First working period (Frankfurt, 17. – 19.5.2022)
On the 16th of May, I took a trip to Frankfurt, where Christian and I set out to develop the basic framework of our collective practice. All our meetings were held at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, where Christian was employed at the time. I embarked on this trip with a few guiding questions in mind, conceptual islands we could return to if our discussion reached an impasse, as well as specific questions directed at Christian’s approach to improvisation.
What does this collaboration offer to improvisation? And to philosophy? How does the exchange between flow states and reflective states function in both domains? How does spoken language influence musical statements—and vice versa? What does the thought process look like during improvised philosophy?
Our first playing session carried the usual tension of a first encounter, a freshness and novelty that felt almost tangible. Even now, reflecting on it through time and space, through memory—the central theme of my undertaking—it’s striking that memory was also the first topic Christian touched upon. Memory had already been at the center of my own reflections during Performing Reflection 1.0: How do I deal with memory? How do I escape it? Am I improvising or remembering? We touched on a deterministic view of the world, on the idea that we are the result of the presence of the past. We are what we have become through our actions, thoughts, circumstances, and surroundings. To what degree is what we improvise tied to memory? From a long-term perspective, it reaches back even before we were born, through the history of our instrument, the history of our practice, our diverse backgrounds, our lives, our upbringing, our families, and finally through the practice itself—our embodied knowledge and our ways of thinking.
From a short-term perspective, how do we keep something in the present? By repeating, by creating loops. But these loops are never quite the same. They change, sometimes almost imperceptibly, but they change. Repetition as change: that which has passed is truly gone.
Memory as a process of retracing our steps, which becomes something other than memory. Memory as a leap to a moment in time, an instantaneous event, as opposed to retracing our steps, where the distance becomes more noticeable: a process of recollection, the journey as important as the destination. Reflection as memory; reflection as a journey that shows us where we started, where we are, and how we got here, shows us how much we have changed, allowing us to change, to move backwards and forwards through our own experiences.
What is the connection between the tips of my fingers and the tip of my tongue? They both reveal a texture, its thingness, its reality. They can be used as a measure, as a tool for experiencing the world. The texture of sound, the texture of words, of a language—sonic mouthfeel and semantic touch.
Can one improvise in an earthquake? The ground as an embodiment of the commonality of the world, something that is common to all of us, that does not move, that allows for movement, for belonging, for meeting halfway. Sometimes the ground does move, and when it does, it shatters our faith in its stability. We are forced to move differently, or forced to stop moving at all. What is the ground of improvisation? Or is improvisation the movement of the ground, the thing that shatters, that forces us to move differently, to adapt?
Can I paint myself into a corner? With discourse, material, statements, truths, falsehoods, open questions? Can I put so much information into the world that there is no space left to maneuver in? Can I keep coming up with things to say, things to play, or has it all been said, played—is it all out there? Am I just rebuilding, recontextualizing, like a scavenger, hunting for scraps of meaning to integrate into my worldview, into my expression? Nothing new, just a pile of words and sounds that push me into a corner. Or is this corner where I want to be? Does the feeling of being overrun by overabundance lead to new creation? Do I have to be dismantled, rearranged, compressed, until I emerge with that final scrap—the one that came from me—to be added to the pile, for somebody else to use?
Is there any stability? In forms and shapes, our recollections, in our own history. What is stable? When we look back, when we remember, what are the things that never change? When you look at this, observing it for the first time, what kind of shape do you see? For me, it has changed, for us. It is always changing; I am always changing; the practice is always changing. Or am I just revising the past?
What gives improvisation its form? Are we just transporting a definition from one domain into another, without thinking about whether it could fit? Is it only a temporal form, marked by its beginning and its end, or is there something else? If we write it down, record it, document it, we translate it into a physical form—give it a shape. This shape allows us to retrieve it, observe it, run it through our fingers, manipulate it. But is it the thing itself? What did we lose?
The more I listened to what Christian was saying—helped by reducing my own material—the more it affected me: my state, my thoughts, my internal images. In this session, a key element emerged concerning the affective power of both words and music. Christian's description of the virtual presence of the past, how seeing a new scene could instantly bring back the memory of another, more familiar one, like the corner of the street where he grew up, elicited in me a chain of memories and aligned the musical material into a state of thematic correspondence. When I think about the semantic similarity between the two practices, this is where I see it most clearly: not on the primary level of meaning, or on emotions tied to a particular melodic shape or key, but on a secondary level, one shaped by metaphor, memory, and imagination. Both sounds and words carry a strong undercurrent of secondary meaning. The complexity of this semantic layer lies in its individuality, in the fact that it arises through the interaction between the thing itself and a person’s unique neural structure. This semantic similarity runs deep, precisely because it resists universality. It is a ghostly presence, overlapping with the thing itself, at times overpowering it, becoming the thing itself, if only for a fleeting moment.
