening and responsiveness should not disappear.
I would wish to add that a number of the formal features of jazz can also be discussed in terms of the establishment and maintenance of the groove. By starting a piece with a precomposed section or a well-known popular tune, the ensemble presents themselves with a favourable environment for establishing the groove. By returning to such material between solos or at the end of the piece, the ensemble not only give a formal shape to the music, they also enable the groove to be checked, repaired, improved, modified. I would like to suggest that the formal features of jazz - and the role that jazz composition often plays - should be understood in terms of the maintenance of interaction and participation amongst members of the ensemble. I do not have space to develop this view here but Monson's extended analyses (p137-177) of a performance by the Jaki Byard Quartet of Bass-ment Blues contains a number of phenomena which can be thought of in these terms. Parenthetically, this makes for a very different impression of the relationship between jazz and popular tunes than that alleged by Adorno - a point also worthy of further development.
Sayin' Something: Jazz as Conversation
Persistently, Monson's informants, like Berliner's (1994), think of jazz as a conversation. Musicologists, especially of a structuralist or poststructuralist variety, commonly employ linguistic metaphors or study methods for analysing music. Consider, for example, Nattiez' (1990) symptomatically entitled Music and Discourse or the various theoretical writings of Seeger (e.g. 1977). However, in Monson and Berliner's studies, it is members who are making such comparisons of the practical production of their music and conversation. Drummer Ralph Peterson (Monson, 1996 p78):
But you see what happens is, a lot of times when you get into a musical conversation one person in the group will state an idea or the beginning of an idea and another person will complete the idea or their interpretation of the same idea, how they hear it. So the conversation happens in fragments and comes from different parts, different voices.
Monson takes such remarks seriously and explores the sense in which jazz could be said to be conversationally organised. She cites Goodwin (1990, p6) whose remarks bare a similarity with Peterson's:
Participants in conversation have the job of providing next moves to ongoing talk which demonstrate what sense they make of that talk. It therefore is possible to see how group members themselves interpret the interaction they are engaged in.
In fact, Goodwin here is endorsing a common view in the field of Conversation Analysis (see the collection of foundational posthumously published writings: Sacks 1995). She draws attention to how conversation is locally organised as a series of 'next moves'. Indeed, two part 'adjacency pairs' (e.g. question-answer, request-compliance) can be found ubiquitously in conversational interaction. She observes that it is through their production of 'nexts' that participants display their understanding of the ongoing conversation. Conversation as a locally organised social production seems promising to compare with musical improvisation and, clearly, this is what Peterson is endorsing.
Monson presents a number of instances of interactional give and take in improvisation which are taken as conversational (p77-87). The interplay between soloist and accompanists, as well as the interplay within a rhythm section, can often be seen to be locally organised as first and second parts: spaces in a solo are filled with melodically oriented bass lines, triplets in a solo are echoed with triplet patterns in the bass, a drum roll leads into a new chorus, and so forth.
Sounding, Woofing, Playing the Dozens, Signifying
Monson takes this observation further. Not only does she find many elements of jazz improvisation to be conversationally organised, jazz relates to culturally specific forms of conversational interaction, in particular, those associated with African American formats of verbal duelling variably known as sounding, woofing and playing the dozens. Kochman (1986) describes such formats (and others which he treats collectively using the commonly used African American term of 'signifying') as involving 'indeterminate strategic ambiguity' - whether an utterance is taken as a serious insult or a joke depends more on the receiver's reaction than on any ascription of intentions to the sender. The maintenance of the interaction itself as a progression of challenges and responses is more to the point than inciting a fight. A "cool" or "hip" response to an insult will be one which responds with "poise and balance" (Monson 1996, p88, see also Goodwin 1990) rather than being unsettled or at a loss for words. It is precisely this kind of kind of heightened challenge which Monson identifies in the exchanges in jazz. For her, there is a common African American cultural aesthetics at work.
