texts

E-mail correspondence regarding the phenomenon of contemporary improvisation (page 1, 2, 3)

Feuld Gaber & Jim Connell, 2006



During the time of this correspondence, participators used widespread abridgement "eai" to refer to recent tendencies in improvised music; this was an informal conversation between the two listeners of contemporary music.




JC, 29th aug 2006

      So, here's a few quick generalised (off the top of my head) lines on strictly musical issues in contemporary improv (to me):
(these are just on what you might be able to describe with no awareness of [or particular interest in] its historical development, etc.)

1) The dissolution of musical gesture, phrases, lines to their most reduced component elements (disjunct, layered sonorities)

2) An emphasis on "continuous" sound, often punctuated with tiny gestures or fluctuations, interruptions (including punctuation by silence)

3) A consequent reduction of any sense of musical linearity (narrative time, as you'd get in Beethoven, Coltrane, Taylor)

4) Little (maybe necessarily little) interest shown in formal organisation, even spontaneously (except where pre- or post-production gets involved, as it does increasingly); the reduction of formal features, i.e. melody, harmony, tonal/pitch hierarchies, etc. (This applies to all improv, really... but even moreso to it now.)

5) Maybe an even more dramatic turn away from a self-consciously "modernist" classical sound, i.e. the pointillism of Webern..

6) Reduced sense of a conversational, responsive attitude between the players.

7) In some cases an almost punk-y/untrained attitude to DIY playing—less instrumental virtuosity than say, Parker or Bailey.

8) Greater interest in "novelty sounds" and techniques, maybe, and these often not integrated into the work as whole, but employed for their own sake. 



FG, 29th aug 2006

"3) often a consequent reduction of any sense of musical linearity (narrative time, as you'd get in Beethoven, Coltrane, Taylor)"

      I'm not so much into this; can you just briefly clear it up; that linearity consists of what?

"5) maybe an even more dramatic turn away from a self-consciously "modernist" classical sound, i.e. the pointillism of Webern.

      You mean even more than in older improvised music?



JC, 29th aug 2006

"I'm not so much into this - can you just briefly clear it up"

      For instance, linearity is achieved in classical music by the use of  themes or phrases which recur in various transformations; in Coltrane (at least until free jazz) there might be an alternation of composed sections (heads) and solos, so with each return it feels like a going away somewhere and "returning", i.e. in time. This is true, in one way or another, for all music that uses forms of any kind. Only "static" music, which is free of any sense of developing, can break out of a narrative understanding—almost all music, understandably, is designed to unfold in time. Forms of various kinds help make this time-based nature of most music clear, and help to give "pointers" as to where you are in it.

      Drones dispense with this, as does texture-based music, which has little forward impetus.  Forward impetus is still achieved in free improv, i think, in the way players respond to each other (usually "building" to a climax or retreating from one). Climax/intensity could still be one way of forming fixed points in contemporary improv, but, to me, there's very often no sense of conscious linearity.

"You mean even more than in older improvised music?”

      Yes, I think absolutely. The sharp points and spikes of, say, Bailey on Iiskra 1903, or on "Topography of the Lungs" sound like they have Webern in mind. Simon Fell also said something about really enjoying the musical intervals of early classical atonality. You might say the tendency is for musical modernism to be ugly, sharp, dissonant, difficult, where lots of contemporary improv is, by contrast, often relatively smooth, polished, approachable, drony, and very "listenable."



FG, 30th aug 2006

      One of the biggest consequences of the indolence that the "avant-media" are perpetuating is the great hesitance toward defining contemporary improv's structural features. But, this is clear; the task is complex, and the potential public is not now so interested in banging its head in order to realise what "eai" has brought into play, that so singled it out as a direction in contemporary music. So, some individuals fills that emptied place by saying that a very simple process was at play: simply that "one way of improvising got old-fashioned, got into a dead-end, so people needed a fresh thing, new one replaced that old.".

"Emphasing textures: yes. at the expense of other features (i.e. formal ones)? Yes, Maybe also. (are there any other features to speak of?)
Not quite sure what you mean by vertical parameters exactly... just sonority/timbre, you mean? Or more than that?"

      Before going any further, I'll now quote part of a review of Veliotis''s "Radial" album by Nate Dorward for Paris Transatlantic. I think that, aside from Wayne Spencer, this is furthest any journalist has tried to scratch the essence of this music, and to try to draw out some factual differences. I'm not saying whether he succeed or not, just saying that I appreciate any effort attempted in this regard:

