PROLEGOMENON
Writing about music can be a bitch.[1] Countless practitioners and academics have explicated such a claim on countless occasions.[2] It is far too easy to fall into the vocabulary of the fawning fan or documentarian description.[3] Often, academic discourses of any ‘discipline’ – from musicology to physics and even that which has been established to tackle this very issue - falls short of successfully encapsulating what music is.[4] Despite being a century and a half distant, Nietzsche’s annoyance still rings true: ‘how much of [music] can be counted, calculated, brought into formulae … what would one have grasped, understood, recognised in it! Nothing, almost nothing, of that which is really “music”!’.[5]
All these problems – identifying and analysing form, theme, intention, depth, meaning, affect, effect, etc… - as identified across the ages and disciplines multiply one hundred fold when applied to improvised musics.[6] For improvisation is an act of becoming, eternally ephemeral, ceasing to exist even as it manifests. Indeed, there is something central to the act of improvisation that refutes documentation entirely. Thus, the challenge of analysis is almost insurmountable, but wholly necessary. As E.T. Ferand has noted, improvisation ‘is evident in almost all phases of music history. It was always a powerful force in the creation of new forms’.[7]
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Centrally, this paper attempts to examine improvisation firmly on its own terms and will, consequently, be improvised, formally and thematically. Moreover, this text wishes to shine a torch into that which is rarely discussed: how the music is used.[8] This paper attempts to look at improvisation as a process, an act of becoming, not just of music but of symbiotic subjectivity. I take inspiration for this approach through Anthony Braxton’s compositions and experimental structure of the Tri-axium Writings.[9] Such an analogy is particularly instructive, since part of my aim was to engage the practitioners of improvised music within the critical discussion. I will use pieces or performances as case studies, chosen by musicians with a strong musical and theoretical legacy.
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I am endlessly inspired by explorative writers such as Kofi Agawu, Amiri Baraka and Aryan Kaganof and their search for more appropriate forms of articulation for art-forms outside of the hegemonic cultural matrix of Western Europe. I want to write seriously and academically but remain rooted to the aesthetic of my subject. As will become obvious, this text is not formulated seriatim and is not intended to be consumed as such. It is a curation; a gallery through which you may wander freely.
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Every act of criticism is an act of violence. In this paper, this axiom is most obvious in the Erotics, which are un-edited free-written responses.[10] They may seem discursive but rest assured: I am talking about the music itself and nothing else.[11]
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When asked what a particular piece of music meant, Robert Schumann famously responded by playing it again.[12] Improvised music is firmly non-institutional and non-commercial.[13] Wadada Leo Smith demands that improvised music ‘cannot be criticised’.[14] Such self-description sets implicit boundaries that we are loath to cross: I aim not to ‘criticise’ improvised music as Smith saw it – I will endeavour not to use the critical toolbox pertaining to composed music unless to make a point about the relationship between the two modes. I am aware of the ‘real and drastic effect-influence of false interpretation (words) on music’ and so will instead use the music as a point of examination, a conduit for further debate into the subjects of the music.[15] My hope is to occupy the space of dischord between the ‘modern’ neo-liberal modes of teleological analysis and non-traditional academic space.
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Agawu: there is a disjunction between the practise of African music and its scholarly representation[16]
Evan Parker: music is not what you hear in analysis, it’s what you hear in the real time of performance[17]
Braxtonspeak: the physical universe particulars of a given postulation are necessarily connected to the life of that postulation[18]
I heard an old Negro street singer last week, Reverend Pearly Brown, singing, “God don’t never change!” This is a precise thing he is singing. He does not mean “God does not ever change!” He means “God don’t never change!”[19]
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What you are reading now is but one actualisation of the paper itself – a paper written as interconnecting sections that can be consumed in any order. For I cannot be the master of the reader’s experience, as stochastic as it may appear. This introductory display of colours is the sole page that readers will share as formulating their reading experience. The text’s lineage can be seen to spring from the I Ching and move through Marc Saporta.[20] The text you hold now is the most recent synchronic form of the work, a hard copy of that which is designed to exist online. The internet is a shifting host. As we will have seen, cementing any criticism of improvisation into text will severely limit how the format of the criticism can reflect the practise of its subject. Online, in a quasi-official space and open to adaptation by any and all Selves, the work remains ever-provisional in an always-editable, mercurial public space. Just like improvisation, an online text is fluid and diachronic; promised and happened; happening and yet to happen.