Real and imaginary responses to a post-concert Q&A session 1
How do you prevent yourself from having ideas? In the sense of preparing for the performance, deciding what and how you want to do things, structure things.
An imperative to structure an improvised performance in a certain way, or to present specific material, thoughts, techniques, and sounds, can be quite counterproductive. Engaging in improvised art forms can be a great way to address our futile need to control our environment, structure time and space, and grasp the ungraspable.
At this point in my development, the way to combat this is through trust and ritual: trust in my basic skills and abilities, in my connection with all the past events—both successes and failures—that have brought me to this moment in time, as well as trust in the other individuals I might perform with. Ritual serves as a way to frame a performance, to enter a state of trust and acceptance, and to build material over time.
What are the features that you respond to in your playing? How does the speaking influence the playing?
On one hand, there are parametric elements that I relate to: the cadence, speed, dynamics, density, and special effects of speech like stuttering and repeating. On the other hand, the text itself has a very strong influence on the playing. The more we work together, the more I can direct my awareness to the spoken words, and the more they influence my playing. The text elicits images, emotional states, and memories that are then interpreted and translated into sound and gesture. Sometimes these translations are quite literal, especially when they are related to terms found in musical terminology. Loops, repetition, and form are some examples that were translated directly into the domain of music, almost as a way of highlighting the point that Christian was trying to develop. Other times, the translations became very personal, relating to secondary semantic meanings, to metaphor and memory. The connections between the domains became vague and hard to interpret—a chain of references, legible to no one but still coherent.
Opinion 1
Enjoying the interplay of the rhythms and the movement of the bodies, the sonic and gestural structures unfolding, which obfuscated the meaning, made following the train of thought almost impossible. Trying to grasp the meaning of the verbal material would take away from the enjoyment of the sonic interplay.
Opinion 2
The performance as rhetoric, extended techniques, the oppositions and tensions that come from the spoken ideas as oratorical methods. The rhetoric of the performance allows us to follow the words and concepts that were found interesting.
Whom are we addressing with this performance?
There is a marked difference between this practice and a lecture, where one has scribbled a few notes, still a form of improvisation, but directed at a very specific audience for a very specific purpose. Eye contact and an actual directedness of the address are crucial. During this type of performance, we are not addressing anyone; we are addressing the situation. It is a different kind of directedness. This is more turned inward—a reflective rhetoric.
Why are you walking back and forth?
It just happens, but the gesture serves a purpose, movement without expressing something, in an attempt to motivate thoughts to come up. Keeping the body busy might help the mind detach. The movement helps you unstick the thought process, to get your thoughts to move. It is a way of detaching from what is in focus. I have to leave the gaze of another to develop the thought. When I am performing, I am not actually interacting; I am performing an interaction. I am addressing you, but I am not. It is not me that is addressing you. The task is to not let this collapse into an actual communication.
A final thought
The beauty of this process showed itself in the way thoughts and ideas came to be expressed, a chain of connections that was being worked out on the spot, but at the same time reaching back to all the concepts that we have discussed, developed, and unraveled through the practice itself. Thought processes becoming explicit, although a lot of the knowledge was, is, and will forever be implicit. An action provoking a thought, producing a sound, provoking a response, producing a sound, provoking an action, ad infinitum. What is the origin, the initial impulse, which gives motion to the cycle? Is this the unifying factor between sound and word?
During and after this performance, I reflected on the ways in which the verbal statements affected my playing, on the difficulty of keeping track of Christian’s thought process while maintaining focus on my own musical output, and on the distinction between the two practices. This distinction soon became a central topic in the many sessions that followed, particularly from the perspectives of semantics and interactivity. We immediately observed overlaps in how both domains shaped the proceedings. How do we perceive the semantic difference between verbal and musical statements? And how do they influence one another?
Preparation as a process of storing material for it to be retrieved in the future. Practicing as a way of communicating with the future, building pathways that will serve us at some point in time, connections that will become active in response to an unforeseen event, seen only in that exact moment, sometimes anticipated, but never exactly. All of these sessions, this collective practice, were a way of presenting material that could be dealt with continuously, topics that came not only out of anticipation, but out of the moment. The process of improvisation itself as a way of generating questions, providing answers, working through the material, reflecting on it, storing it in an impermanent but somehow enduring realm, building up a deposit of materials to be reflected on before, during, and after action, to influence the action, lead the reflection, change with us as we are changed along with it, as our practice changes, informed by the past, present, and future.