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

5. How do you perceive the relation between planning and spontaneity in improvisation?

Alessandro Bosetti:
      At this point I probably have said too much. I've long ago made a promise to the Virgin Mary that I would never again speak about the difference between improvisation and composition. Since I see we are getting there I'm just going to stop.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro:
      I do not believe in total improvisation, I think it really happens at any starting point; but then, once I get to know my sound source well, improvisation is just a means, not an end, even when it’s intentional. I mean that it’s part of a general attitude towards what I’m playing. Of course, I use some sounds I already know, but I wouldn’t call it “planning”, because it sounds too systematic to me; the fact is that we have to deal with memory, the memory of the brain, but also the memory of the fingers (or body), which is more spontaneous. During a performance, I find myself going from known to unknown gestures. For me, it’s the use of these two possibilities that give first, a meaning one to the other, and then to the music.

Andrew Drury:
      Planning is anathema. It is totally counterproductive. It blocks the flow and impedes the connection to an inner vital current of musical energy that is essential. I want to proceed from a place of unimpeded perception and mental clarity. I want to be present. I want to allow my intuition, instinct, and love of music to guide me.
      What is planning though? One inevitably makes choices—what instrument to bring to the gig, who to play with, how to set up, how to dress, where to play, who one expects to be the audience, etc. etc. This is planning. 
After I’m in the performance space and I have chosen what combination of instruments to use, and how to set up, I pretty much try to empty my mind of plans. That’s pretty much the extent of planning. The performance is about trusting the power of music and humans to be able to let go of everything conscious and operate on another level. 
      As I understand it and have received it through my teachers, role models, and peers, this approach is a descendent of the ecstatic experience of West African religions in which one prepares for the spirit to descend and possess oneself.  For me, since I don’t believe literally in Yoruba gods or anything quite like that, it means metaphorically to be taken over by something larger and deeper than exists in day to day life, to access and embody the divine and transformative power that all humans possess.

Axel Dörner:
      For me in improvisation it´s important to be open to change my plans at any moment if it´s necessary. Sometimes in certain kinds of improvisation I have to make very quick decisions, in other kinds of improvisations which are at a slower tempo it´s possible to plan my decisions more.

Bechir Saade:
      Planning is practice. Reaching out on a daily basis for the potential of your instrument. Spontaneity is the explosion of the use of this potential once playing in the now. Sometimes in the spontaneity you discover things you never played before too. Then you pick them up calmly and try to corner them better once practicing again.

Bertrand Denzler:
      It's quite complex, like in real life. Somehow, I nearly always know which kind of music I am going to play. Because I make some choices. Because I have a memory and some desires. And because there is a place, a time and a human situation. So there is a space, from the beginning. But I try to move freely in this environment. To act, to react, to think. Like if I was walking in a forest or in a city. There are like several engines working at the same time in my head, some of them "planning", others reacting very fast. Everything plays a role, the whole personality of all the musicians involved, me included, the relationships between them, the context, the acoustic and so on, whether it's conscious or not. With all this, I try to contribute to the piece of music we are playing, in a way or another.

Bhob Rainey:
      Planning is a desperate attempt to cover your ass when things get rough. If you happen to spontaneously execute a plan, you're lucky. If you engage a plan to avoid appearing weak or uninteresting, you'll be ashamed of yourself soon enough.
      I don't worry too much about spontaneity. So many things are destroyed by humans with a desire to seem special.

Bonnie Jones:
      Honestly I'm starting to think that after you've played a set of music or written a piece of text once, it's all some form of planning after that. The experience of making art seems cumulative – one long and hard won piece of music or page(s) of text. I have some ideas, I make art because of those ideas, and I plan to put myself in situations that provide more education about those ideas. I seek out certain collaborative partners because I'm attracted to their ideas and their choices and their ways of communicating and listening. Of course when it comes to making the piece happen I function on a receptive level rather than trying to shape something before it happens. Really paying attention and listening seems to provide finer-tuned results then trying to structure things too much beforehand. People being people though, spontaneous things can and will happen – that's the most amazing part of working in collaborative situations.

Bruce Russell:
      I don't think planning has a role in improvisation. I don't really plan performances, other than to select what I will use.