This aesthetics sees a particular value in mimicry and imitation and in call-response formats (Floyd 1991). A linguistic example from Goodwin (1990) of 'format tying' is seen to have many musical analogues:
Billy, who has been teasing Martha about her hair, has just laughed.
Martha: I don't know what you laughin' at.
Billy: I know what I'm laughin' at. Your head.Of course, simply uttering 'your head' would have sufficed as a response to Martha. That Billy echoes the format of her immediately preceding turn heightens the tease.
Intermusicality
Monson continues the theme of linking musical features of jazz with African American cultural aesthetics in her treatment of what she calls 'intermusicality'. This coinage of course parallels the term 'intertextuality' used particularly by literary theorists to discuss the relations between texts and, most especially, to pick out texts which themselves are made up of such relations through citation, allusion, lexical or stylistic mimicry, parody, pastiche or whatever. That jazz itself is, in part, about the relations between musics is the point here. Don Byron tells Monson (p104):
There's irony all over, irony everywhere... It's definitely that balance... between totally opposite aesthetics... the conflict between being serious and avant, and just playing swinging shit... a polar pulling between cleanliness and dirtiness, between knowing the rules very well and breaking them. There's a certain kind of pull between opposite impulses that you... see in any good black anything... a certain kind of inventiveness outside of... what is acceptable. And I think that comes from being in the society in that role... just the fact that you're not quite an accepted member of society gives you a certain distance from the way things usually go.
It is easy to relate such statements to well known themes in cultural theory. Byron's metaphor of the 'pull' of opposite cultural tendencies is reminiscent of Bakhtin's (1981) ideas of centripetal and centrifugal forces in cultural dialectics and, as Monson also notes, ideas of ironic intertextuality have been prominently discussed in African American literary aesthetics as well as relatable to the sociolinguistic notions of signifying discussed in the previous section. Monson sees these themes through in analyses of John Coltrane's My Favourite Things, Roland Kirk's Rip, Rig and Panic amongst other pieces.
Coltrane's working of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway tune features many analysable musical features by means of which the ironic effect is achieved. What are brief two bar interludes between instances of the main melody of the song (Raindrops on roses...) in the stage version become extended into eight bar vamps of a more harmonically complex nature. The 'B section' of the tune (When the dog bites...) is not heard until the very end of the performance and then in a truncated form which does not modulate as the original does into the relative major (Then I don't feel so bad...). Coltrane eschews then the cliché of modulating minor to major at the moment that, lyrically in the original, momentary misery is overcome. Soloing by Coltrane and McCoy Tyner takes place not over the chordal structure of the core melody, as might occur in much jazz improvisation based around a theatre tune, but over extensions of the vamps which are based on the more marginal interlude material. Furthermore, when Coltrane does play the main melody, he does so in a highly syncopated fashion quite unlike the very square depiction of the melody in the sheet music version which, evidently, a song plugger supplied to the Coltrane Quartet at a gig in 1960 when The Sound of Music had been in Broadway production for less than a year. Such syncopations - and the dense interlocking groove that the rest of the quartet provide - give the song a strong 'six feel' as opposed to the straight waltz time of the original. Even so a residual waltz feel is present, something which would have been heard as most unusual to jazz audiences of the time.
A vast array of musical features in the Coltrane Quartet's version can be seen to be playing ironically with the rigidities of a composed melody for the theatre. Melodic, harmonic and formal features are all inverted in their significance as an optimistic Broadway tune becomes a vehicle for "brooding improvisation" (Monson 1996, p117).
