Improvisation as a musical practice is an exercise in placing awareness at the center of experience and maintaining it. The center is pure immanence, the here and now presence of world and mind, not limited to sound. It is not the world as “out there” nor the mind of a subject as “in here”, but the mind in continuum with the world as an element of its texture. Participation does not even require one to make a sound. It is not first of all a matter of an ego focused on choosing what sounds one makes oneself, nor bringing concepts to the experience, not even concepts of sound experience. It is neither focused nor unfocused but 360 degree reception, receiving equally what comes from others and from oneself. Whatever one might quite validly prepare through practice on an instrument or through the development of concepts is left aside, neither effectively employed nor actively discarded.

This is similar to certain forms of eastern meditation, which works continually to accept what is, that is, what appears in the mind as phenomenon. It contrasts with the effort to establish a relation between a unitary subject and a transcendent God, or to embody a spirit or Idea. Improvisation is not the dialectic of theory/practice, that is one does not enter the experience seeking a practical result, not even good music, out of a theoretical strategy that hopes to arrive there. Like meditation, one does not measure it by results; it is a wasting of clock time, the time of a session escapes the functional meaning of time in our culture and cannot be justified. It is the doing without the doer. Just as meditation is neither fervently seeking a goal nor lazy, improvisation is neither seeking good music nor is it sloppy and distracted. The sound/silence we might record, listen back to, and identify as music will have tension and release, if only as starting and stopping points, but improvisation as experience has none of these, much less an analysis of what happens as tension and release.

In the midst of the experience we are without means of judging it, which would require a transcendent code, such as we quite reasonably work out for various genres of music. Improvisation is the only practice yielding what might be called music (i.e. valued) that has a ground and primary orientation free of theory, of binary choices (good/bad), and of a hierarchy of practitioners and results. It is however very capable of subtlety and development, such that we can sense our level of awareness and know when we are off the track--distracted by trying to do something impressive, for instance, or something we planned beforehand, or by acting aggressively or impulsively (often confused with spontaneity). If we pronounce our partners wrong in what they do it is out of frustration with our own inadequacy of attention and receptivity; that is what is meant by the frequently stated "there are no wrong notes". It is more common to complain that something "isn't working", which is impossible to reduce to a universally applicable code. Understood as one form of music among others, improvisation can be either valued (“good”) or not, and there can be discussion that extends beyond subjective opinion to establish some common assumptions. However, as a practical activity such distinctions interfere with the effort at hand.

As animals we have developed the ability to focus whatever senses are necessary to our biological needs, to foreground what experience and instinct has taught us is significant and distinguish from “noise”, which refers to interference with our project. The western subject, or ego, owes something to this in the effort to establish and promote its interests in what was perceived as a hostile world, requiring conquest or manipulation. The rise of improvisation has something to do with the collapse of this historical and western-based form, with which Modernism was still associated. It recognizes that we do not need to listen in this way, that we can hear the universe and will not be destroyed by neglect of what might harm us. And, by the same token, we do not need to create weapons for our protection or advancement. That is, we of course defend ourselves and watch out for danger in many areas of our life, we need strong egos for mental health. We are even quite justified in defending our musical output against critics, but we do not need to be doing these things when engaged with sound.

Improvisation lacks the adversarial stance taken by the historical Avant-garde, which has retained its links to Modernism through the politics of movements, effectiveness of various strategies, progressive overcoming of older aesthetics and the like. It is not even about freedom, as formulated in the atmosphere of the sixties, which gave free jazz much of its social meaning. On the other hand, it relates strongly to much of what has been labeled postmodern aesthetics. For instance, when in 1964 Susan Sontag spoke of an opaque art of surfaces, without seeking depth of meaning through interpretation, an art of silence, she could have been speaking for improvisation, which was beginning its modern evolution right about that time. It fulfills much of what she describes as "an erotics of art".

