questionnaire

 Alessandro Bosetti
 Alfredo Costa Monteiro
 Andrew Drury
 Axel Dörner
 Bechir Saade
 Bertrand Denzler
 Bhob Rainey
 Bonnie Jones
 Bruce Russell
 Bryan Eubanks
 Burkhard Beins
 Christian Weber
 Christof Kurzmann
 Cor Fuhler
 Dieter Kovacic (dieb13)
 Doug Theriault
 Dragos Tara   new
 eRikm
 Greg Kelley
 Günter Müller
 Heddy Boubaker
 Howard Stelzer
 Ignaz Schick
 Jason Kahn
 Jeff Gburek
 Jeph Jerman
 Jesse Kudler
 Joe Foster
 Julien Ottavi
 Kai Fagaschinski
 Lee Kwang Goh
 Liz Tonne   new
 Lucio Capece
 Mattin
 Michael Renkel
 Michel Doneda
 Reuben Radding
 Róbert Rózsa
 Robin Hayward
 Ruth Barberan
 Sharif Sehnaoui
 Thomas Ankersmit
 Tomas Korber
 Valerio Tricoli
 Will Guthrie

4. Why are you involved in improvisation, and how do you perceive its?

Alessandro Bosetti:
      I'm less and less involved in improvisation. But i'm far away from stopping to improvise. It's simply very hard for me to think about improvisation as a routine. It's very tiring and I realize I have not enough energy to really 'improvise' every night the way I would like to.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro:
      I started to get seriously involved in improvisation around 2001.
      For me, it’s a way to achieve some statements that are hidden or simply not considered by our society, giving a value to the present, focusing much more in the moment we’re acting…
      It’s also pretty much an ephemeral act, that goes against permanence…
      I like the fact that I’m able (or at least, like to think that I’m able) to take decisions and assume them; and these decisions can’t be taken apart from a more general context which is always in process.
      Also, this kind of music is focused on individuality, but not as it’s commonly perceived or understood; it’s rather the fact of being conscious of your difference to be able to fit in a larger group, and then to be able to recognize and accept others’ differences. This is very important to me, because it refers to a general way of being in life. And also because economical benefit is not a reason strong enough to stop doing it.

Andrew Drury:
      I’m not sure I can answer this. 
      Some of the deepest and most expressive experiences I’ve had in music have occurred while improvising. There’s no distance between the performer and the music. One faces the abyss with nothing other than oneself. I’m fascinated with the people I meet in improvisation. It’s cheaper and a lot more practical than composing, rehearsing, and paying people to play “my” music.  Improvisation is part of all the music I do. Life is improvisation.

Axel Dörner:
      Improvisation is necessary for me because it´s a method which leads to different results than composition. You can not erase things in improvisation (like you can do in composition), this leads to a very different time perception.

Bechir Saade:
      See answer to 3. I just can't separate experimentation from improvisation. Rarely would I commit to specific composed forms of experimentation. I never thought of music (especially in my daily practice) as being composed.

Bertrand Denzler:
      In the beginning, improvisation allowed me to play with others on the spot, without having to reproduce a piece of music. Nowadays, improvisation is more something like a mental tool to play some of the music I want to play, which cannot be composed, because it's a collective music and a music that needs the tension of improvisation. It's a difficult tool and I spend a lot of time trying to improve it, to adapt it, permanently. To me, improvisation is a special kind of concentration, which is very intense.

Bhob Rainey :
      The process of improvisation bleeds into your entire life. It is an extraordinary challenge full of compromises. And it is also as everyday as a tube of toothpaste. It's pretty hard to turn your back on that, once you've had a taste.

Bonnie Jones:
      I think the act of improvising is very human and a very human thing to do.

Bruce Russell:
      I can only improvise, I can't repeat, I can't read music, I won't learn routines like a trained monkey. Musical interpreters of other people's scores are almost never artists, they flatter themselves. One in a thousand can bring their own spirit to 'interpretation' - very few do. Improvisation is a valuable life lesson, it teaches real skills we all need. Listen, and respond instantly, that's what improvisation is about. Alternatively, don't listen, and respond instantly - that can work too.

