* Scriabin: The Complete Piano Sonatas (Laredo) (Nonesuch 2CD)
* Stefan Prins: Fremdkörper (Sub Rosa 2CD)
*
Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley: 26.Jazzfestival, Saalfelden, Austria 8-28-04 (FM
CDR)
*
Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley: Teatro Communale, Modena, Italy 10-11-07 (FM
2CDR)
*
Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley: Auditorium, Strasbourg, France 10-02-09 (AUD
2CDR)
*
Anthony Braxton: GTM (Iridium) 2007 Vol.3 Set 1 (New Braxton House FLAC)
*
Anthony Braxton: GTM (Iridium) 2007 Vol.3 Set 2 (New Braxton House FLAC)
*
Terje Rypdal Trio: Sendesall, Bremen, W. Germany 4-04-73 (Pre-FM FLAC)
*
Ingrid Laubrock Anti-House: Moers Festival, Germany 5-26-12 (FM FLAC)
*
Grateful Dead: Spring 1990 (selections) (GDP/Rhino 18HDCD)
*
Pink Floyd: Animals (Pinkfloyd/EMI CD)
* Pink Floyd: The Wall (Pinkfloyd/EMI 2CD)
*
Genesis: Three Sides Live (Atlantic 2LP)
* U2: The Unforgettable Fire (Island/Universal 2CD)
* New Order: Power Corruption And Lies (Factory/Rhino 2CD)†
* Talk Talk: Laughing Stock (Verve/Polygram CD)†
*
Helios Creed: Galactic Octopi (Transparency 2LP)
*
Thurston Moore: Demolished Thoughts (Matador CD)†
*
OM: God Is Good (Drag City LP)†
*
OM: Advaitic Songs (Drag City 2-45RPM LP)
* Steven Wilson: Grace For Drowning (KScope BD)
*
Opeth: Still Life (Peaceville CD/DVD)(†)
*
Opeth: Blackwater Park (Legacy Edition) (Sony/Universal CD/DVD)†
*
Opeth: Deliverance (Music For Nations/KOCH CD)†
*
Opeth: Damnation (Music For Nations/KOCH CD)†
*
Opeth: Ghost Reveries (Roadrunner HDCD)†
*
Opeth: Watershed (Roadrunner CD)†
*
Opeth: Heritage (Roadrunner CD/DVD)
* Storm Corrosion: Storm Corrosion (Roadrunner CD/BD)
*
Katatonia: Last Fair Deal Gone Down (Peaceville CD/CDEP)†/‡
*
Katatonia: Viva Emptiness (Peaceville CD)†/‡
*
Katatonia: The Great Cold Distance (Peaceville CD)†/‡
* Anathema: We’re Here Because We’re Here (KScope CD/DVD)
* Anathema: Weather Systems (The End CD)(†)
*
Baroness: Yellow & Green (Relapse 2LP)
* Holograms: Holograms (Captured Tracks MP4)†
†=iPod
‡=car
Commentary: "Composition vs. Improvisation: A False Dichotomy"
On Thursday, September 6, I will be playing improvised piano/drums
duets with my friend and former bandmate, Sam Byrd, at the opening
Indeterminacies event at
Zeitgeist Gallery. This will be first time I have
performed in public since the dissolution of UYA in 1995 and the first time on
piano since…when?...1984? I can’t remember. I’m a little bit nervous—not so
much about the music (Sam always inspires me to play beyond my abilities—which is
why I insisted he travel from Richmond to join me)—but more concerned about the
discussion segments, which will be led by
Vanderbilt professor,
Stan Link. Stan
is a good friend and I’m sure he’ll go easy on me, but he is a brilliant and
articulate composer with deep suspicions about the whole notion of
improvisation as a legitimate artistic practice. Of course, this is what makes
Indeterminacies unique: these are not concerts
per se; they are investigations into
the phenomena of performance and reception, critical thinking and audience
participation. The result is unscripted, deliberately indeterminate and always
challenging. We will be required to explain and, perhaps, justify and defend
whatever it is we’re doing from rhetorical attacks from Stan and a potentially hostile,
disapproving audience. Maybe not, but I’d be disappointed if we weren’t.
Consequently, I’ve been reading and re-reading some of the foundational
texts regarding improvisational music in order to buttress my argument that improvisation
is not only a legitimate practice but the basic expression of our innate human
creativity. In Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Wesleyan,
1998), Christopher Small helpfully insists that “music” is not a noun, but a
verb. “There is no such thing as music,” he writes:
Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do.