Each section of the paper thus acts as a singular fragment of a larger work-event, whose meaning is dependent upon its readers contextual positioning as much as mine. Readers are thus co-authors of a work-event, the meaning of which will shift with each consumption.[21] Certain sections require the reading of other sections for their meaning to become apparent, but of course, when this happens will be random and non-linear. Certain sections will be in a vernacular register, others will be stiffly formal. Certain sections follow traditional modes of academic analysis, others require shifts of certain cognitive biases – they may be ergodic, parallels, fictional, meta-critical or calculatingly gnomic.[22] Certain sections are, in a sense, the woodcuts to this chapbook – vibrant companion ephemera. Certain sections will not expound upon the central thesis but will practise it on its pages. Themes iterate and re-iterate and affect others. Voices will fuse with others; I express myself through others. It is improvised and thus never finished, only abandoned; always-already out-of-date at the point of consumption.[23] Crucially, the form of the paper fundamentally connects the aesthetic intentions of its subject with its critical content. For this text reveals itself through signifyin’, not signification.[24]
One doesn’t read the book from beginning to end. Rather, one asks a question then throws three coins six times. The coins tells you which of the 64 states is operating at the moment, then you read that chapter. Those coins also tell you which state you will be in next, and that chapter is read after the first one. This way of reading expresses the idea that life is always in flux, always changing.[25]
Certain assumptions will become apparent in reading, but it worth my indicating a few central points. This text is not concerned with how one ‘arrives’ at improvisation nor how its practices in approach differ when arising from different schools of thought. This text instead endeavours to treat improvisation as a process, an act, a singular work-event binding all involved. This text uses the unique language and culture of its subject to create itself as object. This text is only as inconsistent as myself.[26] How’s that for classical rhetoric?
My subject matter is impossibly large and holistic, perhaps requiring an entirely new heuristic. This is just one level of the pseudo-philosophical fuckwittery that abounds within.
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Before I leave the reader to explore the passages of the text as they will, I will light three torches for the path:
Crux:
improvised music allows listeners and performers to explore and develop Self through Community. Subjectivity originates in the inter-interaction between subjectivities, of which improvised music is a perfect example.
Improvisers in all fields often speak of ‘my music’. It is not a claim of ownership but a complete personal identification with the music they play. They, ‘the musicians’, are the embodiment of the music.[27]
The western affinity to what it would call ‘logical’ can become a straitjacket for comprehending world creativity (or culture).[28]
[1] Everyone was thinking it.
[2] For some examples: Robert Linden, Harmony of Jazz (London: Garant/Central, 2015), 99; Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop (London: University of California, 1997), 263-4; Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (London: University of Chicago, 2009), 510; see also the continuing work of Philip Tagg: http://tagg.org/texts.html.
[3] Krin Gabbard, ‘Introduction’, in Jazz Among the Discourses (London: Duke University Press, 1995), 10-1.
[4] See: Fernando Benadon, ‘Slicing the Beat’, Ethnomusicology, 50/1, (2006):73-98.
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 3. 626, quoted in Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 299.
[6] The term ‘improvised’ can be problematic in and of itself, but I use it in a broad sense to include any music based solely on the moment of creation, its characteristics established only by the sonic musical identity of the person or persons playing it. I primarily discuss non-idiomatic improvisations, improvisations that are not restricted or tied to representing idiomatic identities. It will be clear when I discuss idiomatic improvisations, those which takes identity and motivation from said idiom. (For example, some improvisers will not describe what they do as improvising, but refer to their idiom. ‘I play jazz’, ‘I play raga’, etc.) It should also be said that this text is only concerned with musical improvisations, and has neither the scope nor the expertise to deal with other forms (rap, dance etc.) See: Derek Bailey, Improvisation: In Nature and in Practice (Dorchester: The Dorset Press, 1992), x-xiii.
