Free improvisation
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Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the taste or inclination of the musician(s) involved; in many cases the musicians make an active effort to avoid overt references to recognizable musical genres. The term is somewhat paradoxical, since it can be considered both as a technique (employed by any musician who wishes to disregard rigid genres and forms) and as a recognizable genre in its own right.
Free improvisation, as a style of music, developed in the U.S. and Europe in the mid and late 1960s, largely as an outgrowth of free jazz and modern classical musics. None of its exponents can be said to be famous amongst the general public; however, in experimental circles, a number of free musicians are well known, including saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter Brötzmann, guitarist Derek Bailey, and the improvising group AMM.
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[edit] Characteristics
Although performers may choose to play in a certain style or key, or at a certain tempo, conventional songs are highly uncommon in free improvisation; more emphasis is generally placed on mood, texture or, more simply, on performative gesture than on preset forms of melody, harmony or rhythm. These elements are improvised at will, as the music progresses.
Guitarist Derek Bailey proposed "non-idiomatic improvisation" as a more accurately descriptive term, claiming the form offers musicians more possibilities "per cubic second" than any genre [1]; while guitarist Elliott Sharp (himself occasionally active in free improvisation) has argued—partly tongue in cheek—that no improvisation is ever truly free, excepting the unlikelihood of amnesiac improvising musicians.[1] Interestingly, John Eyles notes that Bailey has been quoted as saying that free improvisation is “playing without memory” [2]
In his landmark book Improvisation, Bailey writes, "The lack of precision over its [free improv's] naming is, if anything, increased when we come to the thing itself. Diversity is its most consistent characteristic. It has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment. It has no prescribed idiomatic sound. The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it."[3]
Free music performers, coming from a disparate variety of backgrounds, often engage musically with other genres. For example, acclaimed soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone was a member of the free improvisation group Nuova Consonanza. Anthony Braxton has written opera, and John Zorn has written acclaimed orchestral pieces.
As it has influenced and been influenced by other areas of exploration, aspects of modern classical music (extended techniques), noise rock (aggressive confrontation), IDM (computer manipulation and digital synthesis), minimalism and electroacoustic music can now be heard in free improvisation.
[edit] History
Though there are many important precedents and developments, free improvisation developed gradually, making it difficult to pinpoint a single moment when the style was born. As an uncredited critic has written for Allmusic, "being freed of all rules, free improvisation cannot be traced back to a genre other than the very generic term avant-garde". [4]
However, in the same article cited above, Bailey contends that free improvisation must have been the earliest musical style, because "mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation." Similarly, Keith Rowe stated, "Other players got into playing freely, way before AMM, way before Derek [Bailey]! Who knows when free playing started? You can imagine lute players in the 1500s getting drunk and doing improvisations for people in front of a log fire.. the noise, the clatter must have been enormous. You read absolutely incredible descriptions of that. I cannot believe that musicians back then didn't float off into free playing. The melisma in Monterverdi [sic] must derive from that. But it was all in the context of a repertoire."[5]
[edit] Classical precedents
Skilled musicians were expected to improvise in the common practice period (about 1600 to 1900), and many notable composers and performers (such as violinist Paganini, and keyboardist and composer Beethoven) were acclaimed for their skills at improvisation. The cadenza portion of a concerto was an opportunity for the instrumental soloist to demonstrate their improvisatory skills. Different composers allowed for varying degrees of improvisation in a cadenza: sometimes a soloist would simply embellish a pre-composed cadenza with a few minor changes; other times, however, the soloist had much more latitude as to how they improvised during the cadenza, with a blank spot being left on the score (with or without an indication of how long the musician was expected to improvise), and pitches, notes, melodies, harmony and tempo left to the soloist's discretion.
But by about 1900, such improvisation fell out of style, and even slight deviations from a printed score could be regarded as improper.
By the middle decades of the 20th century, however, composers like Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen and George Crumb, re-introduced improvisation to classical music, with compositions that allowed or even required musicians to improvise. Perhaps the most notable example of this is Cornelius Cardew's Treatise: a graphic score with no conventional notation whatsoever, which musicians were invited to interpret.
Another notable group, Musica Elettronica Viva, were formed in Rome in 1966 by Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, Frederic Rzewski, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor, and Jon Phetteplace, most of whom had at least some crossover with the experimental classical world.
[edit] Jazz precedents
Perhaps the earliest free recordings are two pieces recorded under the leadership of jazz pianist Lennie Tristano: "Intuition" and "Digression", both recorded in 1949 with a sextet including saxophone players Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. In 1954 Shelly Manne recorded a piece called "Abstract No. 1" with trumpeter Shorty Rogers and reedsmith Jimmy Giuffre which was freely improvised. Jazz critic Harvey Pekar has also pointed out that one of Django Reinhardt's recorded improvisations strays drastically from the chord changes of the established piece. While noteworthy, these examples were clearly in the jazz idiom.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the free jazz movement coalesced around such important (and disparate) figures as Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, as well as many lesser-known figures such as Joe Maneri. Free jazz allowed for radical improvised departures from the harmonic and rhythmic material of the composition – for instance, by permitting performers to ignore conventional repeating song-structures. Such music often seemed far removed from the preceding jazz tradition.
