Ensemble & Ensemble of Me – What I Think About When I Think About Improvisation

Ivar Grydeland

This exposition is a copy of Ivar Grydeland's artistic research fellowship project (2011-2015) at The Norwegian Academy of Music, financed by The Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme. The exposition was redesigned within The Research Catalogue in 2024. The content is identical to the original documentation. ________________________ Ensemble & Ensemble of Me is an artistic research fellowship project carried out at the Norwegian Academy of Music, as part of The Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme between 2011 and 2015. In this project I produced solo improvisations deriving from the music of two improvising ensembles to which I belong: Dans les arbres and Huntsville, and I produced collective improvisations with the ensembles. The project’s key questions: - What are my concepts when improvising with the ensembles and when improvising alone? - How do the ensemble improvisations inform my solo improvisations? - What do I think about when I think about our and my own improvisations? The Haruki Murakami-paraphrase in the sub-heading indicates a process of on-going reflection upon what I regard as key aspects when I improvise. More specifically, what I regard as key aspects in the music of Dans les arbres and Huntsville, as well as for my own solo improvisations. These reflections reveal key aspects and main challenges that emerged during my attempts to create solo works informed by the ensembles. The reflections are chiefly documented in the form of a personal encyclopaedia. The encyclopaedia includes audio and visual examples, both from the final artistic results and from artistic activity during the project.

Ensemble & Ensemble of Me

What I think about when I think about improvisation

Listening

When I play,
I am listening for pitch and rhythm.
I am listening for motives that travel across the instruments.
I am listening for what's not there,
where the empty spaces are.
I am listening for texture and dynamics.

When I play,
my listening is both very selective,
and it is very inconsistent.
Disloyal.

It can be highly self-centred too.

When I play,
my awareness is more loyal to the collective than my listening.
I think I am more aware of the others than I am actually listening to them.
But when I listen back to a recording of a piece,
it sounds indeed like I am listening to them.

Does that make sense?

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Ivar Grydeland - Ensemble & Ensemble of Me – What I Think About When I Think About Improvisation - 2024