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On Spontaneous Music
Alvin Curran
The following reflections are written five years apart, the first in response to Sabine
Feisst, for her doctoral thesis, the second written at the request of Giesela
Gronemeyer for the present publication. The author begs the readers understanding
for some occasional overlap.
Improvisation is the art of becoming sound. It is the only art in which a human being
can and must become the music he or she is making. It is the art of constant, attentive and
dangerous living in every moment. It is the art of stepping outside of time, disappearing in
it, becoming it. It is both the fine art of listening and responding and the more refined art
of silence. It is the only musical art where the entire score is merely the self and the
others, and the space and moment where and when this happens. Improvisation is the
only musical art which is predicated entirely on human trust.
The art of improvisation assumes (and for me unequivocally proves) that human
beings are musical beings and that not unlike the great natural musicians of the
animal kingdomfrom crickets and cicadas to whales, wolves and lionsall human
beings are born with, possess and participate in some form of music.
Regardless of the musical context (the people, place or time, tradition or style), the
art of improvisation puts the full responsibility for the music being made on the
person/s making it, and for the entire duration of its making.
Hence, in free improvisation the prevailing notions about the origins of music
(the gods, collective memory, composers, mythology, etc.) are temporarily eclipsed
by the sheer magical energy of the physical person/s making the musicfor it is
they who are momentarily but fully responsible for the sounds they make. It is
they, the improvisers, in whom the traditional roles of composer, performer,
director and teacher are fused into one single role. It is they who, in every sense,
becomeliterally arethe music they make; and at best, transform everyone and
everything into that musicthat sharing of air, time and space. This is
immediately as evident on hearing an improvised cadenza in a Beethoven piano
concerto as it is in hearing Coltranes endless concatenations on the song My
Favorite Things or in a Dagar Brothers levitating performance of an evening raga.
And this is even far more evident in musics not rooted in tradition, but in
continuing experiment and research; such spontaneous musics could be said to be
based on almost nothing.
ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/07494460600989994
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Improvised music is, however, generally based on something: a word, a set of fixed
tones, a melody, rhythmic pattern, chordal sequence, timbral change, gesture (crescendo, diminuendo, fragmentation, drone, etc.), a reaction, a memory, a dream. Or any
combination of these. All musical cultures employing forms of improvisation codify
these forms around a specific set of sounds developed through a long historical process.
The history of western twentieth-century music in its modernist and
postmodernist attributes can be viewed as a series of attempts to liberate music
from various forms of tyrannyrules and traditions real or imagined: triadic
harmony, memorable melody, the twelve equal-tempered tones, metered regular
pulse, European orchestral timbres, ranges of instruments, standardized durations,
fear of disorder and chaos, the fear of silence. In the middle and late 1960s we
witnessed attempts to embrace all of these aspects of musical liberation while
focusing at the same time on the philosophical, political, and economic liberation of
music from itselfthat is, the freeing of music even from the need to liberate itself.
Nevertheless, a momentary and generalized freeing of music, not only of all former
musical ideology and practice, but from its fiercely rooted social and economic basis
in the West, became the utopian challenge taken up in many different ways, by a
number of dedicated musicians throughout the world. La Monte Young in New York
City, Larry Austin and Pauline Oliveros in California, Takehisa Kosugi (the Taj
Mahal Travelers) in Japan, Terry Riley, Glass and Reich, Tudor and Cage, Christian
Wolff, the Sonic Arts Union (Behrman, Ashley, Mumma, Lucier), Franco
Evangelistis Gruppo Nuova Consonanza, Gavin Bryars Portsmith Symphonia,
Cardews Scratch Orchestra, The Spontaneous Music Ensemble London and in
individual voices such as Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker, Peter Kowald,
Misha Mengelberg, The AACM (Muhal Abrams, Anthony Braxton) in Chicago, as
well as natural sound-artists Annea Lockwood and Maryanne Amacher etc.
The improvisation groups AMM in London and Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) in
Rome, however, can be said to have taken the most radical position in regard to this
process of liberation. Musically speaking, both groups were attempting to literally
reinvent music from zero. With revolutionary fervor, yet in a most pacific way,
everything pertaining to the art of music (within their imaginations) was called into
question. And while these groups had no boards of inquisitorsthere were no trials,
prison sentences, tortures or disappearancesthey tacitly agreed on a new musical
practice which would invest each member of the group with the responsibility for
every sound made, thus heightening the individuals listening awareness and playing
responses to all the sounds made at any instant (however simple or complex), as well
as heightening their overall sense of commitment to the work; they further agreed
that any audible or imaginable sound, or sound source, was equally valid as raw
musical material. This, indeed, gave birth to some of the most remarkable musics of
the time and, as far as one knew (in l966), there had never before been a music made
on such far-reaching principles of individual freedom and democratic consciousness;
this was collective music pure and simpleand without knowing it, a stunning artistic
example of political anarchy. From my experience in the founding of the group
Musica Elettronica Viva, I would like to describe what I believe were the principal
485
codes of action and expected behavior and implicit strategies and goals of our group
improvisationsthe music in all of its various phases has been described and
documented elsewhere.