These ideas were extended in the 1962 Free Fall recording by jazz clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre's trio, featuring music that was often freely and spontaneously improvised, and which had only tenous similarity to established jazz styles. Another important recording was New York Eye and Ear Control (1964), a soundtrack for a film by Michael Snow, recorded for the ESP-Disk label under the leadership of saxophonist Albert Ayler. Snow suggested to Ayler that the band simply play without a composition or themes.
The Spontaneous Music Ensemble was formed by John Stevens and Trevor Watts in the mid-1960s and included, at various times, influential players such as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler, Roger Smith, and John Butcher. As with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), many of these players began in jazz, but gradually pushed the music into a zone of abstraction and relative quietude. The British record label Emanem has documented much music in this vein.
There was (and continues to be) often considerable blurring of the line between free jazz and free improvisation. The Chicago-based AACM, a loose collective of improvising musicians including Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Famadou Don Moye, and Malachi Favors was formed in 1965 and included many of the key players in the nascent international free improv scene. (Braxton recorded many times with Bailey and Teitelbaum; Mitchell recorded with Thomas Buckner and Pauline Oliveros.)
In 1966 Elektra Records issued the first recording of European free improvisation by the UK group AMM, which included at the time Cornelius Cardew, Eddie Prévost, Lou Gare, Keith Rowe and Lawrence Sheaff.
[edit] International free improvisation
Through the remainder of the 1960s and through the 1970s, free improvisation spread across the U.S., Europe and East Asia, entering quickly into a dialogue with Fluxus, happenings, performance art and rock music. Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd was famously an AMM devotee; rock bands such as the Grateful Dead, The Mothers of Invention, King Crimson and Henry Cow incorporated extended passages of free improvisation into their live performances.[citation needed]
By the mid-1970s, free improvisation was truly a worldwide phenomenon. Japanese players like saxophonist Kaoru Abe and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi took the music to greater heights.[citation needed] The Los Angeles Free Music Society ran ahead with glee through the ideals of free music.[citation needed]
In 1976 Derek Bailey founded and curated Company Week, the first of an annual series of improvised music festivals in which Bailey programmed performances by ad hoc ensembles of musicians who in many cases had never played with each other before. This musical chairs approach to collaboration was a characteristically provocative gesture by Bailey, perhaps in response to John Stevens' claim that musicians needed to collaborate for months or years in order to improvise well together. The final Company Week was in 1994, but its spirit survives in many similar ongoing festival and events worldwide.[citation needed]
[edit] Electroacoustic improvisation
A recent branch of improvised music is characterized by quiet, slow moving, minimalistic textures and often utilizing laptop computers or unorthodox forms of electronics.
Developing worldwide in the mid-to-late 1990s, with centers in New York, Tokyo and Austria, this style has been called lowercase music (a term coined by gallery artist and musician Steve Roden for his own work)[citation needed] or EAI (electroacoustic improvisation), and is represented, for instance, by the American record label Erstwhile Records and the Austrian label Mego.
EAI is often radically different even from established free improvisation. Eyles writes, "One of the problems of describing this music is that it requires a new vocabulary and ways of conveying its sound and impact; such vocabulary does not yet exist - how do you describe the subtle differences between different types of controlled feedback? I’ve yet to see anyone do it convincingly - hence the use of words like 'shape' and 'texture'!"[6]
[edit] Free improvisation on the radio
The London based independent radio station Resonance 104.4FM, founded by the London Musicians Collective, frequently broadcasts experimental and free improvised performance works. WNUR 89.3 FM ("Chicago's Sound Experiment") is another source for free improvised music on the radio. Taran's Free Jazz Hour broadcast on Radio-G 101.5 FM, Angers and Euradio 101.3 FM, Nantes is entirely dedicated to free jazz and other freely improvised music.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b Guitar Player, January 1997
- ^ Eyles, John (10 August 2005). Free Improvisation. All About Jazz. Retrieved on 2008-04-04.
- ^ Bailey, Derek. FREE IMPROVISATION. Cortical Foundation. Retrieved on 2008-04-04.
- ^ anonymous. Free Improvisation. allmusic/Macrovision Corporation. Retrieved on 2008-04-04.
- ^ Warburton, Dan (January 2001). Keith Rowe. Paris Transatlantic Magazine. Retrieved on 2008-04-04.
- ^ Eyles, John (21 June 2006). 4g: cloud. All About Jazz. Retrieved on 2008-04-04.
[edit] External links
- European Free Improvisation Pages An information resource for European free improvisation
- Signal to Noise magazine A publication focusing on avant-garde jazz and electro-acoustic improvisation
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