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Where else but forward
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, with
its evenings consisting of a series of short performances, typically hosting one group from home and
one from abroad, in what in principle in terms of genre, tradition and ensemble 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 consonance 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 – and will gladly – 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 likeminded individuals practically realized, the non-idiomatic improvisation, and at a time when transgenre 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 a form 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.
Primož Trdan – September 2012