What the group MEV (along with AMM) essentially did was to redefine music as a
form of property that belonged equally to everyone and hence to encourage its
creation freely by and through anyone anywhere. This idea alone had great
implications for the art of improvisation, for it brought forth a new and quite flexible
code of behavior based on the following principles:
0)
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
Any physical space is a potential musical space as is any time of day or night an
appropriate musical time.
All music starts anew each time, as if there had never been any music before it.
Any member of the group may utilize any audible or imaginable sound at any
time.
Musical remembering and musical amnesia are of equal valuein short, one
could build on past or conditioned experience or try to forget everything ever
known.
The requirements for musical participation are no longer based on purely
musical skills, education, technique, experience, age, gender, race or religion
but on an implicit code of universal harmony and mutual acceptance. This
resulted immediately in a form of transnational music.
Each player provides his/her own instruments and sound sources.
The act of collective performance has no specified duration and performances
begin and end by tacit (musically understandable) agreement.
Without leaders, scores, or any rules at all, the music should be based on the
musicians mutual respect for and trust in one another, the public, and the
individual and sum of all the sounds emitted into the performing space.
Because this music is fragile and dangerously based on almost nothing
(ephemeral sounds and precarious human relationships), the players must
cultivate extraordinary levels of attention, awareness and artistic efficiency
primarily through silence and rigorous listening, and appropriate action and
reactionso to prevent the music from becoming literally nothing. This form
of personal and collective commitment endowed everyone involved (including
the producers and public) with finely tuned ears and magnanimous attitudes.
No matter what transpires, a sense of transcendent unity is likely to be the
unspoken goal of every improvisational event. (This sense of unity, though not
always achieved, is very recognizable, almost tangible in certain moments.
Especially when one cannot answer the questions: did I make that/did we
make that/did you make that/did they make that?
All members share equally in the promotion, economic stability and creative
growth of the groupin return for an equal share in received proceeds.
This is a space for your own contribution.
15 17 July 1995
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in comparison to the singular task of keeping the musical energy high and unified,
efficient and in constant evolution.
To do this, to make music obliterating any awareness of related tradition or
predetermined structures, required an enormous self-discipline, commitment and
momentary suspension of the individuals self. It required above all a new expanded
musicality, one that could equate beauty with ugliness and vice versa. The resulting
musics were liberating in every sense . . . After performances, rather than return to
reality as if we had been casually experimenting in a scientific lab, we returned often
with the shared knowledge that we had all been somewhere, on a voyagein the
same illusive and unnamable spaceunified by making the same music together, as if
it had been composed, magically composed . . . and this music we knew was ours, we
had in fact composed and performed it in the momentbang-zoom!! Just like that.
Whatever else remains of the MEV legacy, we challenged the noble traditions of
western music in a new and untried way: by daring to reverse the proper professional
balance between technique and passion, by assertingIll say it againthat we, and in
fact anyone, could make a music based on nothing, with any sounding means and
without written score, sketch, agreement, leadership or even, we hoped, memory. That
in fact we could make music of powerful emotive content and attraction outside the
canons of historical western compositional practice was a profound discovery to all of
us in the group and to many outside. The collective process and a few early (middlesixties) electronic technologies allowed us to extract the hidden sounds inside any
object, or from the entire sounding environment, or from electricity itself, as well as
those drawn from the depths of the human mind and bodythis was the nuclear
matter of our daily experimental live-electronic group improvisations.
That the utopian cultural implications of this practice were in succeeding decades
absorbed, codified, expanded on, contested, marginalized, even somewhat forgotten
is historys natural way. Thirty-five years later, as I sit here in the July heat, it seems
to me that the revolution we had the privilege of participating in has evolved into
largely standardized improvisatory practices (some still vital, others not) that all in
some way had their origins in those mad fortuitous encounters among Free Jazz,
Indeterminacy, European structuralist composition, explosive countercultures, and
movements for social and economic justice. One could even argue that todays
sizeable worldwide free-improvising community, while apparently alive and well, is
making music in a temporal cul de sac a predictably common practice. Is this music
movement at an end, buried in no longer provocative atonalisms, collage, and macho
virtuosity, and overshadowed by the economic power of mainstream jazz, the
gravitational forces of the European New Music Betrieb, and more youthful forms
of hip-hop, noise and electronicsall which have successfully incorporated elements
of the earlier freely improvised music styles? I ask myself, will the myth of Schoenberg
outlive the myth of Cecil Taylor, or will both of them fade while Beethoven and Dr.
Dre slip away with the culture bounty?
In retrospect, maybe not much of the sixties experience was truly revolutionary,
and less of it had profoundly transformative consequences, but 30 years later, as
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trends and technologies in music are unfolding at a dizzying rate, thankfully the
confrontation between progressive and regressive has not been globalized out of
existence. The youth culture, without setting a foot in the piazza, imagines it can
subvert the entire social and economic order by the simple click of a mouse. And with
the planet now choking on its own voracious music consumptionmusic of every
kind everywhere all the timesurely someone will be able, once again, to inject it
with a wicked dose of orderly disorder. MEV is dead! MEV lives!
Gallipoli, 6 August 2000, edited by Susan Levenstein
http://www.alvincurran.com