Music, Culture and Conversation Revisited
There are many interesting features for the study of improvisation in Monson's (1996) and Berliner's (1994) ambitious treatments of jazz. Of particular interest is how both authors try to trace the connections between the music, the fact that it is an improvised music, and its cultural context. In Monson's case, this includes some attempts to show that the music is 'enculturated' in its very texture: melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and formal elements are related to the specific situation of jazz as an (especially, if not uniquely) African American cultural production. These demonstrations involve, as we have discussed, a focus on intermusicality and a specific understanding of African American conversational practices. While jazz, its musicological analysis and cultural embeddedness are per se topics beyond the purview of the current work, I want to examine here the connections that can be made between improvisation and conversation in more depth. And this for a number of reasons. First, as this metaphorical association is so ubiquitous in performers' and listeners' discourse, we need to understand what is going on when the comparison is made. Second, seeing improvisation as conversation may give us an insight into the real time production of orderliness in improvised music. That is, it may help us link a characterisation of the situated activities of performers to the formal organisation of the music they produce. Third, the responsiveness of (good) conversational interaction is often taken as an aesthetic goal for (good) improvised musics. All of these matters will turn out to be important to my characterisation of what improvised electro-acoustic music might be.
Important to Monson's treatment of improvised jazz and conversation is to not merely note that members often make comparisons between the two but to give this an analytic status. She principally does this through Goodwin's work on the social organisation of talk in black children. However, a certain confusion can arise at this point. As noted above, Goodwin's remarks about the sequential organisation of conversation around 'nexts', how this offers in-built opportunities for recognising and displaying how the talk is understood, and how all this creates an instrinsic motivation for listening are ubiquitous features of conversation and are not just confined to specific formats of African American exchange. That is, the claim cannot be that it is by virtue of possessing core features of conversation that jazz is a specifically African American cultural production as these features are ubiquitous. The claim must be rather that to organise a music that way is a particularly African American thing to do. I think this claim must be taken very carefully as so much of jazz improvisation does not fit the model of conversation closely applied (and its close, rather than loose, application does seem to me to be required to licence convincing comparisons with sociolingtuistic study of African American discourse).
Conversation is a turn taking affair, yet many of the organisational features of jazz concern the shaping of a player's contribution in the light of concurrent contributions from others. Jazz is after all, typically, a polyphonic music. In the terms of Sacks et al. conversations are locally managed a turn at a time. Yet much of jazz improvisation concerns the deployment of forms of organisation with a longer reach. A melody and its chordal harmonisation give players resources to organise their productions beyond what is immediately next. Perhaps the conversational metaphor could be rescued at this point by insisting on a flexible definition of what counts as a turn and hence when those moments of transition from current to next occur but this, of course, would be begging a specifically musical analysis of such phenomena which the conversational metaphor itself would no longer be guiding. A common treatment in the Conversation Analysis literature is to regard issues of turn allocation (who speaks when) and turn construction (what kind of speech action they are performing) as locally managed affairs in conversation whereas in 'rituals' turns are pre-allocated to specific speakers with a particular, known-in-advance, constructional formation. Hence, in the courtroom (Atkinson and Drew 1979), questions are pre-allocated to counsels and answers pre-allocated to witnesses. It is such pre-allocations which enable counsels and witnesses to interact as, precisely, counsels and witnesses. In jazz, or at least the kind studied by Monson, the pre-identification of musical roles for different instrumentalists again seems to me to be a matter in tension with any far reaching comparison with conversation (or with ritual for that matter as, I would want to claim, the characterisation of ritual we have been dealing with concerns the distribution of speakers to particular turn types and the notion of turn we have already argued is problematic, or at least awaits further explication, in musical contexts).
What are we to make, then, of remarks like Peterson's which do make such comparisons? We must remind ourselves of the precise context in which the comparison is made. Peterson is pointing out certain specific phenomena and making a comparison with conversation on that basis. To be sure the swift completion of an utterance by a co-interactor is commonplace in conversation - indeed Leudar and Antaki (1988) is a study of just that. And this kind of latching and continuing is familiar in music too. In short, it is the observation of specific phenomena which occasion the comparison in Peterson's talk. As a matter of ethnographic method, I would want to respect this feature of Peterson's talk and regard his occasioned production not as a (proto-)theory or analysis of or a metaphor for improvisation which should be extrapolated beyond accounting for the particular phenomena it is tailored for. To be sure, a jazz improvisation will contain locally produced features where a competent member - player or listener - can identify a current and a next. It will also contain features managed over different timescales, ones beyond an immediate responsiveness. As such the analysis of an improvisation would do well to treat this management of multiple musical times as a core topic. While locally produced examples of this-then-that, call-then-response, statement-then-variation when distributed across players attest to the social interactional organisation of improvisation, they do not exhaust its formal social interactionally engendered features.