The apparent thing “music” is a figment, an abstraction of the action, whose
reality vanishes as soon as we examine it at all closely. This habit of
thinking in abstractions, of taking from an action what appears to be its
essence and giving that essence a name, is probably as old as language; it is
useful in the conceptualizing of our world but it has its dangers. It is very
easy to come to think of the abstraction as more real than the reality it
represents, to think, for example, of those abstractions we call love, hate,
good and evil as having an existence apart of the acts of loving, hating, or
performing good and evil deeds and even to think of them as being in some way
more real than the acts themselves, a kind of universal or ideal lying behind
and suffusing the actions. This is the trap of reifications, and it has been a
besetting fault of Western thinking ever since Plato, who was one of its
earliest perpetrators (p.2).
Small concludes that this kind of thinking is what led to the “privileging
of Western classical music above all other musics” (Id. p.3) and the denigration of
improvisation. But, as Derek Bailey points out in Improvisation: Its Nature and
Practice in Music (Da Capo, 1992), it is “musicking” in its purest form:
[M]ankind’s first musical performance couldn’t have been anything other
than a free improvisation...it is a reasonable speculation that at most
times since then there will have been some music-making most aptly described as
free improvisation (p.83).
In the context of human evolution, the development of notation and the
arrival of the sovereign composer is a comparatively recent event. Bailey explains
how idiomatic improvisation was a vital skill cultivated by musicians of the
Baroque era, where the continuo parts were generated from skeletal notational
symbols, the figured bass functioning like the chord symbols of jazz or the "Nashville Number System." He also reminds us
that the virtuoso soloists of 19th Century were expected to improvise
their own cadenzas or deliver an off-the-cuff set of themes and variations as
an encore. These skills were gradually lost in European tradition with the rise
of the “heroic composer”—yet improvisation remains an essential element of Indian
music, flamenco and, of course, jazz, rock and every other form of “popular
music” around the world. What we call “classical music” is no longer an
integral part of a living culture—something people do—it is the realm of
professionals: trained specialists who administer the “great works” of long-dead
composers for a passive audience of self-selected elites. The truth is:
improvisation—especially free improvisation—is something anybody can do, a concept
antithetical to “professionalism” with its concomitant barriers to entry. As
Bailey points out:
Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears
to offend both its supporters and detractors. Free improvisation, in addition
to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone—beginners,
children and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is
available. It can be an activity of enormous complexity and sophistication, or
the simplest and most direct expression: a lifetime’s study and work or a
casual dilettante activity. It can appeal to and serve the musical purposes of
all kinds of people (Id. pp.83-84).
It is the “dilettante” or “amateur” that is necessarily disparaged and
devalued in a musical culture that is administered from above by elite
professionals and specialists. But I proudly accept my role as an amateur—that is,
a lover of music—and an improvising dilettante. I do not hold myself out as a “musician”
but rather “musicking” is simply something that I do—whether it is “good” or
worth listening to is beside the point. And I celebrate the fact that, yes, anyone
can do it—they are just discouraged by a dominant culture that tries to tell
them can’t unless properly vetted and credentialed. Like Small, I believe “musicking”
is an innate ability, like speech, but it is deliberately suppressed by the
gatekeepers of “professionalism”:
[I]f everyone is born capable of musicking, how is it that so many
people in Western industrial societies believe themselves to be incapable of
the simplest musical act? If so, and it seems that many genuinely are, it must
be either because the appropriate means for developing the latent musicality
have been absent at those crucial times of their lives when the nervous system
is still in the process of formation (those who are deprived of speech
opportunities at that crucial time also never fully develop their speech
capacities) or more often, I believe, because they have been actively taught to
be unmusical (Small p.210).
The metaphor of speech or language goes only so far with regards to
music, but the absurdity of our musical culture is obvious: it is as if only professional
writers and paid speechwriters were allowed to speak and be heard. Like the child
who abandons the joy of finger-painting when told by teachers and other
authority figures that her drawings do not resemble their subjects, “[i]ndividuals
are assumed to be unmusical unless they evidence to the contrary” (Id.)—that is
to say, willing and capable of channeling their innate creativity to meet the
demands and needs of professionalism. Everyone else is rendered illiterate and mute.
It could be argued that this “de-musicking” of our culture is partly
responsible for (or at least reflective of) society’s larger ills.