Bryan Eubanks:
      I was in Portland, Oregon, and playing alone and within a duo called BEDS, which was a sort of psychadelic jam band, and our material was totally improvised, and based on these really personal and ignorant ways of dealing with our instruments and making music. It was very fun, and the other guy in it was a very close friend but eventually this ran its course and I wanted to get deeper into music and improvisation than this project could allow. Around this time I met some like minded people who were also going in this direction, Joe Foster and JP Jenkins, and we collectively began our development in music which lasted almost daily for about 3 years.
       The importantance of these early experiences is that they were concerned with personal relationships to musical vocabulary, technique, and playing partners, and all this has really stuck with me and colored how I approach any situation. Although, I am comfortable working in new or unknown collaborations, the best music seems to happen with people with whom I have certian affinities for, and where we can let the music evolve over time into something without forcing our ideas into it, it seems to take time for collective ideas to gestate in the act of playing before they can be perceived as a realized music.
       Ultimately, I would say that improvisation is the most natural and economic means of producing music, and in living life.

Burkhard Beins:
      I´m not involved in improvisation, I´m only involving improvisation. It´s just a method. - Or merely a very unprecise term in use for a huge variety of musical methods and strategies outside thoroughly notated forms of composition.
      In small groups I usually prefer to not preconceive the music, but to rely on the interactive decision-making processes of the musicians in the moment of playing. Especially by working in interestingly balanced group constellations over a longer period of time it´s possible to achieve some aesthetically pretty refined and complex music. I´m not sure if this still has so much to do then with something that could be easily reduced to a term like „improvisation“.

Christian Weber:
      Improvisation has the same structure as life does. Working on the music means working on myself and vice versa.

Christof Kurzmann:
      See above. Also I think, in its best moments improvisation can reach a form of organization that is as well relevant to our social and political status in this world.

Cor Fuhler:
      I would reverse this question, why isn't everybody involved in improvisation? It is the most natural way to make music.
      One learnes to talk first and then read, not the other way around.
      I think we asociate "the written" with something "true", and the oral tradition as something random and less valuable. Which is very wrong I think.

Dieter Kovacic (dieb13):
      I think that "improvisation" is a problematic term, because live-music always has improvised elements. In my case "improvisation" means an unstable state somewhere in-between loss of control and heading in specific directions.

Doug Theriault:
      To take part in music and dramatic performances where there's not just "one author", but a collective creation.
      To create things that exist just at a certain moment and a certain time, as opposed to some commercial standards looking for reproducibility.

Dragos Tara :
      Without the novelty and theater of live performance, a piece of recording must be able to hold up to scrutiny - be careful! A recording also allows for a kind of environment and sometimes a kind of sound that simply does not carry or work in a live context. I try to exploit these differences on some occasions and on ignore them on others, though ignoring them on playback is difficult. I might hit delete.

eRikm:
      I’m involved in music as an improviser (depending on the project), and that is what attracts me towards practising it. Although improvisation has, since the last few years, become a musical style, it is, more than anything, a practise that influences our entire attitude towards life.
      I’m attracted by a certain form of chaos. I like to work with musicians I haven’t had the chance of seeing in a long time and to simply find a common language with them. It is a fact that you haven’t met these people in years, but, as soon as you walk up on the stage, the communication is re-established and it continues. It is a beautiful experience for me.
      Improvisation requires great experience, I often hear performances which sound like “the dealing of same cards” of a small community which isn’t open enough for different forms than its own. I think it is time that this situation has changed. It seems to me that today there are not so many new forms in the field of multimedia, visual arts, as well as certain contemporary dance (which, again, should be defined).
      What I could see and hear in the last few years on the international music scene (apart from certain kinds of rap music and contemporary composition), are musical forms from some other time which ended with 20th century. As for “improvised music”, it is an area in which there hasn’t been any innovation for a long time, it is almost as boring as jazz :))

Greg Kelley:
      [see answer to question no. 3]

Günter Müller:
      When I started playing music first in rock/jazz bands I soon got tired to play the same stuff again and again, to rehearse the same pieces, it was much more fun to improvise; and I realised that so many unexpected things were happening in improvisation. Since then, the late 70's, I've been dedicated to improvisation. Improvisation is not a genre of music or a style, improvisation is the way you look at music (and life), it is a method, it's the view on things.