      "It's worth turning back to Veliotis's statement from the website, which on reinspection is significant for its nonchalance over questions of whether this is "improvised" or "composed" music. Radial is simply denoted a "structure of continuous sound and/or silence". So which is it, improvisation or composition? For an earlier generation this was a crucial question, and the answer to it carried a lot of ideological freight (see Derek Bailey's pungent manifesto "Improvisation"), but increasingly I'm inclined to think that neither term can be meaningfully applied to so-called lowercase music. Consider, for instance, the distance between the implicit stance of Bailey's kind of improviser - the agent of point-by-point, moment-by-moment renewal and change - and that of the "lowercase improvisor", whose actions might often better be described as "adjustment" or "maintenance." The latter role can be quite literal, when the performer becomes an overseer of technologies which can operate continuously on their own - turntables, feedback, electronic loops, radios, motorized fans, etc - but Veliotis occupies much the same, somewhat elevated position on Radial even though he's working with something as traditional as unamplified cello. Am I the only person who finds himself less and less confident in using words like "improvisation" and "composition" under these circumstances.[...] We are probably still waiting for a terminology that really feels right - that seems in accord with what it's like to make this music, to listen to it, or to witness it in performance. —ND"

      Now, if  I were to use everyday, descriptive, common-sense language to make my points clearer, I'd reason as follows:
"Vertical music--because in this music a horizontal axis does not and can not play any role. Emphasising textures brought this music to the point where the vertical axis is its primary, even its only, concern: new timbres, new sonorities and their combining in certain way(s). Simply put, contemporary music has no greater priority now than the further "stratasation" ('laminalisation') of sound.

      As we have stated, development through time maybe was the last and the greatest refuge of "old music." And as you noted, "only 'static' music, which is free of any sense of developing, can break out of a narrative understanding." This shift towards "texturization" that occured in the '90s, enabled 'static' music; music which would be "new" in its every feature, because all features and parts of the past have been removed.



JC, 30th aug 2006

"One of the biggest consequences of the indolence that "avant-medias" are perpetuating is great the hesitance toward defining "contemporary improv's structural features."

      So, is it mere laziness? I imagine, as you say later, that it's both relatively difficult to do (technically, to write about) and that "eai" is hardly a self-conscious thing at all (i.e. that the musicians are conscious of). I imagine that the extent to which they're conscious of it is the extent to which they reject it. Maybe "this music" is best defined as an accumulation of things-it-isn't.

"But, this is clear; the task is complex, and the potential public is not now so interested in banging its head in order to realise what "eai" brought into play, that so singled it out as a direction in contemporary music. So, some individuals fills that emptied place saying that a very simple process was at play..."

      I think in this case it's just the reluctance to draw in any wider social questions, and it's that that's blinding any more accurate history.

"ND: Consider, for instance, the distance between the implicit stance of Bailey's kind of improviser - the agent of point-by-point, moment-by-moment renewal and change - and that of the "lowercase improvisor", whose actions might often better be described as "adjustment" or "maintenance". The latter role can be quite literal, when the performer becomes an overseer of technologies which can operate continuously on their own - turntables, feedback, electronic loops, radios, motorized fans, etc - but Veliotis occupies much the same, somewhat elevated position on Radial even though he's working with something as traditional as unamplified cello. Am I the only person who finds himself less and less confident in using words like "improvisation" and "composition" under these circumstances?"

      Noetinger said something once on this "dichotomy" that I have a lot of sympathy for:
"This label 'improvised music' bothers me [...] Improvisation, like composition, is a practice linked to a way of life, not a musical genre."

      To me, too, improvisation encompasses a total set of ideas about (and approaches to) to music and music-making, not just a style or a technique made use of in producing it. This does justify the continued use of the term,  even if composition (or recording post-production, etc.) is capable of producing music that's similar or "just as good."



JC, 8th sep 2006

      Problems in writing any history of improvisation:
1. the errors of projecting "eai" backwards into history (as if it had always existed)
2. the teleological view of musical development in which "eai" is seen as a point of arrival (as if it was always going to exist.)



JC, 10th sep 2006

On 8 Sep 2006, at 22:34 FG wrote:
"you'd have to give concrete examples of what you are writing here and how they affect an incorrect general perspective..."

      Say, for instance, if you have some "eai"-style music in mind (some idealised form of it) and then listen "historically" to earlier styles, earlier music, and measure it against this conceptual ideal. So you might listen back (say, to 60s AMM) and think "wow, this track (or this little piece) sounds a lot like eai!" So all music of the past is listened to through the "eai-filter" of now; is monitored for "eai-ness." So constructing a history in reverse from now (rather than trying to grasp each stage in relation to the period that gave rise to it) is likely to be full of errors, providing not at all a true picture of how things really develop, or how to assess the music of these periods. This connects to my earlier criticism of picking out supposedly important records as milestones along a liner history of development (when in fact it is anything but).

"Concerning point two, "eai" as some point of "arrival" -
isn’t “eai” indeed the point where contemporary music finally reached its goal, and that would be a genuine "new music"..."

      What I was suggesting was the possible error of conceiving of a history in which it is imagined that musicians of the past could be somehow aware of this future point of arrival, or in which earlier music is measured against this point. It's tempting, but insufficient, to project the "eai" concept back over music history as if it was an predestined, eternal concept rather than one arrived at through a painstaking and contradictory process of development.

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