I hope the reader does not think I have been labouring the point excessively, nor unjustifiably targeting Monson's ambitious work on jazz. My purpose is not to pillory Monson - though I do think it is too much to hinge an argument for the African American cultural specificity of jazz on an extrapolation of member's occasioned remarks and specific musical phenomena into a metaphor with substantive implications (though, in turn, it must be admitted that this is not Monson's only argument). My main purpose is rather to undercut the temptation to make immediate responsiveness an essential feature of an aesthetic of improvisation and valorising a sense of improvisation-as-conversation in order to do so. As we have seen, many of the world's musics are interactively produced in performance with varying degrees of pre-organisation. Not all of these can be properly typified as 'doing improvisation'. Even where improvisation is a member category, the texture of the music is not exhausted by formats which go this-then-that.
'Free' and 'Non-idiomatic' Improvisation
Monson's and Berliner's work on improvisation is principally confined to jazz musics in a recognisable tradition following from Coltrane, Charlie Parker and various others - a tradition very much alive in the music of the contemporary improvisors they study. It is a music of differentiated roles for instrumentalists, a music of solos and accompaniment, a rhythmic grooving music, a music of variations on borrowed, pre-composed or otherwise alluded to material, and so forth. Of course, all of these features have come to be optional or avoided in many forms of jazz from the mid-1960s onwards, as well as in improvised musics whose surface similarity to jazz may only lie in the choice of certain instruments.
As Dean (1992) emphasises, an equality of instrumental roles without any presumed relationship to soloing or accompaniment is notable in the music of AMM, Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME), MEV, New Phonic Art, all of whom date from the late 1960s. For many commentators, the late works of Coltrane are jazz at the limits of post-bebop improvisation and at the beginning of new 'non-idiomatic' (to use Bailey's, 1992, term) forms. In the 1965 recording of Coltrane's Ascension, for example, the musicians were arranged in a circle, literally without any sense of a 'front line', to encourage their symmetrical attentiveness to each other and equal opportunities for participation. These recordings are characterised by dense improvised textures with only occasional recognisable soloing. For Dean (1992), these late Coltrane works announce a form of 'textural improvising' which is most prominent in the work of AMM. Over more than a thirty year period, now, AMM have pursued a music in which the collective production of texture is a fundamental organising feature. On a number of occasions (e.g. in Childs and Hobbs 1982/1983), AMM percussionist Eddie Prévost has described AMM's textures as 'laminal' - that is, made up in turn of a number of textural layers. Indeed, Laminal is the title of a three CD retrospective of AMM containing concert recordings from 1969, 1982 and 1994. The accompanying booklet recalls the weekly public rehearsals that AMM conducted in the 1960s in a highly reverberant rehearsal space. The use of sometimes extreme levels of amplification in a live room by musicians with a taste for texture naturally gave rise to a music where it can be unclear to performers and audience alike which instrument is the source of which contribution to the overall production. In a sleeve note to Generative Themes (1982), Prévost remarks that the performers would commonly stop to listen to find out the source of a sound only to then realise that they were producing it themselves. In interview with Bailey (1992), Prévost argues that this experience of a loss of ones identity within a collectively produced laminal texture can sometimes require a musician to 'differentiate' herself with a clearly legible gesture. It is the occurrence of such gestures which often precipitate a larger scale organisational change in the music as new materials are sought for continuing 'heuristic dialogue'.