Heddy Boubaker:
      I'm involved in it for all the reasons I cited above, that's my favorite artistic activity. In fact, that's only a simple continuity of life activity, of being human, at least when you feel a little bit of freedom in your mind.

Howard Stelzer:
      Improvisation is, for me, simply a strategy for composition. Ideally, I don't think it should matter if music is composed in advance or on the spot, as far as what the result is. But I'm involved in improvisation for a few reasons. First of all, I was very much influenced by the friends I made when I moved to Boston back in 1998, who were all improvisers (in particular: Bhob Rainey, Greg Kelley, David Gross, Mike Bullock, Vic Rawlings). Playing with them and talking with them about music affected how I think, and led to some real formative experiences. I started out playing messy noise, but began to think in gestures that are connected to a body, to rethink my tape machines as intruments and to develop the range of subtleties that I'm able to express with them.

Ignaz Schick:
      I am not involved in improvisation, I am involved in experimental music.
      That can be composed in the studio, created in real time, pre-structured collectively, or fixed by loose arrangements, sometimes rehearsed over & over again for many years, improvisation is one method out of many to reach certain musical results, and there are many other methods, like tape music/collage/studio work, composition, songs,  conductions, oral instructions, installation...
      But for sure there is one thing which is very unique in improvisation, when it goes well and if it is practised with the right players it is the only really  democratic form of creating music, it is sort of an Utopian idea which comes true here, each participant is equal to the other, no one is the boss or has all power like a dictator, and this seems to be a reason why so many feel threatened by improvisation. Every participant is equal and free to make his own decisions. In that sense improvisation in its pure form is highly political.

Jason Kahn:
      The greatest aspect of improvisation for me is discovering a sound and a way of musically communicating with other people in a spontaneous situation. In improvisation I am first and foremost interested in this working process, of creating spontaneously. It is through this process that I find myself learning most about finding new ways of playing with others and of creating new sounds myself.

Jeff Gburek:
      I am increasinlgy involved in composition, but I leave wide open spaces for improvisation. Sometimes I am purely improvising. I perceive improvisation as a tool to reach certain energies in music and as a way to transform my consciousness.

Jeph Jerman:
      It's the oldest form of human music in the world. I am involved with it because I enjoy making things in the moment, more than repeating things over and over.

Jesse Kudler:
      I don't really know how to explain how I "perceive it." It's just there; I certainly was improvising before I was aware of the genre of"improvisation." I'm involved both because I'm inherently interested in the aesthetics of improvisation, and because it's a working method that I find useful. Even when I'm working on composed music, it feels improvised in some sense - it's sort of put together on the fly based on what I think works, not on some kind of prescriptive plan.

Joe Foster:
      I like hearing improvised music, and I don't like the idea of playing someone else's music (or expecting someone else to play mine). It's very much my nature, as well, since I'm really not a planner. I think of improvisation as both outlandishly simple and bafflingly complex. It's a way of living, of thinking. "Spheres balancing on spheres." I really think of it in terms of choices and potentials, rather than techniques and sounds. I'm also deeply affected by my playing partners: I often find that my musical and personal affinities are the same. I don't know anything else that is so structured to be non-linguistic communication, and the practice of making a discipline out of freedom seems bottomless from where I stand now.

