Essay was written by Primož Trdan in 2012 as part of the
booklet for a compilation Sound Disobedience, released by Zavod Sploh
and L’innomable.
To write a detailed history of
freely improvised music of any given place is a contradiction in terms.
In its essence improvisation does not lend itself easily to such
retrospection; the lively activities of music circles that follow an
improvisation ideal resist the orderly historical reconstruction in the
same way that free improvisational form tends to elude any formal
analysis. A casual chronicler however cannot sidestep the simple fact
that over the last years the major impetus for improvised music in this
part of the world has come from the strivings of Sploh Institute.
Their activities rest on a few basic assumptions, which ensure that the
scene continues freely and renews itself in the process. The most
palpable expression of this is to be found in the concert cycle entitled
Confine Aperto, which in principle in terms of genre, ensemble
and location seems highly unprincipled. Behind the scene there is the
on-going and regular improvisation workshop called Research, Reflection which follows similar tenets: its free and continued activities rest on
a few rules, or rather on smallest common denominators as opposed to
some formula. Somehow it seems that all these activities emulate the
phenomenon of improvisation in its basic contours, in a continuous
moving forward.
Namely the fundamental structural maxim of improvisation seems to lie
in the not-looking-back. Hardly a novel proposition, nor is it
particularly academic, rather it derives from an etymological essence of
improvisation as unpremeditated activity, with all the focus on the
present moment and how that moment evolves in the future. The meaning of
not-looking-back might perhaps be elucidated better if we take it to
signify the major difference that exists in terms of musical structure
between composition and improvisation. The former is historically and
phenomenologically speaking determined precisely with this looking back
onto the past. Old compositional forms attest to this, as for example
the repetition of ritornellos in a baroque concerto, the theme of a
fugue or the function of a recapitulation in a sonata form. Something
similar can be said of the musical syntax which maintains its coherence
in the tonal harmony through a more or less even cadence model and a
return to the tonic harmonic function – a tonal system effectively means
a continuous looking back towards its beginning. When Arnold Schönberg
made the twelve chromatic tones qualitatively equal to each other and
therefore did away with the hierarchy between harmonic structures, he
transposed the composition into the realm of free chromaticism and with
that into the realm of free forms, of an unexpected »expressionist
logic« and close to the stream of consciousness; at least until a good
decade and a half later, with a strict dodecaphonic method, he went back
to composing within the classical formal patterns. It is no coincidence
that it is Schönberg’s music from this short period of free atonality
that is often to be found amongst the references of musicians who are
free improvisers.
It seems to be the case that it is only the freely improvised music
of the last half a century that has decisively separated improvisational
activity from composition making. This is on the one hand the result of
giving up the idioms that connect improvised music with the act of
composition. In the 19th century, for example, an improviser on the
organ was still thinking about the ways of modelling the phrases, about
cadences, harmony periodicity, even about the formal order. All of these
of course constitute the elements of composition making – for him
Schönberg’s explanation of composition as »a slowed-down improvisation«
would have been apt indeed. On the other hand, for a long time
improvisation was dependant on the pre-composed elements. Ragas in
Indian classical music or the chord progression in the jazz standards
are but the result of decisions taken by composers. It
is a wonderful paradox that in the decades following the Second World
War two fairly contradictory practices found themselves occupying the
same musical space: the free, radically spontaneous improvised music
making and the strictly structured, radically fixed composition making.
For both the practices, the findings of the musical language analysis
undertaken at the end of 1950s by György Ligeti would still hold true.
Ligeti had then made a convincing case that the new musical expression
is dictated by four processes: the resistance against established formal
schemes, the disappearance of conventionally received musical syntax,
the dissolution of the even metre or pulse, and the weakening of the
functions of separate formal sections that have lost their »vector-like«
properties. This would seem to offer a great platform for thinking
about the connections and divergences existing between acts of
improvisation and composition. The open and elusive form as well as the
irregular musical and sound syntax of free improvisation is born out of a
fast and intensive engagement with musical ideas. When the musician
faces an idea, and begins to play with it as the idea is emerging,
taking into account its transient nature and beginning to let go of it,
as he continuously searches for a new one, we can only imagine that
reflecting on the place and intention of the idea in the context of the
entire musical trajectory as well as the history of music is but
somewhere on the margins of the improviser’s consciousness. The
compositional liberalization of the musical form, syntax and rhythm in
the 1950s, however, emerged more out of the negative reaction against
the past aesthetic standards than out of a practical need. The modernist
ban on consonance and repetition turned into an ideological norm.