It was improvising saxophonist Evan Parker who (Prévost claims) first characterised AMM music as laminal. In doing this, he was making a contrast with the 'atomic' improvisation style of other ensembles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rather than organise a music around layered textures, atomic improvisations consist of microscopic elements arranged in relationship to each other. For example, some of the work of the SME, in which Parker played with John Stevens and others, can be characterised in this way. Indeed, in Stevens' (n.d.) book of improvisational exercises Search and Reflect great emphasis is played on the use of small sounds. Clicks, no matter what instrument they are realised with, are valued as a means by which musicians can immediately respond to the activity of others and do so with materials which will not overly dominate the sound. The click will leave maximal space for others to fill with their clicks. Using clicks and other atomic productions, then, a musician can maintain a balance between contributing and listening to others in a way which maximises mutual responsiveness. While Stevens regards the click as a limit case of the sounding duration, one which specially highlights the reciprocal relationship of sound to silence, he also writes from time to time as if sustained notes should be regarded as a sequence of instants - slurred clicks perhaps we can say. In the ongoing production of a sustained note, the musician is passing over a series of opportunities to stop playing. In this way, the rationale behind the click (responsiveness, leaving space for others) forms a baseline for assessing the utility of a sustained note. In a music of this sort, textural exploration through sustained sounds is likely to be rather exceptional.
In an interview, Martin Davidson (1997) asks Evan Parker:
Did you find playing with the SME restrictive at all? It sort of comes across that you are being restrained, shall we say.
EP: Are you sure that's not with the benefit of hindsight, looking at what came later? [what came later in Parker's work is discussed below - JMB]
MD: Maybe.
EP: I didn't feel particularly restrained. I felt a lot of what John was talking about, or the kind of method, such as there was one, was based on several quite simple rules, which is that if you can't hear somebody else you are playing too loud, and if what you are doing does not, at regular intervals, make reference to what you are hearing other people do, you might as well not be playing in the group. I mean I've put it in my own language, but those were maybe the two most important lessons that John wanted people to learn when they played with SME. And so there was what you can call a compositional aesthetic which required musicians to work with those two kind of rules or ideals in mind.
Dean (1992, p27-47) provides an analysis of the development of rhythm in jazz and non-idiomatic (or 'non-formulaic' in Dean's terminology) improvisation which can help us understand how a contrast between atomic and laminal styles could emerge. Dean traces a number of tendencies in the complexifying of rhythm since late-bebop: the superimposition of metres by aggregating pulses or their subdivisions into extrametric pulse groups; the use of changing and coexisting pulse speeds in metrical improvisation; and so forth. It is worth recalling Monson's observation at this point that the groove is a collectively produced phenomenon, requiring the intermeshing of different instrumentalist's contributions. Thus, these superimpositions and aggregations are not just rhythmic but also social interactional affairs - requiring ever more delicate and difficult practical coordination between players. Something's got to give! In particular, the status or very existence of a pulse needs to be re-valued. Dean (1992, p45):
É there seem to be two different stances, for both performer and listener. In the first, there is taken to be a continuing function of the same status as pulse (we can term it 'free pulse' or 'impulse' to distinguish it from fixed pulse) throughout most of the music. These impulses usually occur fairly close together in time - between twice and four times per secondÉ
On the other hand, many musicians, including many of my European free improvising colleagues, admit to feeling rather slow impulses, of around one per 1.5 seconds, which are fairly regular, but do not quite qualify as pulses, and within which they place irregular groupings of subimpulsesÉ The flexibility of approach this allows is useful for the improvisors in giving a sense of space units, which can be taken as appropriate for placing successively contrasting ideas, often one per space. On the other hand, the space units are not necessarily felt synchronously by the other musicians, in fact usually notÉ [which means] that a massive convergence on an accentuation point, out of a grossly divergent structure, is very rareÉ The consequence of this approach is that overall activity of a group free improvisation can readily become extremely dense, with events happening many times per second. There is no clear pressure to wait for the beginning of a subsequent impulse (one or more later) for the next action, unlike the situation in pulsed music. Indeed if as usual the musician is defining the impulse by the activity s/he performs within it, it may become rather difficult to continue to sense an impulse progression when not playing. This is perhaps one of the limitation of free impulsed playing.