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Above I have likened improvisation to meditation; here I wish to break away from all the implications of that analogy. Meditation is a discipline that anyone can apply and develop, but it is not an art form strictly speaking, since there is nothing that comes out of the experience that can be evaluated, chosen or rejected. In improvisation one responds, which is a step taken past awareness, and the response is received by others in various ways. Improvisation as experience is the root source of a music, which takes its place among other musics and is performed, evaluated, appreciated or not. The players may be very experienced at improvising, very aware and responsive to everything going on, and yet as music the result can be not only uninteresting to everyone who hears it but also useless in any way that music historically has been culturally used and defined. It might become music, a smaller category within that of sound, only through an intervention by one player who is assertive and purposeful. An improvisation can be cautious to the point of rejection of all strong feeling and conflict, whereas music is characteristically tied to feeling in its largest range. We would not expect improvisation to be painful, for instance, but music can hurt us, destroying as art always can our complacent and conformist sensibility. Even silence, associated with calm in meditation, as music can be a sword in the hands of musicians affirming a space that others would fill with their trite display of emotions.

There is something quite democratic about the improvisation experience. The social politics of it are not just theory but show up in concrete injunctions that are everywhere apparent even when violated. One is expected to be able to improvise with any other player, at least with any other experienced improviser. This is most evident in Anglo-American culture, but also true of improvisation internationally. For other forms this would be repellent, for they are more frequently based either on playing only with “the best” or in specific band formations which tend towards stability and exclusivity. If a country musician were to play in every band that was possible to play in he or she would be going against the rules, whereas an improviser who did the same could not be faulted for failing the requirements of the musical form. This is what makes improvisation socially broader than any other form, and links it not to the Avant-garde but to the democratic spirit of the sixties.

The form of the experience might be open to all sound and all makers of sound, but the improviser as musician, that is as a creative artist, is necessarily an elitist, who makes choices based on intentions, skill and experience. You may play with everyone who knocks on your door (as Derek Bailey did) but actually make an effort to play only with those who excite your interest, and they might be few and far between. An improvisation session that happens to be recorded or performed can be of great value as an experience but outside the moment or the players themselves terribly boring. A certain kind of boredom can be quite interesting, exploited as art, if care is given to the frame around it; boredom has been well explored since the sixties. But without that frame it can be enervating to a spectator (and musicians are often tempted to spectate what they are doing), and without spectators (i.e. listeners) real or imagined we would hesitate to say a collection of sounds is music. The spectator in us wants to get to the point; which is specifically what is lacking in the improvisation experience.

In other words, I CAN play with anyone, but as musician I am required to ask myself, who do I WANT to play with. Improvisation keeps the door ajar, one never knows how others will evolve in a direction that will suddenly arouse oneself. But ultimately it is each creator of music who decides very undemocratically who to join with to make music, based on anticipated or intuited results. Not to mention with whom performance would be possible, given one's public status. And there is nothing fundamentally improvisational about that kind of calculation.

So there is a distinction between improvisation as practice and as a form of music, as there is between the player and the musician. In my view one is not higher than the other; they are in fruitful if frustrating dialectical tension. Sometimes there appears to be an absolute contrast, but on closer inspection it is rather a matter of two poles with everything located somewhere in between. Players at a casual session can have in the back of their minds the notion of rehearsal for an ultimate performance, a testing of who one would prefer to play with. And players can present what they do as music to an audience, with predictable time limit of “pieces”, but still acknowledge to themselves that it is primarily an experience for themselves to which non-players are invited to listen.

The tendency in our time, now that improvised music has become a genre competing with others (since the late nineties), is for the experiential aspect of improvisation, which does not aim at musical pieces or the “best” groupings, to take a back seat to performance and behavior that is normative for all other musics. Performance is expected to be the best the players can do rather than just what they find themselves doing. The democratic aspect of improvisation, meanwhile, manifests itself as the door open to talent. Given the prominence of quickly assembled electronics and attraction of specialized extended techniques, this means improv is possibly the fastest track to career success (getting an audience to a performance) of any form of music today. Ironically, it is doubtful that the actual experience of improvisation will be recognized as the ground of the music, as Zen meditation is of various Japanese arts, since in the West the arts tend to be focused on production and the marketplace, and ever moreso as the market economy gobbles up all traces of art.