Elliot Carter has rejected even his modernist predecessors Charles Ives
and Edgard Varèse, writing thus: “I cannot understand the popularity of
that kind of music, which is based on repetition. In a civilized society
things don’t need to be said more than three times.” Essentially a
world-view statement, in our context it sends out a warning signal
against repetition in musical modernism. Perhaps it is not futile to add
here that Carter’s penchant for process and evolution in his works, as
for example in his Night Fantasies, comes very close to the
nature of an improvisation continuum, except that it is highly
determined by the Western compositional practices as control over the
balance between form and matter, their proportions and over progress
with mirrored seeing and paying attention to the past.
A short theoretical digression, or rather tightening: the »amnesia«
of the past in the improvised activity could in a sense lead to a patchy
musical cartography, a disconnected sequence of sound events, but the
truth tends to be very different. A sketch of the improvised music
phenomenon that this note offers has to take into account also the
different natures of musical time in improvisational activity and
composition making. When a composer is creating and writing down a
score, what s/he effectively does is structures and manipulates in
advance the time sequences through the means of sound – John Cage nicely
explains something to this effect in his essay Defense of Satie. Conversely,
the nature of time in improvised playing is the nature of time with
which we are confronted in our everyday lives. And this is not necessary
the simple system of a constant forward movement of »the now«, of the
point which cuts sharply between the past and the future, but something
that can be captured well with Husserl’s concept of the inner temporal
consciousness. With his cognitive approach to the phenomenon of time
Edmund Husserl came to the conclusion that in every moment we not only
take cognizance of our immediate present situation, but that every »now«
encompasses also the experiences of our past, that is to say
temporarily distant perceptions. These sensory accompaniments of any
given moment Husserl refers to as retentions, which he then carefully
differentiates from the memory reproductions of the past. Such expanded
horizons of our present can be helpful when we try to understand how a
freely improvised music arch can in fact be cohesive, even when the
musician is completely immersed in the momentary act of kneading the
sound matter. At the same time improvisation can also become a beautiful
analogy for other human activities. Many an improviser can tell you
that improvising is not merely an act of music making, but is primarily a
general imperative of life.
To write a detailed history of freely improvised music of any given
place is a contradiction in terms. A casual chronicler however has
nevertheless been given here an opportunity to modestly reflect on how
improvisers “don’t look back” in the here and now. What can be seen is
contempt for genre norms and an allegiance to the idea of freely
improvised music as non-idiomatic improvisation. Yet today, a few
decades after Derek Bailey had theoretically dealt with, and in
collaboration with like-minded individuals practically realized, the
non-idiomatic improvisation, and at a time when trans-genre stance has
already become an entrenched marketing label, a principled negation of
genre and idiom is but problematic. The key characteristic of the genre,
according to Grove Dictionary, is repetition. Genres emerge as
they codify past repetitions and invite future ones, and it can be
surmised that something similar holds true of idioms. Elements of
reductionism, drones, extended instrumental techniques, as well as the
recognizable procedures of electro-acoustic creations that can be heard
in today’s improvisations, have now, through repetition, moved into the
field of recognizable idioms, and their repetitive free circulation has
constituted itself in a way akin to genres. History is full of such
cases. Towards the end of his discussion of the genre in the Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart encyclopedia, Hermann Danuser wonders whether, given the perpetuation
of differences between different compositional practices, such as
electro-acoustic music or sprachkomposition, it might not be
better to speak of them in terms of different genres of musical
modernism. The movements that constituted themselves in radical
opposition to repetitions of the past, tended later to become codified.
With both contemporary composition and improvisation, the solution to
this problematic often emerged out of their basic formal properties.
Some of the most suggestive and meaningful scores of the last decades,
as for example those of Sofia Gubaidulina or those of Wolfgang Rihm,
were born precisely out of admiration for the old sound-worlds. But
top-notch improvisation to this day is one that, as it has always
managed to do, exists with a good degree of self-reflection, while at
the same time is capable of turning away with utmost nonchalance and
heading for – where else but forward.
Essay was oroginally written and published in 2012 as part of the
booklet for a compilation ‘Sound Disobedience’, released by Zavod Sploh
and L’innomable. You can buy it here.