What is interesting about Dean's analysis for our purposes is his attempt to fashion a three fold link up: between the maintenance of a pulse, certain forms of inter-musician coordination, and hearable musical forms. As the groove complexifies or loosens into the pulse, other forms of social coordination and musical organisation come into existence. But these in turn can be found problematic from time to time. A 'free pulse' might be hard to collectively sustain through improvisational playing in the absence of pre-composed material or a differentiation of musical responsibility. A slow unaccented impulse might lead to extremely dense textures without unexpected group convergences (indeed, achieving these too may require some pre-agreement or pre-composition, cf. my earlier remarks about such convergences in Fell's work). I read atomic and laminal styles of improvisation as further attempts to deal with this situation and this at the threshold of disappearance of the pulse. Both are attempts to maintain characteristic forms of social organisation between players without relying on either pre-composition or the necessity of a mutually enfolding pulse. Dean (1992, p46) asks:
Do any improvisors work in what they feel to be an impulseless space?É
The most notable examples are the early work of AMM and, to a lesser extent, that of MEVÉ It seems particularly possible to achieve this state with electronic instruments, or at least with amplification of very soft sounds so that they can be sustained for very long periodsÉ
It is interesting that there was a comparable involvement with long notes among composers in the early 1960s.. Thus Lamont [sic] Young's Composition Number 7 of 1960 consists of an 'infinitely' sustained two-note chordÉ Many of these composers, like Oliveros and Young, were also improvisors, and it may perhaps be because of that experience of producing/performing musicÉ that they developed this interest in long notes.
In more recent improvising, with the wide availability of synthesisers which can also sustain permanently, groups involving other instruments have also begun to be more able to perform such virtually impulseless music: for instance, AMM, Wired, New Phonic Art, and Gruppo Nuova ConsonanzaÉ This is an example of a clear influence of the availability of technology, but the wide development of circular breathing techniques among improvisors since Coltrane (for example, Evan Parker, saxophonist) shows that human devices can overcome the technical problems anyway, and this was a simultaneous evolution in the early 1970s.
I have quoted Dean at length because he makes some symptomatic connections between different forms of music and their organisation, and technology and instrumental technique. These are my core topics too. And this is how I'd formulate the questions these topics arise in response to. In the fallout after the disappearance of the pulse, how are forms of socially organised improvised music making possible? How can something hang together when it is no longer the groove or its residues which is providing an intrinsic motivation for the players to attend to each other? What resources (other than those which are composed, borrowed, found in the groove or whatever) will enable us to achieve musics with multiple forms of organisation (current-and-next, longer reach)?
One can play over drones and, of course, LaMonte Young has no monopoly on this. Drones are ubiquitous in the improvised musics of the world as a resource for giving pitch gravitations while allowing multiple temporalities to be constructed thereupon. A drone also enables a musician to test the resonances of a performance space. This interaction between drone, time and space is a feature of LaMonte Young's work just as much as it is of the Hindustani music discussed earlier.
One can breath in a circular fashion, something which in turn Evan Parker also has no monopoly over. However, Parker's specific reasons for extending his technique with circular breathing, double-tonguing and multiphonics are interesting to examine in depth. In particular, he suggests that they stem from an interest in developing strategies for solo playing after the experience of group improvisation in SME under Stevens' strictures (Parker 1992).
