I improvise to feel a resonating cohesion with the world.
After listening, playing, reading and most of all reflecting on it over and over again — to the point of making me fear being incapable of writing this exposition — this is the answer to myself. Why?
I strive to experience existential meaning in life. To me, improvising is a method to get there — a way of being present, in the world. I cannot force it to happen, but it is most likely to happen when I leave my self-preoccupation, in an attempt to express and experience something more than who I think I am. When improvising in music, my aim is to reach a transcendent state of playing what I am – that I am not only playing in a room, but also being played by a room. In this project, I have experienced that this resonating setup creates a shortcut to getting into this mental and physical sense of cohesion, because the room is actually vibrating and resonating. A social level of cohesion is that the listeners becomes co-creators or at least responsible for their individual experience, because they are invited to move around in the room; each position has its own timbre, volume and feeling, and the sounding objects can change their sound when they are approached or touched.
During this project I have sought something that could help me understand, and also put into words what improvisation is. Books, essays and poems by authors like Inger Christensen, Paul La Cour, Peter Laugesen, Per Kirkeby, Bill Viola, Dewey Redman, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rainer Maria Rilke have been major influences. As an example; read or listen to this poem by multi-artist Dewey Redman:
Music
The most elegant of travelers
Living in living
Spanning infinite
Reincarnations
Pacifying agnostic and pious alike
Music
Mastermaker of the body
Intimate with the soul
Laying to shame all explanations
Music
True god of the universe?
I read this daily for many months, because it is printed on trumpet player and associate professor Kasper Tranberg’s bulletin board, in our shared office. Hearing and reading this poem empower my vision and supports my opening statement about why I improvise. Instead of describing music on a phenomenological level, Redman describes it on a metaphorical level. He opens my imagination and I allow the poem to speak to my emotions— it is an aesthetic and subjective experience. During one of my rehearsals at Copenhagen Contemporary, I had this poem on my mind, and in a break I listened to the radio and coincidently heard them quote Søren Kierkegaard for saying that spirit is the syntheses of body and soul, like Redman; "mastermaker of the body, intimate with soul, laying to shame all explanations – Music, true God of the universe?"