Bryan Eubanks:
      I play a lot, privately and in public, and I let my music develop slowly, so naturally I repeat ideas and examine areas over and over again for periods of time. This doesn't seem bothersome to me, and I don't consider it an insult to improvisation, on the contrary, I consider it improvisation. I don't see improvisation as an "in the moment" always-totally-new and fresh spectacle, but rather as a meta-concept to guide the holistic development of something personal over a long period of time. So I may control, or plan, what I am working on for short periods, but this always leads to something unplanned and new, which is then developed over time. In the end the music is most important however it is arrived at.

Burkhard Beins:
      I think it needs some sort of „spontaneous planning“. In the moment of playing you have to analyse the current situation including what has led to it, while at the same time you are trying to anticipate next possible developments and to extrapolate new strategies working towards your preferred directions, respectively following your sense of an inner musical logic. But thus not enough, you have to make decisions and act at once, even if there was not enough time to comprehensively analyse all relevant aspects. Altogether a rather excessive demand, which requires alertness and agility to revise and adjust your plans spontaneously again and again, while acting without hesitation.

Christian Weber:
      There's no planning in improvisation. There are strategies of communication. It's only the momentum that counts.

Christof Kurzmann:
      I think both have the same value. It depends on the project and your goals with it.

Cor Fuhler :
      As an inevitable mariage. You have your vocabulary, but you make new sentences with it every time. Sometimes you find new words but mostly it is the people you play with that change the meaning of what you are playing. So you adjust/react.

Dieter Kovacic (dieb13):
      It's like using language. I use specific "words" (sounds/techniques...) to communicate with other musicians and the audience. There is hardly any planning but a lot of explicit and immanent system and structure in what I do. In this context spontaneity is just to let happen, what exists inside my head anyway.

Doug Theriault:
      Improvisers all have different languages they have developed. Spontaneity has to do with choices made during the improvisation in a particular system. That is the only kind of improvisation that is going on...players can choose to go along with or ignore what is going on.

Dragos Tara :
      As you work on different projects with different people, you start to create your own general image of improvisation. This means that both are always mixed. You discover things on a road that you had already chosen.

eRikm:
      Krishnamurti “FREEING ONESELF OF THE KNOWN”
During a solo performance or with other musicians who don’t ask themselves such questions any more, I don’t look back to what I’ve just played, and I don’t anticipate my next move. Only the moment has to be right. It seems a bit confusing :))) and I’m sorry about that, but I can’t express it more clearly.

Greg Kelley:
      I strive for transparency.

Günter Müller:
      Of course you're establishing during the years a vocabulary and a grammar; so one of the things to work on is to keep things developping, to find ways to transform things again, to find new strategies, to surprise yourself. I was involved in a couple of concept improvisations and conducted improvisations, that have been fine experiences, but at the end never totally convincing.

Heddy Boubaker:
      In the absolute there could not be any planning in my improvisation, only spontaneity, that's the theory; practically there is something that I will not call planning because there is the idea of making a project, of systematization behind this word, but this might better be named preparation, mental preparation, dealing with (non)-memory, trying to start with a large “blank sheet of paper” that's the only form of “planning”... But beyond that you have your human, simple, mortal, your anguish, neurosis and so on to deal with...

Howard Stelzer:
      For my own work, I typically perform with a few ideas in mind, but my gear (and my body) will ultimately do what it wants. My plans have to change depending on what sounds come out of the speakers, and how much control I lose due to crappy equipment resisting what I'm attempting to do with it.
       That said, I see no inherent value in spontaneity for its own sake, as an ideal in itself. My interest is in the music, and if a player needs "freedom" (however that is understood) in order to create good music, then of course that's fine… but if rules are put in place, or certain gestures are planned, or phrases repeated or written out, then that's fine with me as well, so long as the process serves the finished music.

Ignaz Schick:
      It always depends on the situation and project, often when there are clear plans the pressure of fulfilling those can block your flow of ideas to go somewhere else. Sometimes there are clear planned out actions, there’s a clear road to follow, I think in general there is 95% of planning/experience and 5% of spontaneity, and I think it is likewise in composition.

Jason Kahn:
      In almost all cases when I improvise with others there is no discussion beforehand on how we will play. Even when improvising in a solo context I might at the most have an idea of how I will start. What proceeds from there on out will be determined as I go on playing.

Jeff Gburek:
      There are long range plans and short term plans. Both come together for improvisation.

