Context

- Important influences and ideas

On composing for improvisation

Composition is an important part of my practice but in the context of this research project it is also my tool for developing new language as an improviser. By composing I am forced to study a given material thoroughly. On this page I will discuss my approach to composition as an improvising musician and how other artists in my field adress the same topic.

At the beginning of a free improvisation, like the one imagined in The outset, any material introduced is a new stroke of color on the blank canvas of silence. Composition, then, is a matter of planning in beforehand what is to be played. The level of detail in the planning stage will determine the predictability and the reproducibility of the end result. 

In my practice there is no complete separation between composing and improvising as methods of music making. As the following quote can illustrate it is debatable if there is, in fact, any point at all in doing this separation. In 1987 a group of musicians/composers, all closely related to the improvisation field, have a panel discussion on the matter at the BIM house in Amsterdam, the panel including among others Cecil Taylor, John Zorn and Derek Baily. 

After forty minutes of collective incoherence and mutual misunderstandings, the prominent view to emerge was that there is no such thing as improvisation, or if there is, it is indistinguishable from composition. Furthermore, composition, should there be such a thing, is no different from improvisation. Having established that, there didn’t seem to be anything else to discuss and the group dispersed, gratefully returning to playing music: improvising, in fact.¹

Reconnecting to the ideas of coherence in the music and the identity of a musical piece mentioned earlier, I feel that there is also an inherent conflict in composition and improvisation between control and freedom. In order to open up a composition for improvisation the composer must give up some control and similarly an improviser must renounce some of his or her freedom to follow the composers intention. My intention when making the music for this research project is not free improvisation or anti-idiomatic esthetics but rather to explore and develop tools for improvising within a given harmonic framework. There is room for improvising also within something pre-composed but the room can vary in size.

'(…) it’s not ever one ratio of improvisation/composition, it is always in flux.' 

- Kit Downes²

Learning from the modernist composers

Influence on jazz/improvising musicians from classical composers is nothing new, instead a kind of dialogue seems to have been constant from the start. As an example of this, jazz pianist Ethan Iverson has traced how many jazz pianists from different periods have studied classical repertoire³. Another famous example from the classical world is Stravinskys "Ebony concerto" written for Woody Hermans band in 1945. 

My first encounter with post tonal theory and modernist ideas on harmony in a jazz context was in a masterclass with saxophonist John O’Gallagher who has analysed how John Coltrane built his improvisations in the late album Interstellar space⁴ on collections of three or four notes, also known as trichords and tetrachords⁵. In this project I have used ideas from three important 20th century theorists: Paul Hindemith’s The craft of musical composing⁶, Vincent Persichetti’s Twentieth century harmony⁷ and Joseph Strauss Introduction to post-tonal theory⁸ and I will refer to these books in my analysis. On the page called "The music" a few key concepts are presented.

The typical music theory that I encountered most of the time as a jazz student is a pragmatic presentation of tools to lay the ground for improvisation in typical jazz contexts where a lot of emphasis is put on chord/scale relationships where the musician interprets chord symbols into scales to construct melodies. Practicing the scales is a way of connecting what you hear (and imagine in your head) to your instrument. As a way of further investigating the relationship of chords and scales, many modern jazz guitar players explore how one and the same chord shape (and its inversions) can be used on many different chords by being aware of the scale degrees or chord extensions that are sounded. Here are two examples from instructional videos with guitarists Lage Lund⁹ and Romain Pilon¹⁰. 

With inspiration from this approach I started look att all possible combinations of three notes and how they relate to different chords and scales. I got interested in how to use them as shapes within bigger harmonic units by picking out trichords from a bigger chord or scale. I found this interesting also as a way of abstracting chordal material, thinking of trichords as the constructive element allows me go in and out of, more or less, ambivalent harmonic worlds, still maintaining a kind of logic in the musical construction. This led me back to my idea of looking for inspiration from the classical world, like so many before me. In this case I have a special interest in composers from the modernist period. 

With inspiration from a method book¹¹ by the above mentioned John O’Gallagher, a fair amount of time during this research project has been spent mapping out the different chordal and melodic possibilities of trichords on the guitar fretboard (follow the link for a more detailed description of the map). This became my method of finding a concrete object of study, investigate the potential within these small sets of musical material.

To conclude this part I would like to share a few quotes from interviews that the Danish pianist Jacob Anderskov made with a number of highly profiled composers and performers in the field of jazz and improvised music. Anderskov himself has published two research projects also exploring post tonal harmony as part of his creational output. The question he asked was:

To what extend have your processes as an improviser been informed/influenced by definable material structuring principles? – e.g. from specific concepts/theories, or specific parts of recent music history.¹²

I have selected a couple of answers:

Django Bates:

To a great extent. (…)  Time-stretching and time-contracting techniques of minimalists (also usable in a post tonal way). Intervalic games, sometimes related to, but avoiding the rigidity of, Serialism. Cells and collage edits. Multiple simultaneous tonalities as learnt from Charles Ives. Dissonances based on harmonics. Superimposed phrases of differing lengths forming the skeleton of a composition.  (…) I like to feel like an explorer. 

Marc Ducret: 

Very old games like palindromes, rhythmic augmentation and diminution, melodic or harmonic extension/contraction help me defining my role as an "improviser" inside a piece played solo or with an ensemble - which means of course working a lot on ”improvisation. 

Mary Halvorsen: 

All of the musical styles I have studied played and listened to over the years inform the materials I use in improvisations. (…) As far as post-tonal materials, I think about that too but probably in a less organized way. I have spent time creating my own exercises out of intervals and random patterns, so using an intervallic approach is common source material for me (thinking of each interval as it's own mode). I enjoy creating symmetries, dissonances, patterns, in the moment, although most of that is improvised and is not drawing from a specific line of study. 

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