[7] E.T.Ferand, Improvisation in Nine Centuries of Western Music, quoted in Bailey, ix.
[8] Another fittingly subjective statement: we are not concerned with where it’s from but where it is in the cultures to which I have been exposed.
[9] I conflate Braxton with improvisation a lot in this text. While technically not entirely accurate, I feel he is a great advocate for improvisation and his compositions mainly exist as vessels for improvisation.
[10] There being no way to effectively verify or authenticate this, dear reader, you will just have to trust me when I say I write them and then never look at them again.
[11] My erotics are analogous to Down Beat magazine’s regular feature ‘Blindfold Test’.
[12] A favourite anecdote of poet and jazz musician Don Paterson. Don Paterson, Orpheus (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
[13] Bailey, ix-1; Rob Wallace, ‘Kick out the Jazz!’ in People Get Ready, edited by Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace (London: Duke University, 2013), 117.
[14] Leo Smith, Notes (8 Pieces) Source a New World Music: Creative Music (Self-published, 1973), 11-2; Eric Porter, What is this thing Called Jazz? (California: University of California Press, 2002), 262.
[15] Smith, Notes, 11.
[16] Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music (London: Routledge, 2014), xv, xii. Far from claiming my subject epitomises ‘African’ music as Agawu defines, I posit that the clarification of Agawu’s that it is solely ‘African’ music which suffers from this scholarly disjunction is superfluous
[17] Evan Parker, quoted in Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age, by David Borgo (London:
Continuum, 2007), 54.
[18] Anthony Braxton, Tri-axium Writings 2 (Synthesis Music, 1985), 1.
[19] Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), ‘Expressive Language’, Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morror & Company, 1963).
[20] Marc Saporta, Composition No.1 (London: Visual Editions, 2011); Stephen Karcher, Total I Ching: Myths for Change (London: Piatkus, 2009); Alfred Huang, The Complete I Ching (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1998).
[21] I am indebted to Derrick Attridge’s notion of work-event in The Work of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[22] Inspired by various writers from Jorge Louis Borges, to Jacques Derrida’s Glas, to Julia Kristeva’s Stabat Mater.
[23] To paraphrase W.H.Auden paraphrasing Paul Valéry: Paul Valéry, ‘Recollection, Collected Works, vol. 1 (1972), translated by David Paul; W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (2007), ed. Edward Mendelson, "Author's Forewords", p. xxx. Also, for a more detailed discussion of the topic of (accidental) artistic abandonment ‘to the flames or to the public’ see Paul Valéry, ‘Le cimetière marin’, Charms, translated by Pater Dale (London: Anvil Press, 2007).
[24] Beholden clearly to Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). I use ‘signification’ here a static theorisation that is logical, rational and limited, with fixed, denotative and exclusive meanings. Inversely, ‘signifyin’’ functions through allusion, reference, gesture and dialogue to suggest meaning in association – as such, no meaning is fixed, signifyin’ suggests contingency, improvisation, social production and negotiation of meaning. Nor is it exclusive to African-American culture, merely finding its strongest articulation therein. See Robert Walser, ‘“Out of Notes”: Signification, Interpretation and the Problem of Miles Davis’, in Jazz Among the Discourses, edited by Krin Gabbard (London: Duke University Press, 1995), 165-170. For other applications of Gates’ theories in music criticism, see Gary Tomlinson, ‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies’, Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons, edited by Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 64-94; Samuel Floyd, jr., ‘Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry’, Black Music Research Journal, vol.11/2 (1991): 265-287.
[25] Sheila Heti, ‘How to be Good When You’re Lost’, with Ted Mineo, in Where are you Now? 16 Artists, Writers, Thinkers, 16 Personal Maps (London: Visual Editions, 2013). Heti is discussing the I Ching.
[26] For a thorough and wide-ranging account of what I do not address see Bailey.
[27] Bailey, 11.
[28] Anthony Braxton, Tri-axium Writings 1 (Synthesis Music, 1985), 29.