Jeph Jerman:
      It's a tightrope that we all walk. A friend told me once that one could only truly improvise on an instrument that one had never played before. I think there's truth in that. It can be difficult NOT to plan, as it is one thing that mind does so well.

Jesse Kudler:
      I think it's easy to lose some of the useful possibilities in improvisation with excessive planning - whether it's wanting to use certain techniques or sounds or having some concrete idea of where you want things to go. It always seems to me that these kinds of plans distract from really hearing and experiencing the music as it is; it adds another overlay that I usually perceive as distance.
      That said, I am much less of a purist than I once was. I am not opposed a priori to some kind of plan - it can make sense in certain situations. And I often find that playing with a group or project privately before a first public meeting can help establish common ground and get some of the crap out of the collective system. Several minutes of fumbling around, or doing really really precious "tentative" playing at the beginning of a performance is no longer interesting to me.
      For the more regular projects or partnerships I'm involved in (most notably, HZL and Tweeter), I don't even necessarily have to think of it as improvised music. The group is the composition, in some sense. Without even necessarily talking about it, we have developed some kind of collective music or collective identity. We have some rough sense of how things will go. I find this useful. And, in some respects, freeing. I would rather play HZL music than generic improvisation or "EAI" or whatnot. Enough things are understood or taken for granted that we can then move beyond that.

Joe Foster:
      I'm finally at a point where I'm accepting that I have aesthetic preferences, but I'm still pretty doctrinaire about planning (in my own practice, I mean, not in a prescriptive sense). I approach every playing situation with as blank a slate as I can, and try to reserve the right (within my relationships with playing partners, and inside myself) to make any choice that the music calls for. That said, I no longer feel the need to be self-consciously "spontaneous" - too often that sort of behavior strikes me as forced, and players who work in that way seem to me to be imposing themselves on the music. I'm not at all interested in doing that.

Julien Ottavi:
       If we talk about the improvisation as a concept and not as musical style, I would say it is a complicated relation. I would say that there is a struggle or a batttle in this moment where you improvise in any kind of situation, because you are always crossed by your background, your education, the objectives that you fix for yourself, your subconscious that runs some undefined aspect of this personal construction. So in reality, you never know, or not really, if you are improvising really or not...or if you are not doing what you always think you should do, within what limits are your actions not oriented by your background/education/goals/subconscient? At this point I should admit that we are not sure...
     That we could see the relation between planning/spontaneity & improvisation are not so clear, and that sometimes you think... even if you are convinced that you are in a process of improvisation with a strong part of spontaneity and that in the end you are maybe just repeating yourself or repeating some models you have learned in this situation or even playing a game where you fixed yourself a dedicated role?

Kai Fagaschinski:
      In different projects I work in different ways. Some projects work on full composed material, but most projects are more open (= involving aspects of improvisation) to a different degree. In some projects there are no spoken or written pre-arrangements at all when we play concerts, but anyway something gets preset through the collective experience of a group rehearsing, our previous concerts and earlier discussions.

Lee Kwang Goh:
      I have never planned an improvisation before. So it is hard for me to tell.

Liz Tonne :
      You must start an improvisation somewhere. This doesn't necessarily have to be something planned but often something familiar. From there you can leave a place of comfort and familiarity and begin to explore and ride the sound. At a certain point planning becomes a composition and it is fine to incorporate improvisation into a composition but it's still a composition.

Lucio Capece:
      I have to say that very often I start with an idea, kind of a form of how I imagine that the things can be or how I wish them to be, according to how I’m feeling in the space and with the musicians I’m playing with. This form is always modified in the live performance and I have to play differently, and this is the best thing about it. Basically I think that there is always a paradigm. It is not true that we create from nothing. I think a lot about this and how not to play in an automatic, established way. To think about this form helps me a lot to concentrate and I enjoy loosening it at some point of the playing.

