Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-10-20 06:57
Fine with me - no metaphors in this post then. The supposedly funny thing here is a) this particular discourse is schlepping itself on since great great great Ornette Coleman´s grond-breaking recordings, and b) "trying to make sense of it" appears to be quite a typical reaction to the different plateaus of posttonality...Schoenberg has it in his "Harmonielehre" that all this called dissonance/lacking structure and comprehensability is just a matter of habit. So we could just try to get used to it.
It´d do some good if Allen could pin down (without polemics, that is) what he calls the basic problems of free improvisation. Deducible, though, is the sole thing, namely that free improvisation has no structure and thus ends up in either being cacophonic 'waiting for one´s turn in an permanent drone' (silly me thought that´s exactly what all that jazz is about? this routine?) or 'permanent hesitation' (in itself a fascinating sort of a concept, to me, to come up with a performance or a composition comprising wait and impediment,...I think I´ll go for this once, just to give it a try).
So what those examples (indeed primitive, Allen - those results are to be expected when one let´s jazzers invent swing/harmony - jazz -forms on the spot; this isn´t what improvisation is about, the latter strives to go beyond those ideas of extrinsic form and repeatability, of rhythm, harmony, melody etc, and quite sucessfully so, since nearly 50 years by now) illustrate, Allen, is that a pre-structured piece is better than a non-prestructured because the former is prestructured? That´s begging the question, quite simply (that´s all examples can do, actually: an example, exactly because it serves as one, can never lead to an actual proof of this what it´s an example for, neither inductively nor deductively).
We can´t read each other´s minds, You say. That´s right, thank God - but we´re not interested the least in that, performing freely, but the soundgestalt emerging from the other instruments. That "just an undulating dorne without inherent structure" -agrument even such a spearhead like Boulez has uttered once referring to improvisation (and that stung a bit, I admit it) - but this position is so fixated in the presumed authority of the composer-knows-everything-ahead (expert-knowledge) and thus the piece can be repeated to perfection that authors, performers, and the audience just don´t have to listen any more (or, rather, that listening for those becomes a confirmation of expectancies), it´s just asking about a representation of an representation (a repetition of the code encoding the composer´s interieur, that is). This music is never actually there. Don´t think free improvisation would have no "structure", it makes one, hic et nunc, it´s just that the improv´s structure isn´t pre-arranged (and it goes without saying that there are just as many cases of fluking/not working free performances as there are in prestructured music, it´s not working just because it´s free). It´s exactly this hierarchy You mention that irritates free performers to the extreme - it works within the jazz consensus, Allen, but it is not at all a fundamental requisite for music and its performance in general. We don´t "make up structure" in free improvisation, it´s already there, because otherwise there´d be no music but just noise (many people think that the case - well, let them have it their way, the musical plateau is vast enough for any of us - but don´t try to spit into my soup, please, let us exchange recipes instead). A structure is an encoded, intersubjective formation of the set-forming variants´/elements´ relations - and this is already present/preformatted in/by/with the instruments of the performers (more than 9 out of 10 construed according to the chromatic scale of the Western world), the performers´ internal background (education, listening-biographies, concepts of the characters works of art/ artefacts) and the audience´s layout.
For me, as well as for all of the ensembles I play in and for most of those I had the opportunity to listen to, composition and improvisation as opposites are obsolete, to be overriden by a performance-formation that uses both as the tools/means to a specific end that they are. We perform a graphical score with the same strictness as we do pentagramm-notatoins as we do free improvisations - all that matters is the unconditioned dense formation of the musical piece to be listened to, and not an extrinsic authoritative principle playing God.
Markus
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