From my point of view, the tension between improvisation as playing/listening experience and as music form is a good thing--inextricably linked and productive of new directions and experiences. Hopefully this tension will continue to be productive and not resolve itself in the direction of a stable genre, as have jazz and classical music. Right now musicians themselves, and not record producers or promoters, are in the collective driver seat. “Genre” implies limits and an accepted interpretation, but improvisation is wide open, listeners and players alike seem to have few boundaries to what they consider valid. This is such a contrast to the locked-down mainstream culture as to almost give us hope.  ¶ 10:40 AM 0 comments

  18.~~~~~~~~

The First Reader

Reading over no. 17, I stumbled on an amazing omission. I had written “as soon as I realize the huge difficulty I would have in destroying my writing I know that I am seeking to go outside myself to these others.” But what of the value of communicating with myself at a later time, of self-confrontation, of creating a greater unity for my life? Doesn’t that warrant saving my writing from the fire, and hasn’t that in fact been fundamental to all my reading and re-reading?

There is a paradox within the activity of writing that I rediscover here: the very fact of language as medium, medium of thought as a painting is a medium of visual images, requires one to imagine, at times unconsciously to create, another identity than oneself. In writing books and blogs, rather than shopping lists, the recipient of writing is an identity either as friend, neutral, or antagonist who is necessary as a foil to our own identity. Thinking, hence writing, is motivated towards selected others, as a glance at our continual mental chit-chat would tell us. The act of writing is “interested”; in writing a blog or a book, at least, one seeks the continuity of one’s self, a self-identity, through the very imagining of an other as reader. Even in the most heated thrall of the process, most fully “possessed” by the illusion of ourselves alone and heroic, ranting in the most individualized style—at that moment our bodies are in fact seized by the imaginary readers we fabricate. At the height of our belief that we have fully expressed ourselves, our passion is the simulation of an other’s.

I’m not trying to say anything new here, just restating crudely the philosophers and cultural critics who have been tearing apart the “bourgeois subject”, the Author and Artist, not to mention truth seeker, as heroic figure from at least the Romantic era through Modernism. The language of self and other, identity and continuity, fits into certain discourses of at least the latter 20th century. However, here I am discovering this vocabulary and these themes for myself, grounded within my process, and finding often by surprise that my life, spanning the eras of high modernism and current post-postmodernism, responds to some aspects of contemporary thought. I am at least influenced by the fact of occasional coincidence of my thinking with that of people who have promoted their thinking in a public forum, subject to debate and contradiction, as I have not chosen to do.

I am drawn to this point about writing for others because I want to understand what would be necessary to write for myself, to know the self I am who writes and has written what I have. What is it to be the first reader? Not proof-reader, not editor, but self-reader—to find myself as my own other. This effort relates more to the discipline of self-knowing, such as Gurdjieff and his followers articulate (Ouspensky’s “self-remembering”), than to philosophy and cultural studies. And it is certainly paralleled by my other dominant and practical question: how do I play music for myself, how do I keep from being engulfed in the social resonance of my sounds, how am I the first listener.

To another reader of postmodern critique this might raise the issue, whether I am a reactionary, against the grain of history attempting to resurrect the dead author and artist of Modernism. An alternate view would see me as reacting to the ways in which this postmodern theme, too well taken, has collaborated with the pluralistic, diversified marketplace. Then I would be trying to map out the territory of an integrity, an existence, which is not for sale.

[Along these lines, you might be interested in the essay, Improvisation and the marketplace. Click here.]  ¶ 9:07 AM 0 comments