Now, don't get me wrong: I am not suggesting that Stan Link, as a professional composer and
credentialed academic is an agent of oppression—far from it. His pedagogy focuses
on advanced 20th Century compositional techniques and the critical analysis of film
soundtracks while his electroacoustic music is radically subversive of the
musical status quo; frankly, he is barely tolerated in a conservatory culture
that worships Beethoven above all else. But his suspicions about improvisation
are sincere: improvised music oftentimes lacks the rigor and formal coherence
of a thoroughly planned composition. However, improvisation is, for most
improvisers, not an ideology: there is not an inherent conflict between
composition and improvisation. Some of its greatest practitioners are also fine
composers, from Duke Ellington to Andrew Hill to Cecil Taylor and Anthony
Braxton and they bring a highly developed sense of structure to their
improvisations. Moreover, even in free improvisation, a structure or form,
however rudimentary or amorphous, is the inevitable result of performance. A
common criticism of improvisers is that they are only capable of recycling familiar
material. That is true enough, but you can always add new words to your
vocabulary. As Joe Morris puts it in his new book, The Perpetual Frontier: The
Properties of Free Music (Riti 2012), “you can only play what you know how to
play, but you can learn something new instantly in the process of making it”
(p.40). Morris lucidly catalogs an ontological array of techniques and
methodologies available to the improviser and describes how “synthesis,
interpretation and invention” inform the processes of improvisation. At its
best, free improvisation eschews schema and clichés to create what Jack Kerouac
called, “deep form,” a spontaneous composition.
Theodore Adorno’s vicious attacks on jazz may appear wrong-headed on
the surface, but a close reading shows that his real disagreement was merely with its false
declarations of originality and its failure to live up to its own promise. In
his 1941 essay, “On Popular Music,” Adorno gets at the heart of his criticism:
Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations
have become so “normalized” as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to
express the standard devices of individualization…This pseudo-individualism is
prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that
the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely limited.
Improvisations…are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme.
In a great many cases, such as the “break” of pre-swing jazz, the musical
function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the
break can be nothing other than a disguised cadenza. Hence, very few
possibilities for actual improvisation remain (quoted in Peters p.78-79,
emphasis added).
In The Philosophy of Improvisation (Chicago 2009), Gary Peters rightly
points out that this passage “is not a rejection of improvisation any more than
it is a rejection of individuality.” He goes on to say:
Indeed, the issue for Adorno is precisely that the language or jargon
of free individuality alone cannot be actualized when it is spun around a
standardized framework that gives it the lie. No, the above amounts to a
defense of “actual improvisation” (Id.).
Adorno’s criticism was, for the most part, accurate, at least up through the Bebop
era, which, despite its harmonic sophistication, continued to base its improvisations on
the cyclical chord changes of standard show tunes. But while he might have been
loath to admit it, the music of Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor
and Anthony Braxton clearly allow for “actual improvisation”—and contemporary free
improvisation, with its reveling in the hyper-chromatic, dissonant counterpoint
of his heroes, Schoenberg and Webern, should be seen as the realization
of his dream of an autonomous, dialectical music, the actualization of true freedom
in an un-free world.
For me personally, composition and improvisation are simply different
means to different ends. Sometimes they work together and sometimes they are in
conflict. But, as an amateur—a lover of music of all kinds—I embrace them both
equally. I love to listen to classical music and play it on the piano for fun.
I love abstract, difficult music as well as the joyful release of a perfect pop
song. I love the visceral thrill of loud electric guitars and the ecstatic tribal beat
of dance music. I love the loose improvisations of the Grateful Dead and the
tightly controlled fury of Opeth. “Horses for courses,” as they say down here.
As for what Sam and I will be doing on Thursday, it is, in essence, music as
seismograph: what Vyacheslava Ivanov
would call the “cryptogram of the ineffable,” or the “hierograph of lived
experience” (quoted in Leeman p.35). Our long shared musical history has built
up the trust and affection which allows us to telepathically communicate our
most personal, inchoate thoughts and feelings in an unmediated, free improvisation. The
results may or may not meet the criteria of “good music” as conventionally defined,
but the “musicking” will be intimate and honest.
For Small, the meaning of music is about expressing ideal relationships:
The act of musicking establishes
in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is those
relationships that the meaning of the act lies.They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are
conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between
the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and
they model, or stand as a metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants
in the performance imagine them to be” (Small p.13).
In the band, we used to
talk about going to “that other, better world” which was only accessibly via improvisation.
We hope go there again on Thursday—you can come too! Please join us on September 6 at Zeitgeist
Gallery, 1819 21st Avenue, Nashville from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. The event
is free and open to the public--who will be encouraged to challenge us with probing questions and insightful comments. Indeed, an ideal relationship as I imagine it to be.
+++
+++
You can download music Sam and I have recorded over the past few years
in my home studio over at
The Internet Archive.
+++
Bibliography:
* Derek Bailey: Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Da
Capo, 1992)
* Richard Leeman: Cy Twombly: A Monograph (Flammarion, 2005)
* Joe Morris: Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music (Riti, 2012)
* Gary Peters: The Philosophy of Improvisation (Chicago, 2009)
* Christopher Small: Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and
Listening (Wesleyan, 1998)
