Performing Reflection 1.0
A removal of the training wheels, an honest attempt, without extensive preparation or rehearsal. The goal was not to appear as a dilettante, but to preserve a blank page and observe what might emerge. The only preparation undertaken was to determine whether the format was viable, mostly for reasons of social preservation, as the performance was to take place not only in front of our internal artistic research colleagues, but also an illustrious delegation of doctoral students and professors from a wide range of European music academies.
For the performance itself, I reached out for some help: Bojan Krhlanko to the rescue, a long-time collaborator, from jazz to experimentalism. A trembling beginning: the pressure of both the context and the novelty of the format was almost overwhelming. But I pushed on, and the voice became steady, my thoughts clear. I felt safe to say and do what I wanted. Immediately, a few phrases emerged that had been pre-thought, not for the performance itself but as private jokes. I found myself placing the practice “in the age-old tradition of doctors cutting their spleens to see if they would survive,” and immediately realizing that there was much less at stake here. We can see how the two practices—playing and speaking—connect. The paths are retraced, both in the performing and in the thinking. But they also feed one another, overwhelming me, allowing for uninhibited output. I don’t have time to think, to doubt, to get into my head or become trapped in a deconstruction of my psyche. I’m forced to balance two sides of the same coin, forced to improvise for my life, or at least to feel like it. Thinking back on the performance, and watching it unfold, I can see how much the reading and the thinking influenced the verbal output. I can observe which notions found fertile ground and wanted to remain part of my personal philosophy—my evolving perspective on improvisation.
"The starting point provides the framework, feels like it’s the only thing that we improvise. Everything else is a relation. Can we talk about improvisation? Is it all just a recontextualization?"
Pressing outlined a model of improvisation with aims to explain how people improvise, how they learn to improvise, and to explain the genesis of novel behavior (Pressing 1988). The model is simple in its starting point as a sequence of non-overlapping sections. Each section comprises musical events and is called an event cluster. Each new event cluster is generated on the basis of previous events, long-term memory, current goals, and, where applicable, a referent (Dean & Bailes 2016, p. 40-41).
Pressing’s model points to the causal nature of improvised practices, not only from the moment of initiation, but extending further back, conditioned by previous experience and even long-term memory. One could trace this lineage all the way back to the initial improvised gesture: the Big Bang as the one true improvised statement.
“Repeating what I already did before, just in a different context.”
For Adorno, all of these memories, both voluntary and involuntary, become fused and encoded in formulae, clichés, predigested chunks of aesthetic matter where everything new is really old. Clearly, if improvisation is to have any value for Adorno—“real improvisation”—it would have to become more Nietzschean, more forgetful, indeed, a “music of forgetting” as Nietzsche describes it, what he calls “monological art” (Nietzsche 1974, p. 324). The logic of Adorno’s argument is that such a music of forgetting would be the only way of avoiding the clichés that pass for improvisation, a logic pursued, as already suggested, by many free-improvisors (Peters 2009, p. 82).
“Crossing the borders of technique, we discover something new.”
The best bits of my solo playing, for me, I can’t explain to myself. Certainly, I wouldn’t know how to go straight to them cold. The circular breathing is a way of starting the engine, but at a certain speed all kinds of things happen which I’m not consciously controlling. They just come out. It’s as though the instrument comes alive and starts to have a voice of its own (Evan Parker, quoted in Lock 1991, p. 33).
“The instrument provides a new context.”
The way we approach the instrument can facilitate new gestures, sounds, and interactions. Preparations allow us to extract new sonic possibilities. Manipulating the instrument with a new object offers a fresh perspective, a new context. Even repositioning the instrument can create an entirely different sensation. Turning it on its side, or attempting to play it from an unfamiliar position, forces us to recognize the extent to which we have been relying on familiar gestures. Without access to this embodied knowledge, we are compelled to fall back on other forms, more abstract ones. It becomes an act of zooming out, one that forces us to abandon the notion of the instrument in favor of improvisation itself.
An extension of technique might have certain musical implications which might produce further technical implications, which might reveal further musical implications—that sort of extrapolation or rationalization is one of the various ways in which the instrument can supply the music (Bailey 1993, pp. 99-100).
“It’s hard to escape memory.”
"If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates?" (Wong 1994)
“It requires a great deal of empathy to find an ending.”
One of the greatest pleasures in both performing and observing an improvised performance is the unavoidable moment that marks the beginning of the end, a negotiation—sometimes with the audience as hostage—dependent not only on empathy but also on how we interpret certain sound events. This moment can be understood through what game theorists call a coordination game (Schelling 1981), which appears in improvisation whenever performers attempt to reach a mutual understanding, often to shift the course of the performance. Such moments hinge on focal points: events that stand out for all participants. Saint-Germier and Canonne found that expert improvisers have the ability to “identify points at which individual expectations can converge” (2020, p. 13). Their data shows that experienced improvisers are not only skilled at interpreting these points for themselves but can also anticipate how such moments will be perceived by their collaborators.