Music Biennale Zagreb (17. – 19.04.2023)
How do we learn from this type of research? One possible answer to this question is to create situations that carry the potential for failure. This risk not only keeps us on our toes, but it also allows us to experience mistakes, or what we perceive as mistakes, bringing us back to the beginning in a cyclical process of reflection. We gather experience for a new process and continue the cycle, often indefinitely. In this sense, the residency and its final concert were not endpoints, but rather steps in the right direction, a journey that began long before the research project and will extend far into the future: research as improvisation, and vice versa. We use improvisation as a framework for exploring topics of interest, and research as a framework for improvising on those topics. Through a continuous process of searching, finding, learning, and eventually forgetting, we move closer to an epistemology of improvisation.
Up to this point, the project had built a repository of topics. These areas of interest were explored in various ways: from reviews of existing texts and ideas, through interviews, discussions, and performative dissections, to written, spoken, and played reflections. We engaged with themes such as irritation, reflection, flow, memory, semantics, time, form, space, communication, hierarchy, practice, intuition, limitations, knowledge, and skill.
A universe of questions emerged, and the only way to approach understanding was through the process of improvisation itself. These topics were not just abstract entities, but also waypoints—beings within the space-time continuum that called out to us, reminding us of their existence and importance. They allowed us to travel back through memory and reflection, observing how they developed, shifted, and integrated into the fabric of our playing and thinking. They nestled within us, an epistemological pursuit transmuted into sound through the prism of humanity.
The ensemble—now finally complete with Nikola Vuković on trumpet, Luka Zabric on saxophone, Christine Gnigler on recorder, Urban Megušar on cello, IRK on double bass, Pavle Jovanović on guitar, Bojan Krhlanko on percussion, and Christian Grüny on philosophy—set out to explore how this approach would function within the context of a contemporary music festival. How could we make our work part of the surrounding structure, with its logistics, timetables, and expectations? The goal was a final performance on the third day of the residency. Beyond that, we included an open format—a hybrid workshop/rehearsal/discussion process—to observe whether our approach could function with an audience. Was there value in opening up the working process, allowing a peek behind the curtain? The audience was not in the role of passive observer but of active participant, both in discussions and in the playing. Could we trick them into becoming improvisors?
A simple focus and reaction exercise. Start from silence. You may clap or produce any other short sound. Whenever you hear another clap, try to react to it as fast as possible. The starting point for us and the audience, or not us and the audience, but only us. There is no audience. An attempt at circumventing the division. We are all the audience. The extended ensemble starts, claps, reacts. Eyes closed, ears open, in a state of anticipation. Probes are sent out into space, at first timid, but quickly gaining in confidence. The uninitiated join the ranks of improvisors. A lone pitch, movement, and then an instrument. The ensemble awakens, groping around in the dark.
What can you observe in this performance? Can you pick out the central topics, discover the underlying theories, methods, and processes? Or is it just another set of improvised music? Isn’t every set of improvised music full of underlying theories, methods, and processes? How do we discern them? How do we get a glimpse into the process itself? How do we observe the unfolding of an improviser’s life, lay it bare?
Did this verbal reflection help with understanding, this reflection-on-reflection? Observing how a thought process gestates, grows, and eventually unfolds into something more than itself. How it branches out, loses itself for a moment, forgetting about some appendages, dropping others—the redundant ones. How it abandons the path that it set out for itself, just to resurface back where it started. Does a research project follow the structure of the monomyth? From a call to adventure, to threshold guardians, mentors, revelations, transformations, atonements, and the eventual return—it certainly seems so. I am back where I started, without an elixir but with the freedom to live, in the moment.