Mattin:
      Oh when I improvise I am so free! Free of what? Certainly not free of falling in the most obvious cliché that improvisation has developed: the idea that while improvising you are free to do whatever you want, and that you create new music all the time.
      I think we all pretty much can anticipate to a certain extent what the music that comes from certain improvisers might sound like. I am very dubious of the idea of spontaneity, as if what we do to be free could ever be without restrictions by ideologies, circumstances, spaces, people in the room, aesthetics and  judgments.
      I am surprised when Christof Kurzmann (addlimb interview) says in reference to improvisation that he is interested in communication but only between musicians, as he considers playing solo a monologue rather than a dialog.  Where is the improvisation taking place, just among the musicians? I don't thinks so. I am interested in looking at concerts as situations in which different people are involved, and even if hierarchies are established by default (the performer getting attention and being paid, the  audience paying for bringing their “quality taste “  and being quiet and respectful), these aspects  should be questioned, dealt with, twisted , deformed and contradicted. This should be done by creating intense atmospheres in which all involved feel strange, in which they do not have clearly defined roles to fall into, where they are part of something which does not necessarily need to be pleasant. A situation created in order to stop the reproduction of stereotypes through amplifying to 11 the alienation that capitalism produces in us.
      More and more the notion of spontaneity is questioned in improvisation.
      Early on in the history of improvisation, to react to each other's sounds in very direct way was a way of expressing freedom. At some point it became clear that this way of interacting was becoming more and more predictable. Other people like AMM (and also thanks electronics) were able to play longer sounds, so the reaction to each other was not so direct and it was more about sounds being together.   Players like Sachiko M, took this drawn out way of working with sounds and minimalism to an extreme by playing just one sinewave in a concert.
      A single decision could also be a way of improvising: I play only one sinewave in the whole concert and let's see what happens. Some people might think of this as a composition, and here many interesting questions emerge. Among them: who is performing the sound?
      Every time the listener moves his/her head the sinewave sounds different to him/her. This kind of playing, is very paradigmatic in the way that it takes into account a more direct relationship with the audience and the space.  But of course this is not an end point and we should keep exploring different possibilities.
      Then people like Taku Sugimoto, Taku Unami and Radu Malfatti started to put their own compositions into an improvisation context.
      These musicians have opened avenues that help us to understand that  improvisation happens between all the people that are involved in the room or space. We all know that a higher amount of intensity and concentration on behalf of the audience also makes the atmosphere more interesting. Is the creativity coming only from the performers? I do not think so, I think it is a shared experience. We  see that to put ideas  into the improvisation context-for example of single decisions (Sachiko M sinewave) or a composition (Radu & Taku's) - can help us  precisely question the boundaries of improvisation. These kinds of works are seriously questioning the role of the performer, as anybody would be able to press the 'on' button on the sinewave, or turn on the amplifier and just let the hum sound.  I don't think its just about making those sounds and pretending they are the only ones that matter in the room, but also taking into account what the people who are present are experiencing, and what feelings and thoughts are being developed.
       So if we can bring single decisions and compositions into improvisation, I am also interested in using specific concepts as part of my playing in order to question notions of spontaneity, authorship and freedom in improvisation.
      These concepts are often developed from discussions with other players.

I will give an example:
      Before playing a concert in the 2006 Erstquake at Tonic in New York, Radu Malfatti and myself started to talk about what we were going to do for the concert  based on what we knew about the space, the context and the possibilities that we had.
      And this is something that many musicians do.
      When does the improvisation begin? As we started to play or when we started talking about it?
      We decided  that it would be interesting to play with a composition of his, that has a very strict time structure with many silences. During these silences I was to record the sounds of the room with my computer (people moving, rumbling stomachs, glasses, mobiles ringing, ventilators...), and then I was to play those sounds back at the same time that Radu's was playing his composition with the trombone. I was not producing any sound per se but re-contextualising the sounds being produced by the audience in the room.
      Generally both the audience and the players respect the sounds that come out of the instruments and the speakers more than those produced by the audience.
      This respect is created by the hierarchical division between performer and audience that makes up the structure of the concert format.
      But in improvisation you cannot separate the sounds made by the audience from those by the performers, they are existing together and we cannot exclude or forget some and leave others for our enjoyment.
      This concert was very intense as it became like a sonic panopticon, where the  movement of the audience was monitored and then heard by all the people in the room.
      At the same time it became obvious that everyone present was part of the situation, everybody was playing the concert, all of us were audience and performers at the same time and this did not give a sense of freedom but a sense of responsibility.
      Some people had criticized Radu's concerts because the audience felt like in a church or in school and you would not be able to move. But what happens when your movement actually becomes the music that everybody hears?
      Then your social behavior comes into focus, and people have the chance to disrupt the concert totally. In the case of the concert at Tonic, nobody did anything strange, everybody behaved in a very correct way.
       This says a lot about how audiences feel comfortable behaving in certain ways depending on the context. If we had tried the same concept in a pub or noise festival or in a squat, it is very likely that audience would have been more playful and reactive. But as the audience at Tonic that night had an interest in very quiet music, people behaved in a very respectful way. But the question of “respect” is complicated: could passivity also be read as active participation in the form of concentrated listening?