Julien Ottavi:
      I am not involved in improvisation. Improvisation is a way to not be previsible... you are not where people think you are, or think are not where you think they should be... but in the sense you talk about this concept, you talk about a musical style / genre. I was interested few years ago in the process of learning and making this music as a way to learn music and also to share with a community a common musical expression. But I am not interested at all in the improvisational music itself, as a musical being; improvisation shouldn't have a goal or be a closed community as it is, it should be spread in every human expression. I have got the impression that in our society it is more a way to be recognized by others rather to be with others, it's more a way to express one's "ego" rather than a way to share an expression inside a community.
      Also as far as I know musical experimentation was never limited to improvisation. There are a lot of other styles / genres in this field (as sound poetry, contemporary music, sound art, sound installation, noise music, minimalist music, field recording...etc...etc). Improvisation was a way for other generation to break rules of classical music and to open it to non-musicians and for musical expression with no rules at all... that's for occidental music history, having in mind that improvisation has existed from the first time a human started to play music and same through the centuries... . I am interested in the method of improvisation for learning life in general and to be in this process of finding a new expression all the time, finding unsual approaches of discovering something and give a life to these things, it goes for language, music, dance, astronomy, cooking, love, thinking, relationship in general, all the human expressions/incarnations.

Kai Fagaschinski:
      In my youth when the music I was listening to had to get stranger and stranger (coming from pop and rock music), I came to avantgarde & free jazz and British improv music. I thought I should try this as well. But "improvisation" wasn't and isn't the point of it, it was about the sounds and how to arrange those over time, how to develop music.

Lee Kwang Goh:
      I’m interested in trying things out, searching for new possibilities
of sound and changing ideas on the spot (in live situations); that
turned out to be improvisation.

Liz Tonne :
      Improvisation is a meditation for me and a way to connect with other people non-verbally.

Lucio Capece:
      Honestly I got more involved in improvisation when I began to play noises. It began to not have sense to write them or to ask the musicians I was playing with, to try to find ways to write them. When you play noises the possibilities of rediscovering them and to take them to unexpected places in a live performance, is really strong. Playing with other people and in different spaces makes the instruments react in different ways. I think that more than trying to play my sounds correctly in each place I try to understand how they sound in each space and how they are modified by these spaces and by the presence of other musicians, and sounds. This experience is just fantastic.

Mattin:
      I take improvisation as a problematic term that can never be resolved.
      As a matter of doing, a constant-work in progress that questions boundaries of sound, time, spaces, people and social situations, and the music and culture industry.
      At the same time the question of improvisation is a very tricky one if we put it in relationship to capitalism these days.
      Capitalism puts higher and higher demands on people to be able to improvise, to adapt to the constant changes of the market, to interact with each other and communicate in an effective way, to be ready at any time for the worse.
      There is a strong correlation between the importance of constant innovation in capitalism and in improvisation, and we cannot avoid that there is a strong relationship between the two.
      So my question is:
      when does capitalism stop producing value out of our own experimentation?
      Can you make a clear distinction? I could not,  so who are we really experimenting for?
      The more open you are to experimentation, the more you would be likely to open up new avenues for capitalism to produce value.

Michael Renkel:
      It is an ethical experience because it is about making decisions. It is about creating one’s own way, a musical self-organisation that strives towards the spontaneous appearance of new structures and new behavioural patterns - in an open process - which are characterized by internal feedback loops. These feedback loops make it possible to alter the view of reality: causality loses its specifying character, as cause and effect merge and exchange their roles in the musical process. Improvisation as a utopia of systemic thinking.

Michel Doneda:
      Maybe because sounds are more important for me than music. I remember the first sound I played. I am always at this level. Improvisation is movement, and because of that I’ve met so many artists, and been to so many countries. Also, this is an individual process in a collective approach. No hierarchy! I trust individual relationships more than objects and music is an object to me. And then there are reasons for this involvement that I will never know, maybe they just have to do with luck?

Reuben Radding:
      As a music-maker, and as a listener, the stuff that really feels alive to me is usually improvised. I first experienced group improvisation as a songwriting tool in my youth (rock bands), and it always felt to me like the songs we made from our improvisations were inferior to the jams themselves. There is something to me about being in the moment, to be creating, rather than merely performing.