Realising that I was interested then in the challenge that solo playing represented I was aware that my approach had become overly concerned with the modulation of other musicians' input! I asked myself what were the longest units of material that could be incorporated into an improvisation? In answering this question I gradually developed the use of additive procedures for building patterns and used repetition/mutation procedures which have characterised much of my subsequent solo improvising. Two qualities have been remarked on consistently in the intervening period: comparisons with electronically synthesised music and references to machinesÉ Through the repetition of simple phrases which evolve by slow mutations (a note lost here, a note added there, a shift of accent, dynamic or tone colour) their apparent 'polyphonic' character can be manipulated to show the same material in different perspectives. The heard sound is monitored carefully and the small increments of change introduced to maintain or shift interest and the listeners' attentionÉ
The challenge for me in solo improvising is to fill the acoustic space. [By] exploiting natural acoustic resonances the illusion of 'polyphony' can be enhanced. The activity of maintaining several layers of activity has more in common with the circus arts of juggling and acrobatics than with the soul searching of high art (or whatever it is supposed to be about)É
In testing my limits of duration I worked on two techniques which have given a particular character to what I now feel free to call my style. Using an up/down motion of the tongue, rather than the standard technique of tu-ku using throat attack, I developed a double tonguing which was faster and more flexible and capable of use over a wider dynamic range. This technique made rapid successions of notes of very short durations possibleÉ To extend durations beyond a breath length I worked on circular breathing technique in which a small reserve of air in the cheeks is pushed through the instrument while the diaphragm is used to breath in through the noseÉ I worked on the reed's ability to sustain a lower pitch while articulating selected overtones combining the method for overtone selectionÉ I worked on sustaining overtones and interjecting lower notes which is basically the same technique with different timing.
As elsewhere in this section we see an affinity in Parker's writing being articulated between ideas of machine music, a sense of the acoustic space and the deployment of specific techniques to accomplish an improvisation. Parker suggests that these techniques were developed to counter being "overly concerned with the modulation of other musician's input". Indeed he develops a new concern for "the longest units of material that could be incorporated into an improvisation" and "the illusion of 'polyphony'" - matters which could scarcely be further from Stevens' pedagogical emphasis on click music. Although these concerns and techniques to realise them were explored in the context of solo improvisations, Parker's recent duo and group work display the same general style. How the 'modulations' of the contributions of others occurs in this work is a matter worthy of detailed analysis. I can only hint at some topics for such research here. Most notably, I hear Parker timing the mutations he mentioned (their occurrence, their rate) in relation to the activity of co-performers. "A note lost here, a note added there, a shift of accent, dynamic or tone colour". In the group work, 'here', 'there' and the relevant shifts to make are coordinated with co-performers. In this way, Parker's techniques - born of solo improvisation - can find a characterful application in a collective setting. Of course, this can give rise to music which has a 'laminal' form as the continually mutated lines of Parker's saxophone layer with, for example, the electro-mechanically propelled guitar of Keith Rowe (e.g. on Dark Rags, where, incidentally, the wordplay of rags to raga is intended).
And so, at last, to the machine. We have seen musical machines (synthesisers, electro-mechanical interventions on sounding material etc.) presented as a means to engender impulseless music. Naturally, a drum machine or a sampler playing back an excerpted beat can accomplish the exact opposite too, even if that is used as the basis for a (pulsed) improvisation. When Parker notes that his own playing style is often compared with the productions of a machine, he particularly has in mind an algorithmic device which can generate a multiplicity of variations from a single musical 'seed':
Recent popularisation of the ideas of chaos theory means that most people are now familiar with fractal patterns and Mandelbrot figures. Without wishing to jump on a band wagon, the process involved in the evolution of a phrase in this way of improvising has something in common with the equations that generate these patterns and figures where the output from one basically simple calculation is used as the input for the next calculation in an iterative process which by many repetitions finally generates a pattern or figure whose complexity is not foreseeable from the starting point.
The ever-same drone machine, the ever-same pulse machine, the ever-new phrase machine. Three musical machines. We can think of others. Musical machines are ubiquitous. But how exactly do these machines relate to the social organisation of improvised music making? How exactly might a machine stand in lieu of or enable the coordination of players otherwise achieved through other means - groove, pulse, raga, call-response, mimicry, search and reflect, layered texture, ecstasy? How on earth could a machine do or help with any of that?