Michael Renkel:
      I know my own instrument and musical material I can rely on. This works as a sort of a plan:
I intend to apply this elaborate material to an open musical process. Then it it becomes important whether I'm playing in a longstanding group (then I know about the others, their material, their personalities, their aesthetics) - then the musicians can work out a long-term group sound; or if I play with people I’ve never met before - then the group has to (re)act much more spontaneously. The rest is communication that allows illogical, unexpected events. Instead of a systematic creation - a plan resulting in an Object/Product, occurs the reproduction of the unrepeatable. Individual playing styles and subjective processes merge in a collective development. Man is the system.

Michel Doneda:
      I think that the process of improvising is somewhere in between planning and spontaneity. I feel alive in this movement between the two opposite qualities. The balance between these two positions is unstable, fragile, and we can never be sure of who and where we exactly are during an improvisation, so we have to try again and again. But it seems that there is always a one-time, unique thing happening. Former experience is both helpful and meaningless at the same time because of that.

Reuben Radding:
      All improvisers have our bags of tricks we rely on and sometimes we lean on those, sometimes not. Hopefully not. I used to be more interested in devising strategies and alternative scores, graphic or text-based, to fuel improvisations, but I think this has had more to do with the desire to have a music I could call "my music" than anything else. Ego stuff. I may not be 100% finished with composition, but hopefully not for purposes of careerism. It's hard not to be frustrated with all the support out there for new composition, while improvisation receives nothing, but it doesn't make me run to the pen. I'd much rather play a bad improvisation than a bad composition any time.

Róbert Rózsa:
      Spontaneous, or free musical improvisation is the highest level of finding the sense and the possibilities of freedom in sound, of its spontaneous creation, shaping and organization. Planning in improvisation is a way to give it directions, some previously constructed form or to facilitate a certain mode of communication between players, which is more than a useful element in playing, especially if it is about a larger group of players.

Robin Hayward:
      I certainly find it necessary to reflect on the music, which I suppose is a kind of planning. Occasionally if I'm finding the music too routined I deliberately do something that doesn't obviously fit in in order to throw the music into a different direction, or even deliberately lose technical control and then work with whatever the instrument throws up. But mostly it's a question of listening both to what's going on and playing when I hear something I want to contribute. Which implies knowing the instrument, controlling the sounds etc - things that would come under the category of planning.

Ruth Barberan:
      What is planned (although I wouldn’t say exactly planned) comes from individual or group work. It´s inevitable that while you’re practising, you get some concrete ideas, aquire experience, learn, construct your own language, find resources. These things that are positive, can be negative for spontaneity, and for improvisation in its purest sense, but I also think that it would be unfortunate and artistically damaging not to use them.
      On the other hand, to keep this spontaneity, it´s necesary to be brave enough to do a bad concert, to play with risk and loss of capacity. And many times it´s very difficult to get it.

Sharif Sehnaoui:
       I wouldn't use the word planning, rather repetition. Repetition is impossible to avoid as we are finite beings who have our limits and necessarily start repeating ourselves at some point. Yet if we consider the music of an improviser on a longer timescale we notice that it keeps on moving, it necessarily does so because of the interaction with other musicians resulting in new directions and different perceptions of the same material in various contexts.
      So yes for me there is some repetition and you might come to like it, still it will undoubtedly break.
      As for planning proper it means we are moving out of improvised music in my view. Not totally, depending on the amount of pre-decided material but it's a clear tendency.

Thomas Ankersmit:
       If I play together with others I don't plan anything, but of course that doesn't mean that "anything can happen". When I play by myself I don't really consider it improvisation, even when I do make up a set as I go along. It's just that improvising by myself is still only my ideas and the instabilities of my instruments. I may execute things "spontaneously" but I might feel that I've been "planning" them for years.

Tomas Korber:
      I cannot give a concluding answer to this question since I think the question whether someone "plans" something or acts "spontaneous" (if such a dichotomy exists at all) totally depends on the particular situation. But generally in an improvised context where other musicians are involved, some flexibility is important.

Valerio Tricoli:
     [not answered]

Will Guthrie:
      [not answered]