Róbert Rózsa:
      I think that improvisation is the most honest, the most interesting, and also the most unpredictable way of music-making, which is in itself a great challenge. Improvisation is a spontaneous game without an end in which everyone makes their own rules; music liberated from all the constraints of genre, style, school, any limitations, in one word: openness. It is about searching and making sense out of things through creation and during the creation itself; music that exists and emerges for its own sake, and I think that it can be said that everyone is involved in its creation, because the listener too, while listening, is involved (more so than in any other case) in its shaping. These are the reasons why I’m very interested in and attracted to improvisation.

Robin Hayward:
      I like the fact that it questions and breaks down the classical hierarchy of composer-performer-listener. It's a very social way of making music. And I like the direct contact with the sound, and the immediacy of inventing music while I'm playing it. Plus the challenge of trying to make it work with other people.

Ruth Barberan:
      1. Because, currently, it is the music that interests me and that I enjoy the most.
      2.I understand it as a permanent search, personal and within a group. I am very interested in stable groups that get a common language and a group sound.

Sharif Sehnaoui:
       Improvisation struck me as a strong experience both for the player and the listener, far from offering a set product, it unfolds a clear questioning path. In the blind consumer society we live in I hold it important to offer other alternatives and open new angles of perception. Improvisation deals with a highly subjective individual time, exposing "difference" as the main catalyst for creativity, diving deep within the artists' own self, putting him constantly on the edge of his very existence. The experience is strong and always highly charged with emotion. Yet it simultaneously promotes dialogue.
      Difference, but also how we can work together with it are for me some of the most important issues of modern society.

Thomas Ankersmit:
       I like the "in the moment" aspect of it, it unfolds while doing, and it's probably the only way that I can be involved in music. I can't read or write music, so I wouldn't be able to play most other people's music, and I just enjoy generating things in real time much more than composing detached from playing. It sort of by-passes conscious thought, one sound event seems to generate the next, and I often feel that I'm just following it along.
      That said, only a part of what I do is improvisation. When playing solo, I often decide on a broad structure before the concert, and roughly what kind of sound material I'll be using over the course of time. Sometimes I layer prerecorded saxophone sequences with live playing, so then there's a clearly predefined element. I also use samples embedded in the synthesizer stuff, passing through signal processing modules, so that also introduces a kind of memory-bank where certain sounds can be called up while I'm doing something else at the same time.
      I often use improvised sequences as the building blocks for electro-acoustic "composition". It's a way of letting unexpected things happen, of losing control to an extent, and then taking control of the material again afterwards by editing, juxtaposition, processing.

Tomas Korber:
      To me, "improvisation" is a method of working just as "composition" (and all shades of grey in between) is. I'm not an improviser in the sense of being primarily concerned with the process of music making. My main concern is the result, the outcome, the music itself. If this goal is achieved through improvisational means or not is something that doesn't matter to me.

Valerio Tricoli:
      So, let's say that I am half involved in improvisation. In fact, I have never released an impro cd. My solo releases are electroacustic compositions - my last work, Metaprogramming from within the eye of the storm, for instance, took three years of compositional work, so it's really far from any idea of improvisation, and 3/4HadBeenEliminated studio works combine improvisation - the raw material is improvised - with a LOT of post-production techniques, overdubs, and experiments with the studio itself. On the other hand I have rarely played concerts that weren't totally improvised, and when I say "totally" I mean that many times I put myself in a situation of having a lack of control of my equipment - actually I achived the lack of control by setting it up in odd ways, or by playing in total darkness so that I can't really see faders and knobs, or experimenting with found instruments or objects etc. So, and maybe I'm going back to question number 3, for me is totally necessary to experiment during gigs, I find it impossible and boring to follow a pre-arranged pattern or path, and all the tension and thrill of playing live music, for me, lies in the task of achieving something unexpected.

Will Guthrie:
      [not answered]